I went full strafe, full guided arrow for synergy, full valk, put enough points in pierce to give 100% with Widsom helm. I need some better gear like better belt, better ring, etc. Using Wisdom helm, Lava Gout, Windforce, Wilhelm’s belt (need better), Carrion wind ring and manald heal 7% (want better ring), Aldurs boots, highlord amulet, Insight Hydra Bow for secondary if I run out of mana, Hustle Dusk Shroud. Im struggling to kill cows P1… Using hustle for attack speed and run/walk since Im too poor for things like enigma (not sure id run enigma on a bow zon anyway). Thoughts? I Think if I can get fortitude it will be better than Hustle… And I need a raven frost ring instead of Manald
are you not running crushing blow, and +crit chance? Did you find a 4 soc bow with +2 skills for harmony?
You should be good with a windforce, Its one of the top 3 bows
For cows I Use Mutlishot, gets better coverage
Highlords is good, Dont use enigma on a bowazon, I dont know much about hustle, but Fort is probably better for raw damage.
I Never ran much CB on mine, always ran with War Travs. Wisdom Should be fine also
When I ran a multishot Zon, It was
WF
Fortitude
Andys visage
Raven/DL ring
Goldwrap
War Travs
Lay on hands
I did perfectly fine with all this, Mowed down cows with multishot.
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you shouldn’t struggle with a windforce on p1.
Make sure that you get some maxdamage charms in your inventory to boost your damage. Also you should stat mostly for dex and not vita as PvM zon.
Your gear isn’t great besides the WF and highlords. LoH would be a nice upgrade outside of cows. WT for damage boost. But I’d recommend you to respec your stat/skill points. max crit, max ar, 100% penetration and only enough points to get to lvl 17 valk as a max with future gear.
Again, you should not struggle p1 with a windforce.
Bow zons have always been one of those chars that required juiced out gear, they were always a 2nd/3rd char after farming lots of currency.
For pvm, getting a goldstrike bow and lay of hands gloves and you can become a chaos farmer, prob best pvm for bow zon till you get juicy gear.
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It baffles and amazes me both at the same time how bad Bowazons have become. I mean for one, Atma’s Scarab is absolutely required. There’s no if’s and’s or but’s about it.
Double damage?
“yah no thanks i dont want double damage” - TerribleZon
secondly, why are you maxing and using Valk? It simply baffles and amazes me both at the same time why Bowazons dont use Decoy instead of valk. I guess it’s a good indicator of a bad player tbqh, a huge red flag, but really, we need to share good information from now on and start teaching new players about using Decoy and other simple tips and tricks.
I mean you’re not even wearing War Travelers… Hopefully it’s because you dont have a pair, but if you do, i dont know what to say other than it baffles and amazes me both at the same time. A Bowa without War Travs is kinda silly.
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i bet you like the smell of your own farts
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Actually from your post it seems to me like you are somewhat low lvl for Hell cows and as such it is more AR than damage issue. It seems amplified by the fact that I dont think any of your gear actually increase AR. You using Wisdom so while Raven is definitely worth getting for AR/later it is not necessity now. As of now I would say your best option would be angelic combo and/or maybe socekting temporarily WF with Eth (or Jah 
). With WF and strafe you shouldnt really run out of mana hence Manald and Insight are overkill. Replace Insight with Harmony it is amazing especially if you do TZ somwhere like Jungle.
If Damage is indeed the case rather than AR (which seems unlikely with WF) then Atma is simplest solution (I assume here you using Might merc).
As for build itself, with added synergies if you using Strafe Valk is either 1 or 0 points (assuming softcore here). I would say your skills should be like 20 CS, 20 Penetrate, 20 Strafe, 20 GA , for now I would say 1 point in D/A/E rest MS and some pierce. Get Torch and Anni it will save you points on pierce. For stats (again assuming softcore) Strength for gear, Vita base, or if you want to feel safe you can add points till you have 80-100 base.
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For a start, you’re handicapping yourself if you don’t use multishot. As good as strafe is now, you still want to use multishot for high density clears such as cows.
If you have maxed multishot for the sake of maxing strafe’s synergy, and you use both multishot and strafe, then that’s partly the source of your mana problems.
Apart from that, if you don’t have the following, your mana pool will be low and you will feel the mana issues more:
- Ravenfrost
- Anni
- Torch
For your damage, put a large focus on trading for max damage charms. Not just for damage but they are very useful for attack rating especially once you start to do terror zones.
As for boots, war travellers are great but they are not a must have. I am still rocking with Sander’s boots for it’s 40% run/walk boost and the attack rating boost. The run/walk is particularly important in situations where you are not soloing terror zones yourself and especially important for zones with lots of dead ends (ancient’s way, glacial trail, crystalline passage, WSK). This is still the case even if you’re using harmony on swap which I highly recommend.
I used hustle armour right up until I switched to fortitude, but I do miss the run/walk speed from hustle 
Highlord’s is a good choice of ammy: +skill, attack speed, deadly strike and lightning resist. Atma’s is good when exclusively using strafe but not so much with multishot. My Merc is using Reaper’s toll to get that decrep proc, and he rarely dies because of it too.
And get razortail, with Wisdom you should understand that having a reliable pierce will indirectly boost up your DPS, especially in areas like cows, flayer jungle, WSK. However, the helm slot is an important piece for attack speed, damage and/or resists.
With this setup, you should be able to solo players 8 TZ cows and it’s fairly budget. I was soloing players 8 TZ cows even with hustle armour based around this setup above.
As of now, I am level 95 on ladder and only rolled my fortitude 1-2 days ago.
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Do you really stop, run around in circles until the merc catches up, and then wait for a decrep proc, and then attack?
i mean, and act 2 merc is okayish for might, but not for waiting for reaper toll procs. Act 2 merc is C tier at best.
You want an act 1 or act 5 merc. Act 1 if you need her to wield Faith, and an Act 5 merc if you need him to run setups like Azurewrath or Last Wish or Hustle.
Now just to be clear about how bad Act 2 merc is on a Bowazon, i’ll tell you right now as a professional i have tested and can guarantee better results from an Act 5 merc wearing Lawbringer. Now you ask how is that any different or better. Well, Act 5 merc has Frenzy so his movement is extremely fast unlike the Act 2 merc. So he’s going to jump from pack to pack super fast procing decrepify more often and where you’d want it.
BUUUUTTTTTT it’s still sub optimal to run decrep mercs. Bowazon does a LOT of offscreen and long range targeting before a mercs AI even kicks in, and those first attacks are just wasted unless you run Atmas ammy and you’re lighting them up with Amp damage. Plus you dont want a melee merc gather up mobs wherever the random AI pleases. USE YOUR DECOY. GIT GUD. Holy Moly the amount of Zon’s who dont utilize Decoy. It’s a GOD tier ability. it cost 4 mana, you can spam it for 6 days straight. It is better than any Valkarie could even dream.
I cant believe how much Bowazon info has been lost over the decades when i was the top PK on USEast. It’s sad, I know Bows have been in a bad state for a long time, but you’d think people would remember how to play them.
You’ve never been top of anything except the unemployment line lol.
So much bad info coming from 1 person.
Strafe is a bad skill because of next hit delay. Atma’s is almost never good. Highlords for mid game, cats eye for end game.
Theres no reason to cast decoy because everything is dead half a screen away from multishot. Whatever is physical immune, you can use magic arrow, or just run past them
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Here’s my friend doing p8 strafe 2.6
here’s my friend doing p8 multi in BiS gear.
Strafe is better. you are bad and shouldnt ever post anything about amazon ever again.
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The fact that you believe 2 random clips of game play is sufficient to show how 1 build is better than another just shows how shallow your understanding of the game is.
I really hope people dont take what you say seriously.
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Makes sense that strafe is better, arrows aren’t wasted
The damage is concentrated
yes and your
crumbled into dust in one 8 second clip.
sorry Caillou, but you’ll just need to play with Rosie today, Minecraft is a $30 fee.
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This is ridicolous discussion:
Cows - MS
Maggot Lair - Strafe
In between personal preferences kick in… but overall MS >>>>Strafe once you get to Faith
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I disagree with you here actually, if he has damage issues with synergised strafe (which I still think is more of AR issue) then MS will result with him getting mauled by a bunch of cows.
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I think you know the answer to that question is no, just like amp damage doesn’t kick in straight away but you would know to attack anyway without it (though it’s also because you need to attack to proc it, but that’s besides the point).
The only difference between the act 2 merc and the other merc options while you use atma’s is you have more damage and attack speed right out of the gate with the former. That merc aura (in my case 230% ed might) together with 20% IAS on your amulet slot on a Windforce build and other highlord’s mods (together ~8% effective DPS) is a big deal.
And an act 1 faith merc, well you need to get a faith first which if you read the room, is out of scope budget wise for the OP as there’s far more basic gear that he hasn’t gotten himself yet… and even then the act 1 faith merc has its own issues.
That’s where playstyle comes in. The moment you reach eye contact with a pack, you don’t immediately start shooting away, you run deeper into enemy lines and position yourself for far better multishot angles while your merc immediately lands closer to the first lot of enemies.
While the act 2 merc does move slower, he does agro enemies of his own and in all practice, the entire fight should be over without him needing to move about too much. He also does far more damage on his own than a lawbringer merc can achieve on his own.
Meanwhile you’re dealing 20% more damage to all other enemies thanks to might and highlord’s since that stuff kicks in instantly.
Atma’s only procs on the middle 2 arrows of multishot, so if the playstyle is to proc amp damage as quickly as possible, then you’re forced into using strafe for the first few seconds and thus indirectly losing DPS in a lot of cases.
And even then it’s not a sure thing, and especially with monsters that are spread out you’re going to be waiting even longer for amp to kick in that you might as well have used a higher damage output multishot (by virtue of its sheer number of arrows hitting things in each given time period) to begin with.
As for the video demos, you presented one of the niche case where strafe + amp does better than multishot. The testing also seems inconclusive as well. For starters, can I ask was the second video featuring a stoneskin Lister?
Did I say don’t use decoy? You should be using both, except I wouldn’t max out decoy, that is a waste of points.
In this case, his damage output is low not just because his sheet damage and attack rating are low but also because he’s dedicated himself to using strafe that shoots far less arrows per second than multishot.
Both strafe and multishot should be used depending on when the situation calls for it.