To be fair, these devs are still learning how this game’s systems work. It was one thing to rewrite the code for the app itself, but very few games use multiple files for the mechanics like D2/D2R does. That’s why they missed the second edit.
I would point this bug out to them directly on the @Diablo twitter and/or the D2R Reddit. It’ll get more exposure and likely a faster turnaround time than a post here on these fora, sadly.
Youd think they would test the changes in closed environments where they could get debugging reports of things happening…like a combat log for verification of working as intended. Its fascinating how many bugs have just been let go, especially one like this where it would take a developer all of like 4 minutes to fix since now they should know about it.
This really needs attention.
Can OP duplicate this in bug forum while we keep it alive here?
Was already submitted as a bug.
D2 and by extension D2R don’t create combat logs. Neither does D3 for that matter. Too much information to process. They probably didn’t realize that they needed to set up a specific type of test to ensure the updated skill worked as intended. Again, that’s one of the downsides to having a myriad files for these things instead of a single localized database file.
Unfortunately it’s highly doubtful we’ll get a fix for this before the next content patch. Blizzard has been rather stingy with its patch push cycles to the point of not pushing even vetted hotfixes unless there are enough other fixes to justify the issuing of a patch or there is a gamebreaking bug that has to be fixed immediately (this sadly doesn’t count as such).
Yeah I know, I’m just saying it’s surprising that for something that requires so much calculation, that they didn’t build such a tool.
geezus…can we get a blue on this?
Long time ago I heard that %AR didn’t work on bow skills. I’m guessing that’s still true? I mean if it doesn’t work for strafe, then what are the chances that it will work for immolation arrow?
It’s the weekend, you won’t unless they see the Reddit thread that spawned this, or respond to someone on Twitter.
I think as per Onadraig, that it applies to Strafe because they upped the skill AR per level itself with 2.4, but the increased skill AR isn’t applying.
Some abilities are like firing off 2 abilities in 1 in a way, while physical abilities are not.
Immolation arrow has 2 impacts. 1 that always impacts (the fire portion), and the physical aspect, which can still miss, even though the fire impacts. The fire always hits, so people may have thought that this means AR has no standing impact on its performance, because like 95% of an immolation arrow zon’s damage is coming from the actual fire they’re skilled into…but the physical portion can still miss. This is demonstrated by observing leech on single target shots. Sometimes it hits, sometimes it doesn’t, but elemental damage cannot leech targets. Only physical hits can, so when you fire an immolation arrow, and it leeches nothing, it means the physical portion either missed, or was blocked. To the average bowzon users eye though, it would appear to hit anyways, because the fire would still occur.
Strafe is a bit different, but also the same if you think about it. Every individual arrow fired by strafe is fully capable of hit/miss, carries all added elemental damage (minus the ranged elemental damage reduction), and is fully capable of causing chance to cast on hit effects. Strafe is basically like shooting 10 regular attacks, at super high speed. It still hit/misses though, just like the PHYSICAL portion of the immolation. It just doesn’t have the spell effect of immolation.
But the AR buff given to strafe is telling us in the tooltip that we have more AR than we actually do, because of the way they updated the wrong file. It absolutely works on bow skills, just doesn’t work when they update it improperly.
In short, we have basically been told we’ve been buffed, and operating on a PURE placebo effect this entire time. NO buff has ACTUALLY been given to the bowzon, either damage, OR AR related. The character screen just SAYS it has.
Probably bad wording on my part, that they added the AR bonus to the skill, but it’s not applying that added bonus. However, how do you feel about the added synergies? I’m not one to delve into the files themselves as I don’t mod, nor have much mod play experience beyond Plugy and Succulent (combined with the Cactus program all by fearedblis). The damage output from the synergies feels correct, and I remember someone (maybe even Bowa) stating that the 25% buff was off back then. I’d imagine if they fix those two things, Bowazon will have a better feel than it does now with the synergies.
So do we know if the AR% on Immolation Arrow works or not? I’m willing to bet it doesn’t, but I haven’t done any testing.
The synergies are moving in the right direction, but the class is still wildly underpowered compared to other classes. Even after a 25% buff to strafe, the class will STILL be wildly underpowered.
To put it into perspective, I have an enchanter with the max possible enchant (6191 damage enchant). When I apply that to the bowzon, the bowzon STILL struggles to keep up with other classes damage, AND it has far less mobility, so it’s still horribly inferior of a character to play. And that’s after a MASSIVE enchant. It’s playable, but it’s just so low on damage it’s not rewarding in any way other than pure fun aspect.
For physical bow to actually ever be truly balanced and keep up with other main stream classes, they’ll have to be able to achieve somewhere around 7.2-7.5k multishots and a 14k strafe, as well as have their FCR break points changed to be significantly easier to hit, the single target strafe bug fixed, and AR bonuses increased SIGNIFICANTLY against bosses.
This would put them nearly in line with hammerdins and light sorcs.
If you didn’t want them to feel quite as broken as hammerdins and light sorcs to properly account for the fact that their range is a ridiculously powerful aspect to the class, you’d shoot for around 6.5k multishot and a 12k strafe. Having an enchant where I can experience these levels of damage, I can tell you that these numbers work.
Basically, any and all changes that were made to bowzons as a result of the 2.4 patch are 100% null and voided. The wrong file was edited. If it was changed for 2.4 and is damage or AR related, it is not working as intended, regardless of what ability it’s for. They never touched the right file.
Apparently for other skills besides Strafe the AR bug was fixed according to Ubeogesh, I haven’t tested it myself but I might try it sometime.
To be honest, I’m at a point now where it’s hard to imagine where the devs go. With Pez stating 2.4 was the hurrah for changes, I’m not expecting them to do many more balance changes that are not more seasonal in nature, like a Sunder Charm kind of thing, but only during the season and not adding to the core game (while they have not explicitly stated SCs will be added to the core post-season, I get the sense that they are).
You are right, that without specific set-ups, a Bowazon is underpowered at higher players difficulty. Bowa’s youtube has a ton of Bowazon testing, and shows it can be done on Cows at least, but we are also talking about an area with little monster immunity.
If the devs decide to add players 8 (which I still doubt, despite SCs being a contradiction to what they’ve said about more reasons to not play with others) to battle net, then they would need to push more specs to be p8 viable. If they add some sort of personal loot option, it would be preferable to nerf some specs or at least do something to increase difficulty of higher player counts more, to slow down the pace better for partying and to slow down the viability of players in solo split games to encourage partying.
I’ve done some testing with all the other bow skills that give attack rating% and I corroborate Ubeogesh’s findings: The AR% for all bow skills works properly except for Strafe where it doesn’t work.
Here’s what I did before the actual testing:
monstats.txt:
- set fallen1 and quillrat1 “enabled” column to 0 to prevent them from spawning in the Blood Moor
- set zombie1 “AI” column to “Idle” to prevent them from moving or attacking
- set zombie1 “Level(H)” to 99, making the zombie level 99 in Hell
- set zombie1 "ResFi(H) to 100, this makes them fire immune for easier testing of Fire Arrow, EA, and IM
- set zombie1 “noRatio” column to 1, this makes it so they use the statistics (level, life, defense, damage, etc.) in monstats.txt instead of a ratio that uses monlevel.txt which is important for the next step
- set zombie1 “AC(H)” (AC = Armor Class which is the same thing as defense, interesting holdover from Diablo 1
) to 1000
skills.txt:
- changed “maxlvl” column of Magic Arrow, Fire Arrow, Cold Arrow, Exploding Arrow, Ice Arrow, Strafe, Immolation Arrow, and Freezing Arrow to 99 (allows me to increase those skills up to 99 instead of the usual 20)
- changed “param3” and “param4” columns of Strafe to 1, making it so Strafe can only shoot a single arrow per skill use
I hero edited a level 99 amazon with a plain short bow and arrows, no allocated stat or skill points, and 505 stat points and 200 skill points in reserve.
Now for the actual testing procedure itself:
NOTE: While I did change the “maxlvl” columns for the skills to 99, I can’t actually allocate that many points for the tier 2+ skills because I’m restricted by the required level (e.g. I can only increase Ice Arrow to level 94 because level 95 would require character level 100 which is impossible without more modding).
So with that out of the way, here’s the results:
Normal Attack
Attack Rating: 250
Chance to Hit: 20%
Successful Hits: 16/100
Misses: 84/100Level 99 Magic Arrow:
Attack Rating: 2480
Attack Rating%: 892%
Chance to Hit: 71%
Successful Hits: 74/100
Misses: 26/100Level 99 Fire Arrow:
Attack Rating: 2480
Attack Rating%: 892%
Chance to Hit: 71%
Successful Hits: 71/100
Misses: 29/100Level 94 Cold Arrow:
Attack Rating: 2367
Attack Rating%: 847%
Chance to Hit: 70%
Successful Hits: 76/100
Misses: 24/100Level 88 Exploding Arrow:
Attack Rating: 2257
Attack Rating%: 803%
Chance to Hit: 69%
Successful Hits: 73/100
Misses: 27/100Level 82 Ice Arrow:
Attack Rating: 2122
Attack Rating%: 749%
Chance to Hit: 68%
Successful Hits: 67/100
Misses: 33/100Level 76 Strafe:
Attack Rating: 2012
Attack Rating%: 705%
Chance to Hit: 66%
Successful Hits: 13/100
Misses: 87/100Level 76 Immolation Arrow:
Attack Rating: 2012
Attack Rating%: 705%
Chance to Hit: 66%
Successful Hits: 70/100
Misses: 30/100Level 70 Freezing Arrow:
Attack Rating: 1902
Attack Rating%: 661%
Chance to Hit: 65%
Successful Hits: 72/100
Misses: 28/100
As you can see almost every skill the AR% is working as expected, with the sole exception of Strafe.
Level 76 Strafe:
Attack Rating: 2012
Attack Rating%: 705%
Chance to Hit: 66%
Successful Hits: 13/100
Misses: 87/100
Level 76 Immolation Arrow:
Attack Rating: 2012
Attack Rating%: 705%
Chance to Hit: 66%
Successful Hits: 70/100
Misses: 30/100
Strafe and Immo Arrow (should) have exactly the same AR and AR%, yet Strafe only successfully hit the target 13 times compared to IA hitting the target 70 times. Clearly Strafe’s AR% isn’t working.
I’ll need to do further testing on how to fix this, but it’s likely something a similar issue to the damage where they forgot to change missiles.txt or something. I shall post here again if/when I find the solution, assuming I don’t get too lazy or forget. 
TL;DR: Bow skill AR% bug from original D2 has been fixed in D2R (so AR% works as intended), Strafe had AR% added in 2.4 but it wasn’t added correctly so it has no effect.
It has been a while so i’ll bump for visibility.
TL;DR: at the bottom.
Got some more info with the help of Bonesy, one of the modders at D2RModding. 
I’ll be honest that I’m out of my element when it comes to server functions and stuff like that, but I’ll try to explain to the best of my limited knowledge of what’s going on with Strafe.
The reason why the AR% isn’t working is because the backend/hardcode of the “srvdofunc” that Strafe uses in skills.txt isn’t properly setup, so the “tohit” (baseline AR%) and “tohitlvl” (AR% per level) of Strafe doesn’t have any effect at all.
What is “srvdofunc”? I’m not really sure myself so I’ll just copy it from the Phrozen Keep:
srvdofunc : Server finishing function, this controls the server side function executed when the starting function finishes executing, it might either be called repeatedly as long as the mouse button remains down, or it may be called periodically (for skills like paladin auras and blade shield).
So this requires a backend fix of “srvdofunc” 12 (the one that Strafe uses) for the AR% of Strafe to work, at least from what I understand.
I tested this by changing the “srvdofunc” of Strafe from 12 to 1 (the same one used by normal attack) in skills.txt and the AR% worked, I changed it back to 12 and tested it again and the AR% had no effect again.
I also tested if it was an issue with the missile by changing the “srvmissilea” of Strafe from “strafearrow” to “multipleshotarrow” and the AR% still didn’t work, so it seems unlikely for that to be the issue.
TL;DR: “srvdofunc” 12 (the one Strafe uses) needs a backend fix to make the AR% work, currently the AR% has no effect.
I made a new bug report here since it’s a separate issue from the Strafe damage bug:
so this is all about straffe?
good thing i like multishot/guided more
never liked that straffe locks you in an animation, doesnt look very hardcore friendly.