Best D2R 2.5 Value Cold Bowazon Builds - Top 3 Endgame Frostmaiden Builds in Diablo 2 Resurrected

In today's article, we’ll be looking at the top 3 best D2R 2.5 value Frostmaiden or Cold Bowazon builds that are enjoyable to play and use items that are fairly attainable while delivering some decent farming capability post-hell Baal and into the late game. If you want to make an effective cold bowazon that you can use to shatter hordes of monsters to your heart's content without hurting your wallet too much, this guide is for you!

Top 3 Best Endgame Cold Bowazon Builds in Diablo 2 Resurrected - D2R Ladder 2 Frost Maiden Builds

Assuming using a Harmony bow on switch and act 5 mercenary with a Greenwood and an Annihilus, Amazon Torch and a cold Sunder charm in the Bowazon's inventory. The sunder charms are only available on ladder, so if you're not playing on ladder, then a pure cold bowazon is going to be more limited to farming in areas that have no or few cold immune such as ancient tunnels in Act 2 or the secret cow level, or the bowazon is going to rely more on their physical damage dealing components that come from the D2R bow itself and the act 5 mercenary since a good chunk of cold immunes cannot be broken without this sunder charm. So let's jump in!

Top 3 Cold Bowazon Build - Mist Matri Bow + Plague

We have a cold bowazon using a Mist matriarchal bow. Mist runeword that was introduced in patch 2.4 to ladder and single player. This can be made using the 5 runes, Cham, Shale, Gull, Thul and Eth into a 5 socket bow or D2R crossbow and provides a bowazon with a bow that has high physical damage, lots of plus skills, a concentration aura, 100% pierce and some nice survivability stats. For a cold bowazon, the combination of up to +6 to bow skills, 100% pierce and when made in a matriarchal bow, a decent attack speed makes for a freezing area that packs a lot of punch. The 100% pierce in particular for any elemental bowazon build is going to be a significant factor to maximize the chances of the chained explosion effects, that allows freezing arrow to explode multiple times depending on how many times it pierces and hits the next target. With a 40% aura resist and +24 to vitality on the bow as well, it makes using a sunder charm less of a burden on the bowazon cold resist and overall survivability. The concentration aura on a bow is nice but mainly only comes into play for the bowazon’s act 5 mercenaries damage or if the bowazon needs to fall back to using multi-shot or magic arrow against cold immunes. 

Overall, there aren't many flaws with this build, however when looking at the best value builds, this build uses chairman gold runes for the bow as well as another cham rune for the play greenwood. So out of the builds in this guide today, this build is going to be the most difficult to obtain build out of the lot. If you're playing on ladder online, a cham rune may not be too hard to trade for, but getting two tamarinds on single player can be quite the challenge. With Mist being a rune word, it doesn't have the option to be socketed with something like a cold facet that's going to be impactful against monsters that are immune or highly resistant to cold damage. So with that in mind, the cold bowazon using a Mist matriarchal bow comes in at third place today

Top 2 Bowazon Build - M’avina Set + Plague

Then we have a cold polls on using the former venus set. We're looking at the M’avina set that used on a cold bowazon while the former venus set is kind of okay for a multi-shot bowazon, the former venus set really shines when used on a cold bowazon build mainly for a couple of reasons. 

- The first reason is the former set provides a total of 100% aura resists. This is going to be quite valuable for a build that ordinarily finds it challenging to stack resists and is wanting to use a cold sunder charm without going into the negative resists.

- The second and most important reason is because the M’avina's Icy Clutch gloves comes with two big bonuses, +20% cold skill damage and a big boost of flat cold damage of 137 to 270 cold damage. The 20% cold skill damage buff calculates 20% of the synergize freezing arrow damage and adds up on top of the base skill damage. Then the flat cold damage is added on top of that and applies to the freezing arrow's final explosion damage. So the D2R gloves with both of these mods together, single-handedly at around 25% more damage for the cold bowazon's freezing arrow attacks. 

So, the former venus set is really made for the cold bowazon. However the former venus set doesn't allow bowazon to achieve 100% chance to pierce. With the plus skills from the set however, a high level pierce is still quite possible to reach up to 90 or 91% chanced appears. This set does serve the cold bowazon really well until into the late game. It's just going to be harder to do individual item upgrades while using this set, so the path to upgrade is going to be a bigger jump. Regardless, the former venus set for a cold bowazon build is really solid and why it sits in at number two spot today.

Top 1 Cold Bowazon Build For Late Game - Wizendraw + Plague 

We have the cold bowazon using an upped wizendraw. Wizendraw is a unique long battle bow which for this build is up twice to a large Siege bow and then to a crusader bow, mainly to benefit Wizendraw's mana leech capabilities. Being a normal unique D2R item, you can find this quite early in normal difficulty if you're lucky, but trading for one of these should not be difficult at all. 

Pros:

- While Wizendraw lacks any plus the bow skills to boost its flat damage for freezing arrow, Wizendraw really stands out with its generous minus to enemy cold resistances which can roll anywhere between -20 to -35%, even an average roll that's just shy of 30% can out muscle the other build shown today and anything between 30 to 35% is going to really stand out. 

- The relationship between flat damage and minor centimeter resistances and how they perform is not straightforward. Higher flat damage increases the overall damage you do proportionately across all monsters. So if you double your flat damage, then you'll do double your damage against all monsters. 

- The high minus enemy cold resistance mods increases the damage taken by monsters by lowering their resistance levels. For example, if a monster has called resistance of 70% and use a Wizendraw with -30% to enemy cold resist, then your attacks will do double damage to that monster. If you then think about all those spots in act 5 such as Glacial Trail, Frozen Tundra, Icy Cellar, Nihlathak’s Temple and Worldstone Keep, those places are packed with monsters that have between 50 to 90% cold resistances or a completely immune to cold damage. So against those monsters, Wizendraw is miles ahead and damage potential, especially during the stages where you don't have an Infinity and a handful of perfectly rolled cold facet jewels. While the certainly will be situations where Wizendraw will do less damage than medicine or Melody when you consider lower resist curse or conviction, Wizendraw does have a small time window of Advantage before those negative buffs come into play in any given engagement versus a group of monsters. 

- Wizendraw also comes with some other benefits such as increase attack speed, attack rating, manner bonuses and cold resistances. All good mods for a cold boson especially when using a cold sunder charm. 

Cons:

However, like the melody bow covered earlier, it doesn't have as many survivability stats as the M’avina set or Mist, so it does depend more on getting resistance charms to help with resistances especially when using a sunder grand charm. But Wizendraw doesn't have as many issues as Melody as the freezing arrow level is lower and carries a lower mana cost and each hit does pack more of a punch. 

So overall, with its distinct minus enemy cold resistance advantage and be more of a budget-friendly bow option, a bowazon using Wizendraw sits in first place today for best value bowazon build in Diablo 2 Resurrected.