anyway after some discussion with other damach zons in game:

You should invest points from 87 to 91 to get level 17 valkyrie for the war pike upgrade with gear
I'm still not sure about points above 91- you could get 1-2% in any of the dodges for example

lol'd at gear pic

My zon [guide in sig link] was versatile and mobile within duels similar to this one, although the mode of attack was slightly less diverse [the damage was diverse enough]. I've been beating my brain about how to go about making a different kind of zon build--this one's cool.

I've also considered a psn bowa/cs [similar to the zon in sig, but with the passives placed into cs and synergies] and a cs/plague and cs/lf [with the lf phys dmg hitting 6k+ damage]. I suppose the plague/cs would essentially be the same as the zon you have here in terms of damage, minus the bow?

Yeah I've seen your guide, I based a fair bit on modifications and took some tips from it, just one or two
The real problem with a poison bowa instead of a poison java with bow is that you're still reliant on landing at least one arrow hit to the poison started
which besides forcing you into glass cannon (-605 life from charms), it gives you a huge liability against paladins and fast teleporting classes that could otherwise be driven off by defensive poison clouds (which have much higher bit rates and max damage, mind)

it lends itself to the complete glass cannon approach where you'll run into many characters that you're basically powerless against, while others you do quite well- and more duels simply come down to luck

But you have to appreciate that there is a huge difference between adding 6500 poison damage over 6 seconds to your bow, and being able to throw clouds that deal 83000 damage over 20 seconds
one of the keys here is that beyond the huge gain of life, you become much harder to kill in that people will not want to stomp you. With a poison bowa, people will want to kamikaze you both before and after you land the poison on them
With plague javelins, you can generally keep people at bay by having them avoid plague clouds- keeping you alive much longer to deliver arrows & furies.
When they do get hit and start going kamikaze with low HP, you're more apt to tank them out with 3500-4000 hp, max resists, max block, dodges and charged strike




or really, while they both use a bow and both use a javelin and both deal physical and poison damage- they play completely differently. A glass cannon that wants to avoid everyone while draining their HP being flighty
and a damach zon that wants to switch between full out aggression with chainlocked CS and defensive spamming plague javelins & arrows- often straight tanking your opponent
Yesterday I dueled someone from JSP who had been reading this guide, and at one point I actually found myself chasing him by chainlocking guided arrows multiple times to pin down his sorc- you'd never see a glass try that

So everyone has their own style of approaching zons, and some favor glass and some want big vita tanks. If your style suits you, best to stick with it. But damach is a much more caster oriented style- playing it much like a shaman or a ghost or a mage, not a bowa by any stretch


But most of the stuff I designed by the simple metric of marginal utility. How much marginal utility do you get from 19 points into valkyrie, beyond the 1st point? How much use is it to buff valkyrie beyond getting a war pike, which takes maybe 4 hard points?
How much benefit do you get from 45 points into dodges, instead of 3 points? Will you really see a difference between 51/60/51 dodges, and 59/69/59 dodges? Thats 61 skill points saved, with barely any loss- 8% less chance to dodge and basically nothing to your valk
Now look at guided arrow and critical strike. Save 10 points into critical to go from 70 to 61. Thats -9% overall damage to your bow & physical on fury, but saving 10 skill points
Garrow gives you +75% damage for 15 points- thats it. Using a faith GMB like me, thats +140 average physical damage to your guided arrow. Big whoop imo.
Thats 86 skill points saved so far- and what have you lost? Virtually nothing to your valkyrie, who stays with the same gear and just loses minor damage which wouldn't connect in more than 1/100 duels anyway
8% chance to dodge and 9% overall damage and +140 physical damage- all at the expense of 86 skill points.


But reinvesting those skill points, you could easily get an 83k damage plague javelin, a 1-3300x24 charged strike and maybe 1-2000 per bolt on lightning fury
Personally, I think even a single one of those would outweigh everything from maxing out the passives.

And after all, once you have 83k poison damage on plague javelin, the poison charms are redundant- you're better off using skillers and life/res charms since the poison doesn't stack, meaning you no longer have to be a glass
And then once you've got good hp on charms, theres no reason to trade 2 base hp for 1% damage with your stats- making you logically a vita zon too




But thats all just thought experiment. Each person plays it a different way, always good to stick with your favorite

might make one of these chars

Oh, I wasn't trying to compare our two zons [I suppose that's what I did], simply tossing it out there. It's cool you understand how certain chars work well with certain players--my example would definitely be zaichek on a kicksin lol

But I've grown tired of my zon. I started with hybrid amazons and what I recognized almost immediately with my telezon is that her main weakness is the lack of a second mode of attack. Cutting out javas, even a simple lb/lf attack, was a huge sacrifice to make for increased mobility. I'm hooked on poison and I'd like to venture out with a plague variant, the only type of zon I've never made. The problems I ran into with my telezon spawning from no second attack were as you pointed out: lower damage over longer periods of time [mobility took care of this in most cases, but still... most characters can escape to town before I kill them if they wanted].

I'll leave my thread to defend the choices I made with the telezon, but I have to say, for that particular build, maxing valk was a good choice. The reasons to pump points into her were less about war pike and more about a 5k+ life valk that spawned with immunities to certain elements; I still find that immunity to almost guarantee me a win against cs/fb/trap and the life on her to allow me to stomp most other zons and necros [meat shield that dodges]. + my passives transfer to her, but only the hard points I've placed into those passives [was a bigger deal with dodges--valk's attack was only funny/good for nk'ing, sorbing/killing fc zons, and getting the last hit on low-life opponents].

but anyways..

One of the main things that is holding back some of my build concepts is whether or not an item with 40psn over 4 seconds will throw off the damage of plague. Say I hit someone with a plague and then immediately hit them with a 40 psn dmg arrow. Will the poison damage then be overwritten [80k to 40]? Will it be averaged? Will it be added?

I'm considering something of a hybrid zon [ga/lb/lf] with plague. I'd sacrifice ga damage for plague, hopefully hitting around 60-80k, with a 1-3 or 4k ga. That being said I'd be giving up enigma to help boost the ga dmg. I'd probably still go vita. Even 2k life is far superior to 1 or there-about.

I've heard 2 java skill gloves add the same amount of damage to plague as trangs do. Is this true? Only reason I'm concerned is I've got myself a pair of 2jav/20ias/kb/dex gloves--which theoretically seem superior to other options for this build I'm considering.

I'm sure I'll come up with more questions but I'm exhausted from work all night/this morning [which may also mean this entire reply makes absolutely zero sense]. Thanks for any help/insight you may have!

oh heck I forgot you zon was a wizspike build. I'd never, ever, ever do that, regardless of how good or bad I was at dueling with it.
theres just no way to win half the duels in the game without lightning fury. Someone like a BvC can teleport on top of you and you're 100% defenseless

I can definitely see the merits in an immune valk, but again thats hard to spawn of course, and tough to hold.
Definitely lots of good arguments for maxing valk, I suppose, and I probably invest my points from 87-99 into it; but I dunno if I'd go it over lightning fury or CS



poison damage in d2 works like this. Whenever a poison attack hits a unit, it deals 1 frame of its poison damage. THEN, if the bit rate (the damage per frame) of that poison damage is higher than the value already on the unit, it will overwrite the bit rate and duration of the poison on the character. So venom can easily overwrite plague javelin, since it has such a higher damage per second, but incredibly short duration- it might stop a plague from happening. But if you have a 83k poison cloud applied to an opponent and hit them with a trivial 40 poison damage arrow, the arrow won't overwrite. In fact, the arrow will actually deal 1 frame's worth of its damage (basically nothing) in addition to the poison already acting from the plague. Thats important to keep in mind for rabies druids, which hit every 4 FPA (thus doing +25% overall damage, since every 4 frames they hit "twice")
it gets more complicated for multiples sources of poison items (average the durations, add the bit rates) or multiple poison skills at the same time ie venom + poison dagger (add the durations and bit rates- if a poison skill is active, its duration is used for items, adding the bit rate, ignoring the item duration entirely)
and even more complicated for skills like multiple shot that deal a % of your damage (for 1 source of poison item, use its full duration and bit rate. For 2 items, add the durations (!!!!!) and bit rates, and for 3+ items, add the bit rates and use only the longest duration of all the sources)


trangs is definitely better than +2 java skills. Boosting the skills might increase your overall damage, but trangs increases the damage per second you do, not duration
for example:

level 43 plague javelin:
65600 over 19.8 seconds

level 45 plague javelin:
74000 over 20.6 seconds (+13% overall damage, but only +8% bit rate)

level 43 plague javelin with +25% skill damage:
82000 over 19.8 seconds (+25% overall damage, +25% bit rate)



but yeah it all boils down to play style. I've found that I can put pressure with 500-2200 damage garrows with decent critical with no problems in the duels where it matters, whereas poison & lightning eat through those big beefy characters who would otherwise shrug them off- and at 1 hp, it doesn't matter what your arrow damage is at all. Much more damage is done in duels where garrow might have mattered by lightning fury- which again is both physical & lightning of course. Invaluable against say BvC's. But 500-2200 damage garrow, while low on paper, turns out to be easily enough to say win in Zon vs Zon, where superior mobility from built in FCR just dominates as I'm sure you're aware- and you can only imagine how much it destroys other bowas to be able to chainlock CS on them. At the same time, its enough to knock sorcs out of teleports whether they are ES or not. So while I might not be spamming multi against druids or garrow against barbs- lightning fury easy fills those same roles, and with max block attached and huge aoe to clear minions I'd say it does it much better.

Very different way to approach a zon

trangs dont add kb, 2 java gloves can
obviously trangs have fcr too thou, i'd keep both of them for different situations

This post was edited by tudey on Jan 16 2011 04:24am

what level valk should you shoot for if hope to get immune one? lvl 99, at max using the leftover points of this build. what would be the "breakpoint" levels that could be nice? might wanna put some points to boost ga or cs too

This post was edited by tudey on Jan 16 2011 05:29am

lvl 32 spawns an immune every other time or so.