So patch 2.4 is going to change the damach zon and what I've seen so far indicates it might become the most broken build, because its hard to play down just what a huge change D/A/E with no animation means. It means instead of 60% chance to be interrupted by any attack/spell regardless of damage, it now gives you 60% chance to not be interrupted by any attack/spell. So besides making zons the tankiest class in the game like it always did, it now makes zons inordinately good at being able to teleport out or chuck a fury while being charged or so on. And that's on top of the change to FHR and block animations that now makes it far easier- to the point of being guaranteed- that you can always get a cast off or trade a hit. The testing so far shows it to be a grace timer like the anti-blocklock measure of 1.10, something like 11 frames where you can't be put into hit recovery after each recovery. It doesn't take much theorizing to see that's going to lend itself to a shift away from builds that try to control and lock down the opponent or builds that try to jump in and chain someone down when they can't hit in return, into tankier grindy builds that can trade hits and slug it out. Since even if you are guaranteed to get a hit off, they then get theirs off, and that exchange bounces back and fort. A lot of casters will become "you can fireball them twice and then they can fireball you twice and then you can fireball them twice" if both players are holding down the button. Well which build is best suited to take advantage of that?

The basic design of the damach zon was to maximize the tankiness of a zon and build around plague as your primary damage source so you could punish conventional ways people tried to kill zons like smiters trying to charge you. A zon with 4300 hp, 75% block, 60% dodge and 50% dr results in over 500,000 EHP against physical damage, capable of taking nearly a hundred arrows from a normal glass cannon bowazon. This put people onto a clock trying to kill you while plague ticked down, and you could punish defensive play and people try to distance themselves away from plague using a bow swap or telestomps with CS or just spam furies, and used sidestepping furies when tanking people at close range. It only used the minimal amount of bow damage possible, sacrificing it all for tankiness and java side, just plinking away with a faith swap that's relevant enough people have to react to it.

2.4 changes the char building quite a bit. Plague now only lasts 3 seconds (6 against -100% PLR), but does about 27% more DPS. Plague that used to deal 158 HP/s for 42 seconds now deals 200 HP/s for 6 seconds. But because the cast delay is only 1 second, its a lot easier to apply and reapply, a lot harder to avoid. But the flip side of this is that a zon will now have to spend more time in duels trying to land plagues since you can't just tag someone with it once. That means less furies, ga, multi, bolt, etc. It used to be pretty universal that anyone who got hit by plague got reduced to 1 HP 'eventually', since even against 75% resist it dealt 6600+ HP, and that was with kb gloves not trangs gloves. Now with only 1200 HP per plague you might have to land 3-4 in one duel.
But the synergy change to Fury/CS now means you need to rethink what the skill distribution will be, and whether a tri-zon can even work at all. Charged Strike can now actually be built stronger with less skill points invested, but since that doesn't include fury, that means maxing Fury won't help CS. You could go 1 point fury and max otherwise useless synergies to CS to make it stronger, but the life change on druid summons makes it even more frightening to have an underpowered fury. Just chucking furies at peoples faces was one of the top damage sources for a damach zon in practice, especially if they weren't using tgods. Its necessary to chew through minions stacks, it contributed some pretty significant damage per hit if they didn't sorb it. Abandoning CS to 1 point will be like assuming everyone is wearing tgods and you just can't hurt them at all with the lightning component, but summons can't wear tgods and fury is a skill that blows up druid stacks in one shot. Still, if a zon is only has 20 CS and ~35 synergy points past plague/poison even at level 99, then 2.4 will actually make CS deal about 31% more damage than the same damach zon in 1.14. That's a huge buff, and becomes much more relevant when piercing tgods.
Then there's another consideration: Bow scaling got better per skill point. 5->7% GA, strafe now deals 33% more so its 5% per skill point also is closer to 7% compared to 1.14. This shifts the balance and makes a bow hybrid like an osamazon more attractive, instead of being minimal bow swap. A damach zon might have 232 dex / 288% ed fanat and +15 to bow skills with faith out, so a 1.14 build had around ~2000 damage per arrow including CS/DS. It gets very slightly higher with the free +32% ed from the patch, but you could add in another +133% ed by maxing GA. I still don't think its worth it, it only winds up being like 350-400 extra damage per arrow for 19 skill points. But strafe is also now far more of an option with the D/A/E changes.
And finally, I think valkyrie is now clearly worth 1 point due to the non-shared, 0.6 cooldown. It used to be questionable whether to spend 4 skill points for inner sight/slow/decoy/valk, even if you could use them a bit in duels and more bming, but valkyrie is actually recastable in duels without competing against plague.


So the sum of all that is to evaluate whether its worth a damach zon build staying as a tri-brid, and how. It could redistribute skill points into D/A/E and GA and become a full blown Osama. It could keep fury maxed and give up on CS entirely. Or it could give up on fury and buff CS even more
At least the gear remains identical. But the skill build needs to change, you cant max both CS and Fury, one or both have to go.

I had a lot of things to say, but I'm sure you questioned anything I came up with in my head.

Personally I feel sad with the plague reduced duration and the "LOOOOOL 1HITT KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM" behind it.
Having to do it over and over makes you just want to spam arrows and using lightning attacks or swap around with fury fury plague.
Using plague over you constantly vs melee based enemies is a plus.


Can't wait to see it in action.

It was a real irony of poison that "poison length reduced" effects were actually ineffective against long duration poisons but very effective against shorter duration poisons, just because of how more hits can reapply it / can deal more than your maximum life. So now if a damach zon is rocking 200 hp/s for 6 seconds (14000 over 3 seconds), that means an opponent putting on a 75% PLR item is going to shave off 450 HP from that 1200 HP. Same thing as venom / poison nova / etc
One of the other important bits of this change is that it makes damach zons play fair. Nobody can really accuse you of l8zing if the poison only lasts 6 seconds, you'll never be compelled to be overly aggressive to stay GM. But its still arguably a big nerf to plague overall. The 1 cooldown really offsets needing to reapply it, but it makes it a lot less of a death sentence on its own.

I could see three real approaches now. Go full Osama zon dropping light entirely, but keep the teleport and EHP stack. You'd swap up equipment a bit by subbing out griffs for a rare circlet. Or the other two options are plague/cs/bow vs plague/fury/bow/upgraded leftover points. Upgrading D/A/E isn't a huge impact for example, but still has some payoffs. The difference between 1 vs 10 vs 20 points into D/A/E on a zon with +12 passive skills is 51/60/51 vs 57/66/57 vs 60/70/60. That gets a lot more rewarding now that DAE means you can't be interrupted by that attack, since it misses without an animation.

the truest build to the old damach zon would probably be;
>1 into every passive skill including valkyrie
>1 point ga and requirements
>1 fury
>20 plague, 20 poison
>20 charged strike, 20 lightning bolt, rest either power/lightning strike (13 at level 99)

😍 love it!

these build names are crazy lol

they'll probably just end up saying plague is bm, but its going to be real strong

oh damn its here!

Goomshill, give your amazon in PTR 2.4 stormshield, max block, equip a dagger (any will do for the test), max dodge and avoid. Let a barb or any melee class try to hit you.
You'll see how stupidly broken she's become. WSG is back for ama in a different manner. You can make her almost dexazon with super high dmg bow side. Whenever someone attacks her, press w, run away, shoot, run away, shoot if caught press W and repeat. If the distance allows try maxed strafe inbetween. To make her even more broken tier, try dracs + gores combo or cleglaw + nosferatu.

This post was edited by babun1024 on Feb 2 2022 03:56am

If I'm understanding the mechanics, it shouldn't take anything special. You should have 50-60% chance to simply not get hit and not even roll to be interrupted by spells/attacks, and on top of that the 75% block can't interrupt your ~10 frame foreswing on a 1HT like dagger/java. So you should be able to use just 50 or 70% fcr (griffs, arachs, fcr ring and fcr ammy vs highlords) and still be stupidly good at just teleporting right out of anything stomping you. I think this really benefits the tanky playstyle as opposed to dex glass cannons. With a glass cannon at least they can roll in hopes of catching you on bowside and landing a heavy or lethal hit. With tanky side, there's no way they ever add up enough hits to kill you when you're that slippery.

The old build was;

>java / ber'd stormshield (eth titans or godly rare)
>faith swap (shadow bow for 8 fpa 30% ias setup with just gloves/jewel, mat for 7 fpa 45% ias gloves/highlords/jewel)
>griffons (15/15 or facet)
>highlords or +2 / craft fcr ammy
>enigma
>+2 java / kb craft gloves (trangs swap)
>raven
>fcr ring
>arachs
>rare resist boots (optional swaps like travs)
>9x java skillers, torch/anni
>cta in stash, or cube it and sub charm


It even means you can get away with slower javelins more easily, removing one issue eth titans had. It takes ridiculously expensive astronomically rare javelins to just beat eth titans so that's a big help
I think that itemization stays 100% the same for the CS -or- fury build possibilities, but clearly has to change if this goes Osama route with just bow/poison.


I'm cheating and using the LCS to report these values rather than calculating it myself to be sure, but with that same setup above with facet griffons, highlords, eth titans, shadow bow, for a relatively cheap setup, and skilling {20 cs / 20 fury / 18 bolt} in 1.14 vs {20 cs / 1 fury / 20 bolt / 13 power strike / 1 valk} in 2.4, I come out with;
1.14 build:
>74k plague over 20.6s on 4 cd
>1-5744 x 12 CS
>1-3019 fury (x46) + 715-1508 throw
>572-2018 GA
>394-1375 Multi
>no valkyrie or decoy
2.4 build:
>13.6k plague over 3s on 1 cd
>1-6797 x 12 CS
>1-1589 fury (x27) + 715-1508 throw
>591-2091 GA
>394-1375 Multi
>valkyrie, now on 0.6 cd and spammable as fuck
>1 point decoy for shits and giggles, slow missiles for BM with -62% speed / 30% damage

now those aren't exactly mirrored, since in the latter build I'm using 4 less points synergies to get valk, because of how useful it is now. That's the 'practical' build. But if you went +4 synergies and 0 valk, it would be 1-7447 cs and 1-1630 fury.
So its losing about half the lightning component of fury and gaining about 30% CS and having those huge changes to plague and D/A/E and very very minor change to GA.


Keep in mind that lightning on fury adds up. The lightning damage is added to the projectile itself and the bolts released, 1 minimum so it usually hits twice per throw on a single target. Its really dependent on opponent's stacked resist and/or tgods. If they have unstacked or even unmaxed resists its obviously a lot more brutal, even a 1510 avg lightning damage source like 1.14 fury deals 128 HP when you pierce them to 50% resists with griffs. But assuming stack that's 64 HP, which is still substantial when its added twice per fury. Now that's 34 HP. At least the griffs makes it pierce the 85% resists on druid summons to deal significant damage, and I think it should still be enough to explode a druid's stack even with just 1 point fury.
But lets put the CS damage compared to tgods. 12x 5774 max means you deal 1473 vs stacked 75% resists, which when buffed to 6797 x 12 now deals 1734. But tgods with stacked resists negates an average 1569 damage per instance before pvp penalty/resists, only damage above that is positive damage. So 12x 1-5774 vs stacked tgods deals 404 HP, while 6797 x 12 deals 560 HP. Nearly 40% jump in damage instead of 30%, the effects of that flat subtraction. However, look back at fury damage. The 1-3019 -> 1-1589 fury that went from 64 -> 34 HP vs stacked 75% resists, against stacked 85% resist / 20 sorb, goes from healing 1.5 HP to healing 19.7 HP. That's actually a bit problematic, it means chucking furies into someone with tgods could make their HP jump up a huge amount if they have minion stack. If you're throwing a fury into a druid with tgods on and 6 minions and you land ~20 damage instances from the piercing shotgunning projectiles, that's healing nearly 400 hp instead of 30.

Hmm, i did not check much upon the ama myself, maby i try to build a 3zon myself in here editor just too see stats.
I kinda always played like this, with 37-40k plague, and then bolt/fury/ga and some fury meanwhile.

For me the physical part of fury was always the important one. Lightning dmg seemed really bad at killing summons and mercs if u had 6/40, but with 300ish+ ed javs even none eth mercs and summons got 1 tapped.

So if i can achieve higher cs dmg or Even put more to plague i take it... My old had 7,5k cs on his standard eq, maxing up on 10,5k with bad dmg setup which i used for manual skillbug cs vs hackers and such before it got patched, this was great, but more would be even better.

2/20fcr/30frw/20@/life/2soc '80ed/30ias' diadem
2java/20ias/15str/15dex/7atd gloves
10fcr/20str/15dex/11@/90mana/40cr
Raven 250/20
2/2/40ias/3xx-4xx ed/eth self or none eth
Stormshield '15ias/15@'
Faith mb
Arach
2/18/30str/20@ ammu

Torch 20/20
Annie 20/20
Cube(cta-mara-demon limb-soj-bk)
8 x java 45
Mix of 322's and 20/5@

I guess this is what would be optimal build on d2r 2.4.
I would not build on d2lod without bug belt, but now with this valkyrie i can drop wisp for meatshield.

This post was edited by gel87 on Feb 2 2022 05:20am