Never built a zon on classic, and kinda want to...
lmk what i need and dont need and what i should be maxing

anyone?

generally the idea for classic bowazons is to try to build solely around freezing arrow and mana leech to try to offset the huge mana cost, even at the expense of dps from higher pierce or wizendraw's -% resists.
even if its got gimpy speed, a 6x pskull ballista is probably the most efficient way to be able to shoot more than a handful of freezing arrows before your mana pots are all gone.

its hard to understand how incredibly bad bowazons are in classic. Even going out for 2x sojs and points into energy, maybe even frosties over ias gloves or deaths, you're talking about a build that shoots 1500 damage freezing arrows when hdins are doing 7-9k. Sure it can pierce and shotgun a bit, but its not like the aoe on hammers/blizzard/ce/orb/etc, and you run out of mana insanely fast, and the only item to reduce resists is wizendraw which means no mana sustain.

as far as physical damage- its totally irrelevant beyond mana leech. Even if you had a 200% ed 20% ias +2 zon +20 dex +20 max ballista, even with 500 dexterity, you're talking about multi dealing ~1.1k damage, reduced by 50% DR, against monsters with 100k+ life in players 8 chaos for uniques

Pm speedoflight @jsp.
Think he has a link to a good guide

I would second the hybrid cold/physical build.

Slow and not very safe, but able to clean hell solo (Diablo himself is very tough...).

My current build :
rare Ballista (ias, ed, dext, -%req)
Twitchroe
Sigon helm and gloves
amulet +2skills, mana leech, resistances
Goldwrap (helpful ias)
Goblin toe
manald heal
rare ring (min/max, mana leech, attack rating)

maxed : Freezing arrow, cold arrow [damage synergy], strafe
some into pierce, critical, valkyrie
remainig : decoy

Some points into vitality, strength for items, rest into dexterity (currently I've around 380).

Against most targets, it's possible to leech mana with freezing arrow at the same rate you spend it, allowing inifinite freezing arrows.
If mana is somehow lacking, use strafe a couple of time to recharge your mana pool.
Against non leechable targets (for example physical immuned), use potions.
When you feel unsafe, use potions and run back.

The idea is to remain untouched, hidden behind decoy and valkyrie.
Many kills are performed off-screen.

And what Goomshill said : bowazons are the worst chars to play classic pvm with.

you have to keep in mind, this is an all-in glass cannon build that totally forfeits survivability and uses almost the godliest bow possible in classic- yet it only deals about ~960 avg. physical per strafe arrow after crit, against mostly 33-50% DR monsters. Even on classic hammerdins deal 9k vs ~0% resist, blizz can deal 3.5-5k vs -100% resist, ww barbs hit for up to 2.8-3k @ 4 fpa, and javazons can deal up to 750x12 furies or 2060x8 cs. Just to kill a 128k HP 50% dr P8 infector of souls would take 266+ arrows. And this is a build with ~350-450 hp and no block, no resists, which dies when sneezed upon. The only thing they really have going for them is piercing strafe or multi at least hitting multiple targets per shot, but the very low amounts of spread out damage are insufficient even for taking on hell players 1 without it being a very slow grind.

its technically possible to build pure physical bowazons on classic, but boy are they insanely underpowered compared to even bad builds. Javazons run around using stacks of non-magical javelins and work far better, and they're still almost unheard of. I just want to impress upon anyone thinking of making a bowazon in classic that they suck horribly and pure physical sucks most of all.

freezing arrow is more competent, but its just like a really bad sorceress when you get down to it. You need to jump through big hurdles to manage the mana usage and then you're left with a mediocre cold damage aoe that doesn't have -175% enemy cold resist like a sorc does. It can pierce and shotgun, and it freezes mobs, but even piercing its damage output is sad compared to other builds, and its freeze length is actually really short even when the synergy is maxed because its reduced to 25% in hell and reduced by cold resist, so a 75% cold resist monster hit by 4 a second freeze lasts 0.25 seconds. Can be improved with eye of etlich or wizendraw or other +item cold length

as feanur said as I said: bowazons are the worst chars to play classic pvm with. besides double throw barbarians

Just dont listen to 0perator