played and beat the game with a sword/spec warrior with minor spell backup, the spells worked out rather nicely. Right now I'm plowing through it with a "ranger-esque" character. Concentrating on just the bow skills for now and shes pretty lethal. Of course I found a razor-sharp longbow early on, so i was doing up to 100+ damage before i even hit the bridge to Rivertown....
Split arrows is pretty nasty in the early game too because they do their own set damage regardless of the bow's base damage and you can time it so all 5 arrows hit one target. Becomes rather useless once the bow damage starts increasing. 30-40 damage at rank 1 per arrow, versus 35-135 pts per normal shot?