Bow Assassin Build

General Discussion
1

Hello, all!

I’ve been thinking a little bit about a build that I’ve never made; the Bow Assassin. Has anyone else built one? How would you build yours?

Attack rating is going to be challenging, but I think it can be done. How far can we push this? :grinning:

2

So, I think the skills are going to be the same for all versions:

Burst of speed, venom, cloak of shadows, shadow master…

I see a few options for the bow.

  1. Faith - damage, speed, ITD, attack rating
  2. Widowmaker - guided arrow, no attack rating needed…
  3. Brand - enhanced damage, ITD, knockback, small magic damage from bone spear, explosive arrows (could be boosted a bit by fire damage charms, dragon armour, demon limb…)
  4. Pus Spitter - Poison damage combined with venom, lower resist proc on striking, we could lean in with poison charms

Skill charms aren’t going to have a lot of benefit, I think the options would be:

  1. Max damage
  2. Fire damage
  3. Poison damage
    These will depend on the selected bow.

Do you see potential in bows not mentioned here? Which way would you go?

1 Like
3

Update:
So far trying to push the poison damage with trang gloves, bramble armour, poison sunder, dual plague merc, etc. Bows tried so far: BOTD, Pus Spitter, Widowmaker, and 6 faceted great bow. Poison focus is not the way to go. The damage and attack rating is way too low. Even P1 is very slow.

The best I’ve found so far is to play like a physical bowazon. The things I’ve noticed so far are:

  1. We don’t have critical strike, so deadly strike on gear is even more important.
  2. We don’t need to load IAS everywhere because we have burst of speed, and we can only reach 9 frames anyway. This leaves more options for gloves, belt, helm.
  3. We have shadow master instead of Valkyrie, so about the same here.
  4. We don’t have multi shot or strafe, but we can use death sentry for corpse explosion for some AOE.
  5. We have cloak of shadows for safety, so we can run lower resists and life like a bowazon if needed.

Faith is the best bow by far. Faith and fortitude run Chaos Santuary at least twice as fast as the poison focused builds. Highlords is not needed for speed, but is needed for the deadly strike. I’m also running gore riders at the moment for more deadly strike. On paper the average damage between a jewellers diadem of speed with ruby jewels of fervor should be about even with Guillaume’s face, but the diadem was definitely faster in my P1 testing. That may change with increased player count. I’m currently running dual raven frosts with soul drainers and m’avina’s belt, but there are more options. It’ll take some time to try each of them and practice the play style, but it’s certainly getting there.

With a might merc running pride, and faith on my assassin, I’m hitting 4.5k damage on the character screen, and have an attack rating of about 9k. It’s actually working, and I think I can improve it more. Anyone else game? :grinning:

4

For pvp or pvm? They can be decent pvp but requires enigma and only good to troll others pretty much. Id immagine it would be horrible for pvm.

Side note, holy fire din with kuko bow is very effective and cheap!

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This is for PVM. It won’t be S tier, but I think I can get it to about bowazon speed.

6

If you don’t need ias from the diadem, you might want to think about atmas+gface. The Amp proccs will help with initial damage and improve your DS damage

7

Just use blade fury, no contest. Bows are horrid…

8

Thanks. I’ll give Atma’s a go. Guillaume’s was a little slower than the diadem in P1, but Atma’s may even it out.