I'm writing this guide to share what I have learned for this build so far. I will note that I play with the extra skills. You can play and gear this character as a starter, but there will be growing pains. I recommend playing this Bow-azon as a NG+ character with items in place to smoothen it out and make your journey easier. I will warn that to get this build to feel good does require a decent amount of investment. I will update this guide as significant changes are made.
SKILLS
- Multishot - 25
- Guided Arrow - 25
- Strafe - 25
You max Multishot, Guided arrow, and Strafe. 1 into cold arrow and magic arrow as pre-requisites. For the Passive and Magic tree, you will put one point into everything, then put in enough points into pierce to get to 100% with added bonuses from gear. You get 25% Pierce from the crafted quiver, so it's easy to hit 100. Max out Valkyrie. Your priority after that is going to be on Inner Sight. If you have points left, throw them into Decoy to buff your Valkyrie.
| B&C Skills | P&M Skills |
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STATS
Allocate enough strength to use gear. For the rest you have a couple options. I only put 200 points into Vitality, and dump the rest into Dex. The reason for only 200 into Vitality, is because you get so much health and added through charms and gear, that you get enough to be plenty tanky, and we want as many points into dex as we can afford to really push the upper end. For example: when writing this I have a health pool of 2200, and almost never die, so having 400-500 hard points into vit isn't going to do much but give you a little more reassurance. Once you buff with CTA, then that goes up considerably, but isn't necessary.
GEAR
Now, for the gear. This is going to get kind of lengthy once I get into options, but I will put what I am currently using:
- Weapon: Quicksilver (Unique)
- Quiver: Quiver of Amplified Slaying (Crafted)
- Helm: Fortitude (Runeword)
- Chest: Fortitude (Runeword)
- Gloves: Stone Claw (Crafted)
- Boots: Eagle Shank (Crafted)
- Belt: The Art of War (Unique)
- Rings: Two Seraphim (Set)
- Amulet: The Vanquisher (Unique)
Edit: for the following section when talking about upgrades, if you feel you don't need survivability from the all res/max res upgrades, if its an option, swap with the dex upgrade.
MIN/MAXING
Bow: For raw damage, Quicksilver is the best option I have found. It is easy to force since it is the only unique Grand Matron Bow in the game. Use your upgrades to hit the 511% cap, then add 5 sockets. Ultimately, I think you want to get 5 Star Facets in it. Until then, you can either go with 5 Ohm's or other ED jewels you have to boost this up. With the rest of your upgrades, I recommend going with 1 ele damage (it adds an extra 1.5k potential damage to your hits, and since we can't get ED higher its easy damage). You have a couple options to finishing this out with some DS to max crit chance, Adding IAS, Demon damage, or Crushing Blow. Your choice there depending on how you want to round it out. To min/max this weapon, will cost you a lot, so I only recommend trying for this once you have a lot of mats to blow. You want the base rolled to perfect. With the new souls recipe, this makes this way easier to obtain, but who knows how many rolls it'll take you. Then up it to the 511 cap and corrupt it and hope you hit ADDED Damage and IAS. From there, roll out the rest of your upgrades. Its half effective for ranged, but it's nice for bosses. Star Facets are the icing on the cake, and all the added attack speed helps since we won't be running Fanaticism.
Here is my finished bow:
The easiest way to get Quicksilver early: save your first Orb of Conversion. Gamble a rare Reflex Bow. Use the cube recipes to up the base to elite, then use your conversion orb on what should now be a rare Grand Matron Bow.
Other options are going to be running a Faith, or Mist, but without making insane corrupt bases, they won't get close to where Quicksilver gets. Another option I have looked at and haven't tested though, is the runeword Peril. Again though, it isn't going to compare unless I get a GG base.
For the helm, your BIS (Best in slot) is Fortitude. The raw damage you get from it is too big to not use, but it took me a while to learn that this could be made in a helm. If you aren't using a Fort helm, then I recommend using a King Conan's Rule. The upgrade you use for the helm slot is going to be the added Dexterity and Vitality recipe. I thought over this a lot. the +skills upgrade isn't that big here. Whereas it does give a small amount of damage, you get more value out of the flat Dex. %HP and mana just aren't really needed, nor res, once you get your anni and torch. Before then, you could use the upgrade there, but…I digress. The corrupt you want to hit on the base here is going to be either the all res/max res, FCR/IAS, or all attributes. All are good options. FCR/IAS is gonna be BIS for tele and hitting our needed like…292%ias for 7 strafe frames without Fanatcism. The breakpoint before that is 147% IAS. Whether you choose to chase 292% is up to you, so keep that in mind when I am talking about upgrades/corrupts. Until either of those helms, whatever floats your boat. I used a 4 socket Shako for the longest time.
The chest, there aren't many options that are any good. Until you can make a Fortitude, just use a good defensive chest till then. There are some useful rare auras you might contemplate here (Fanaticism, Concentration, Might, or even Meditation) until you get Fortitude in this slot. Because you do spend time standing still Strafing, armor does play into your defense, so shoot for a good base that has the highest str requirement you feel comfortable using. Corruptions you want are, again, all res/max res, Indestructible and %ED, or the %phys/magic reduction. Upgrade on this piece will also be the all res/max res.
Gloves here are tough for a good option. It depends on what you want out of the slot. BIS is going to be unique crafted gloves with scaling CB. You want +skills, IAS, and crushing blow, and deadly strike here if you haven't hit 100% DS. The Enhanced damage IAS corrupt is your chase on that end. Upgrades are kind of up to you here. If you don't have your target IAS, then you want attack speed, otherwise you could go for CB, Deadly strike, MF, Pierce if you need, etc.
This is what your gloves will look like:
When it comes to boots, again not a lot of solid offensive options. I went with the best move speed boots I had until I found Lustwanders for teleport. Once you can craft the enhanced damage boots with cannot be frozen, those will be your BIS. Other affixes that roll are kind of dependent on what stats you might need at the time, but by the time I had the mats to make these boots, I didn't need res or anything. The only upgrade here that adds damage would be the dex recipe, otherwise, its up to you on what you want to add here. Corruptions to chase would be the all res/max res.
This is what your boots will look like:
Belts. My old nemesis. I have a hard time finding something here. For now I went with Art of War because of the IAS, scaling max damage, and scaling Vitality. Razortail has usually been the item that fills this space, but with the pierce on the quiver, you don't need to have it on the belt too, so that opens up other options. You could take an arach or a skills craft belt here, and roll with that, but I felt like Art of War gave a more consistent option without having to craft 20 belts to get something good that MIGHT replace Art of War. Corruption follows the same mould. If you are wanting to maximize your all res, chase that, otherwise go for the IAS/FCR corruption if you are still chasing that lofty attack frame breakpoint. However, if you don't need IAS or all res, I would suggest the all attributes corruption to stack dex higher. Upgrades would be either Dex/Vit, or the MF/GF/vendor upgrade, since this build doesn't have a lot of MF, this isn't a bad place to get some.
Here is my finished belt:
For added damage on rings, there are not a lot of strong options. Rocking 2 Seraphim rings is a good place to start. The reason for these rings is the built in 25% enhanced damage on these rings. Good place holders till you can craft the ED rings. Otherwise, you just run whatever, as anything else is just survivability options mostly. You could try to get +5 Strafe or Guided Arrow on some rare rings, but I'm not sure if the +skills there will amount to much I think at this point on Strafe and Guided, I only get 5% more damage per point, so +10 only adds 50%. Crafted rings can roll up to 50% ED on them.
For amulets, for raw damage, I would go The Vanquisher. This is going to be BIS for the huge damage, and IAS on it, and you know how bad we need that. What may just be completely faster though, is going to be Sigil of Hope for the chance to cast CE on kill.
Mercenary
Okay, so for my mercenary, I originally went with an A1 Cold mercenary. My thought process here was the freezing arrow will give some cc, she would auto cast Inner Sight, at a higher level than I could at the time. Inner sight at that point from the merc was adding a 40% damage modifier to enemies affected. Massive increase. I gave her a Faith, and a rare armor with lv 3 Conc aura on it. Helm was just a corrupted shako I had with some sockets with a good corrupt. rings were a +1 ring to help scale inner sight, and the unique ring that gives Lv. 1 Might. When I originally set up this merc, hitting the frames BP with Fanaticism aura felt good. I saw about a 2-3k dps increase from her auras I was getting. HOWEVER. I brainstormed an even better merc.
Meet Ahsab. My A2 Might mercenary. With the gear I have on him, his might aura is up to 270%. I made a sacrifice to his damage, and made a Pride I made in a GG corrupted base I lucked out on. Pride gives freeze target, so he still adds cc that I got from the A1 merc, although not as often as the A1 merc. The real reason for Pride though, is that massive Lv. 20 Concentration Aura it can roll. Making the swap to this set up added another 6k damage over the a1 merc, I just have to manual cast Inner Sight. The chest at the moment is just another aura stack, this time with Meditation. I could go with a lot of stronger options here, this one just makes me giggle with how excessive Meditation is here, since the dual leech I have on my bow more than makes up for any mana issues I might have. Helm is the same Shako I had on my other merc, and the amulet is just a dual leech amulet. Room for improvement there. For boots, I have a pair of Eth Stairway to Heaven boots. the res here is nice with solid armor to go with it. The belt is a Verdungo's.