Shooby's Lightning Strafe Amazon

Character created for 3.0.8 patch (new quivers added). April 27, 26: 3.0.8. guide created. May 14, 26: 3.0.9. slightly update merc section and a paragraph about updated Holy Shock aura damage. Jun 02, 26: 3.0.10. video added. Jun 08, 26: 3.0.10. made alternative gearing sub-chapters to call more attention to them as a lot of people asked me about other items. July, 07, 26: 3.0.10. added a more detailed merc section. Sept, 14, 26: 3.0.11. initial pass at new website 0ct, 02, 26: 3.0.12. reformulated for website. Oct, 05, 25: 3.0.12. Fixed Elemental Craft tooltip Links. confirmed working.

Using strafe as a vehicle for Chance to Cast (CTC) spells is kind of a known quantity in Reimagined. There are several builds that are done with the mechanic, ranging from pure physical variants (Diamond Bow Multishot Strafe amazon) to other lightning variants (Holy Shock Fist of the Heavens Strafe Paladin).

I dubbed the present build Thor's Shotgun because of how it looks like on the procs. Everytime you get a Lightning Bolt proc, and due to the way the character holds the crossbow, it looks like you are just dishing out a shotgun blast to mob's faces. And usually you do that in barrages, deleating entire packs, once you scale the build properly.

The “precursor” to this build is the Wintershock Strafe Amazon. That build is, in some ways, better than this one because you have a lot more free points so you can actually have a more impactful physical contribution on your damage, but that is a LOT LESS COOL to see in action. The Wintershock build is a lot more ‘stable’ and gets off the ground a lot faster due to its CTC spells having high innate damage, but this shotgun build scales a lot better as you accrue a lot of gear though, mostly due to how Lightning Bolt procs carry 75% of weapon's damage (including elemental).

(If you happen to want to do the Wintershock version instead, you can pretty much follow this guide somewhat and just swap the weapon and bolt case for Wintershock and a Quiver of Elemental Slaying or good rare drop of the sort. Scale some physical damage and put more points into Strafe and its Synergies for more sustain but still aim for high lightning and cold % damage to maximize the procs.)

REASONS TO PLAY THIS SHOTGUN AMAZON

• COOL FACTOR. There is something stupidly satisfying about seeing this absolute huge line of thunderstorm falling down from the sky and melting everything in its path.
• Damage. The build scales a lot regarding damage, and excels in farming density.
• Putting an A3 merc to good use. Probably too good of use, to be honest.
• Putting a crossbow to use - in a world of bows.

REASONS TO NOT PLAY THIS SHOTGUN AMAZON

• Damage as well. There is some variance element to how much damage you can dish out. In dense packs, you almost always just melt them within half a strafe - specially when you reach high levels of pierce, but against single bosses and resistant Heralds you will feel your kill speed varias a lot depending on how lucky you get with procs and how much you dedicate your gear to stats like Crushing Blow.
• Difficult gearing puzzle to solve and uncertainty regarding IAS breakpoints (detailed in the mechanics session)