Larian Studios Forums Divine Divinity (English) Help/Tips/Tricks Bow vs Crossbow

I'm playing my first (primarily) archer character and am trying to decide if I want crossbow or bow mastery. Crossbow mastery is attractive because of the rather big damage bonus, but I've heard some mumbling from earlier patches that imply that this damage bonus is non-existant. Bow mastery is attractive obviously because it's fast. So far, it looks like bow mastery at skill level 5 will give every bow I've found thusfar a recup. time of 0, which sounds really good to me. But the extra damage on the crossbows seems pretty impressively high - if you actually get that bonus. Also, if the recup time effects the speed of use of mana-using bow skills like splitting arrows I'd be leaning towards the bow even if the crossbow is getting bonus damage correctly. I'm also not entirely sure how high damage bows/crossbows get in the long run, so I wouldn't know if that crossbow damage that seems impressive now will be relatively minor in the long run. Also, I heard that in older versions True Shot didn't seem to be working, so I'd appreciate input on the trueness of that as well.

Obviously this is somewhat a matter of opinion, so feel free to give me your personal spin. Thanks...

PS - Any other archer-related advice is welcome too, like what mana-using bow skills to pump up...also, in case I wasn't clear, I'm running the latest patch (1.34)

Both True Shot and Crossbow Expertise are broke (the damage is not applied, see here). Even if the crossbow skill worked, bows are faster and tend to do more damage in a given amount of time. Also, there is one unique, potentially powerful bow in the game as a quest reward, but only random drops or trading for crossbows.

Poisoned Arrow, Splitting Arrow and Explosive Arrow seem to be good, from what I have read.

This is true Raze.
AND
The crossbow problem seems to originate from the Orcs army. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

Thanks Raze - I'd actually found that thread via search but I thought it was referencing 1.33 and I thought something might have changed. I actually already dropped a point in splitting arrow and I'm liking it...pretty sweet for 1 mana...and was eyeballing poison arrow for later.

The only change from the 1.33 patch to 1.34 was the fix for the black map bug.
Watch out for friendly fire using Splitting Arrows (ie against orcs who are attacking soldiers, etc).

<img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" />

Poisoning a Long Bow with high hit points (average 75) is very effective against Orcs and Trolls.
Using the control key allows auto-targeting but when foes expire the next target is a friend.
Thunder bolts would be my best choice for entangled humans Orcs beside the camp.