Background

This powerful woman warrior belongs to nomadic bands who roam the plains near the South Sea. The wandering of these groups often brings them into conflict with other peoples, so the Amazon is accustomed to fighting to defend her own. This lifestyle has made her fiercely independent and able to weather severe hardship and travel. While her skill with the bow rivals and even surpasses that of the Rogues, the Amazon is also adept in the use of spears and javelins, as well as in hand to hand combat. The Amazon is much sought after as a mercenary, in which type of service she will be loyal as long as her own ends are also served.

Introduction

Here is our female warrior, not to be confused as a beefed-up Rogue for as well as being much more effective with the bow she also has the potential to master the use of javelins, spears and just a tad of magic.

Her obvious strength lies in ranged attacks and as well as being able to fire a bow or throw a javelin she can enhance these attacks by way of imbuing the weapons with various magical effects such as poison, cold and lightning. There are also skills which will improve her overall proficiency in their uses, for instance, 'Penetrate' and 'Pierce' in her Passive & Magic tree will increase her % chance to hit and ability to strike more than one monster with an arrow or javelin. She has six Passive skills at her disposal and all of them are quite useful to most Amazon builds.

The Amazon begins equipped with a stack of javelins. There are many types of javelins that you'll find later in the game, with more damaging ones that require more strength and dexterity to equip, and have various max allowed per stack. Check out the Amazon specific items page in our Items Database for full information.

The Amazon can use her starting equipment to stab or throw, or switch to a bow as soon as she finds one of those. She's good with spears also, a decent early spear find and a point in Jab will make for smooth sailing through Act One at the very least, though you'll need to work to keep enough mana early on.

Javelin & Spear

All the skills in this tree work with javelins, either throwing them or using them for melee. When using spears, only the melee skills will work, since spears can not be thrown. All of the elemental type attacks in this tree are lightning or poison, there are no fire or cold attacks in this tree.

Javelins: There are many types of javelins to be found or purchased in Diablo II, but none are ever magical, unique, rare, or Set items. Just low quality, normal, and superior. In the expansion throwing weapons are much improved, and there are magical and rare javelins, as well as one (as of v1.09) unique Amazon javelin, Titan's Revenge. Javelins can be used for melee, but they are intended to be thrown, and will almost always do higher damage as a projectile. In addition there are various skills that only work with thrown javelins. The melee spear skills work with javelins or spears.

Javelins aren't a bad melee weapon; they have a quick attack rate when used with Jab, and most have a range of 2, better than a lot of one-handed melee weapons. You should use a shield with your javelin, check the various Amazon strategy guides for equipment appraisals.

Spears: All spears are two-handed, meaning you can never use a shield with one. Though spears have a slow attack speed for most characters, Amazons aren't too bad with them, especially with Jab and Fend adding to your attack rate. Spearazons are much less popular (and powerful, as of v1.09) than Bowazons or Javazons, but can be very strong through Nightmare, and are still viable and fun to play in Hell. One annoying aspect of spears, including the Amazon class-specific types, is their generally low durability, so get used to needing repairs pretty regularly.

Bear in mind that her passive skills in the aptly-named 'Passive & Magic' tree will further benefit the chosen skills in this tree.

As of v1.09, the fastest way to kill a single target for a Javazon or Spearazon is to have a big damage bow and switch weapons, using Guided Arrow with Piercing for the kill (a Buriza is probably the best option, with Piercing built in and huge damage). This is especially useful for killing dangerous targets, such as Might bosses, or bosses with Lightning, or especially MSLE bosses, as well as Physical Immune targets, which Spearazons have problems with. The bow-switch technique is frowned upon by purists though, and also requires you to waste a few points in bow prereqs, and of course requires you to have a good bow to switch to.

Damage bonuses are something to consider with javelins, or the Amazon class-specific spears. These weapon types add bonus damage from both dexterity and strength, usually .75% damage per point of each stat. Most other melee weapons are 1% damage per point of strength, with no damage bonus from dex at all. This means that you can add the same amount of bonus damage by adding to your Spearazons strength or dexterity, but it takes 4 points of dex/str to equal the bonus damage you'll get with a normal spear, such as a Pike or Lance. Dexterity is more useful to add than strength, generally speaking, since it increases your Attack Rating, Defense, and blocking, while strength just boosts damage (and helps you meet item requirements).

Passive & Magic

This tree was originally called 'Healing, Movement and Repair' but as the skills changed, Blizzard changed the name to better reflect the collection of skills and spells in it.

There are six passive skills in this tree, most of which are highly-recommended for every type of Amazon play. The three defensive skills, Dodge, Avoid, and Evade are all great for being hit less often, and are especially useful as Bowazons and Spearazons have no shield to help with blocking attacks. For dealing damage, Critical Strike {Clvl 1} and Penetrate {Clvl 18} are both very useful for all types of Amazons, adding to damage and accuracy, and Pierce {Clvl 30} is essential to boost for any projectile-launching Amazon, whether javelins or arrows/bolts are the projectiles of choice.

Although the Necromancer rules the summoning and control areas of the game, the Amazon possesses two minion skills as well. Decoy {Clvl 24} and Valkyrie {Clvl 30}. Both will take some heat off the Amazon, but only Valkyrie can inflict damage on her foes, and is mobile and longer-lasting.

Most of the skills in this tree have "diminishing returns", which means they increase quickly with the first few points you put in, and then add much less bonus at higher and higher levels. Despite this, some of them are still well worth multiple points, since with some skills adding just another percent or two is very useful.

Bow & Crossbow

Bow is the weapon of choice for Rogue players from Diablo I, and there are a lot more options and techniques to using a bow in Diablo II than there were in Diablo. Long gone are the days of shooting nothing but a steady stream of normal arrows, in Diablo II there are ten bow skills to boost your attacks, which are also assisted by several skills from the Passive and Magic skill tree. There are also a number of types of bows and crossbows in Diablo II, all of them with varying damage, firing rates, and strength/dexterity requirements. See the Bows and Crossbows pages in our Items Database for full info.

Prior to v1.04, all bows were bugged, and the damage from any sort of +%damage modifier, such as Kings, Merciless, etc did not work. A 10-50 gothic bow with +100% damage would list as 20-100, but would actually do 11-51. Since this problem has been fixed, Bowazons have become a lot more effective, and they are among the best characters in D2X.

All bow skills require some mana to use, (Two exceptions, Magic Arrow at Slvl 13+ is free and Guided Arrow at Slvl 33+.) which makes some sort of mana steal equipment mandatory for any successful Bowazon. At lower levels it's usually hard to keep enough mana, but as your bow damage goes up, boosted by better bows and more points in dexterity, you'll find it easier to steal enough mana to keep up a steady attack of bow skills, rather than having to alternate normal attacks with the more damaging bow skills. When using a low damage bow, or shooting monsters that have very few hit points, it's actually more beneficial to have +mana per kill bonuses than mana leech.

Though two of the early skills, "Magic" and "Multi-shot" Arrow allow (as well as Strafe later on), help on arrow economy, one by creating an arrow from mana and the other by splitting one arrow into many, this isn't a real benefit since there is seldom a shortage of arrows, and in any event they are cheap and plentiful to purchase from an NPC in any act.

Bear in mind that her passive skills in the aptly-named 'Passive & Magic' tree will further benefit the chosen skills in this tree, as will two other, non-passive skills: "Decoy", which creates an immobile decoy, and "Valkyrie", which creates an ally, a minion much like the Necromancer's, to fight for you or just distract monsters, giving you free shots at them.

Socketed bows can be very useful at early levels, especially with chipped or flawed gems adding elemental damage, or poison. They aren't the super low level weapon they were in D2C anymore, since Clvl requirements have been added to gems in D2X, but early on you can probably do a lot better with a bow that has 2 or 3 chipped topaz or rubies or emeralds than with any other bow you'll find at that point.