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Archery

Archery is the ranged weapon skill, covering the bow, crossbow and heavy crossbow. It lets you deal full weapon damage from up to 10 tiles away — at the price of ammunition, a mandatory stand-still before each shot, and no shield to hide behind.

What the skill does ↑ top

Whether an arrow hits is the same contest as in melee (see Weapon Damage):

chance to hit = (your Archery + 50) ÷ ((their skill + 50) × 2)

Damage is scaled by Tactics, Anatomy and Strength exactly like a melee hit; the regular bow additionally gains a damage bonus from your Fletching skill (up to +20% at 100).

The archery rules ↑ top

  • You must stand still for 1 second before you can fire. There is no shooting on the move — reposition, plant your feet, then the shot comes.
  • Every shot consumes ammunition: arrows for bows, bolts for crossbows, drawn from your quiver or backpack.
  • Recovery: when you hit a monster there is a 40% chance the ammunition survives and can be looted back from the corpse; missed shots have a 40% chance to fall to the ground nearby.
  • Range: bows shoot up to 10 tiles, crossbows up to 8.
  • No parry: you cannot hold a shield with any bow (all two-handed), and ranged fighters cannot parry blows.
Weapon Damage Speed Range
Bow 12–27 34 10
Tribal Bow 13–28 32 10
Crossbow 14–35 27 8
Heavy Crossbow 16–44 22 8

The heavy crossbow's 16–44 roll is the biggest single hit any ranged weapon can deliver — see Weapons for how those numbers scale. The tribal bow is a sidegrade looted from the savage tribes, not an upgrade.

Archery in PvP ↑ top

Archers trade the melee fighters' triggered special blows (concussion, crushing, paralyzing — all require a two-handed melee weapon) for reach: forcing enemies to close the distance while you fire is its own advantage. But two shard-wide PvP rules still apply, both covered in full on the PvP overview:

  • Deep Wound — any hit that rolls near the top of the weapon's own damage range tears a wound that cuts all healing the target receives, and it stacks (see Healing). It keys off the damage roll, not the weapon class — and since the heavy crossbow owns the biggest single roll in the game, it is one of the best wound-tearers there is. Every bow qualifies on a good roll.
  • Insta hit — arming a weapon lets you strike immediately. It matters less to an archer, since the one-second stand-still still applies before a shot; the half-damage penalty for fighters with 80+ Magery and 80+ Evaluating Intelligence applies to archers like anyone else.

Skill cap ↑ top

Archery caps at 100.0 — there are no Skill Scrolls for weapon skills, so it cannot be raised to 120.

Training 0 → 100 ↑ top

You gain with every shot at a valid target, hit or miss:

  1. 0–30: buy the first points from an NPC bowyer or ranger.
  2. 30–100: shoot mid-tier monsters that can't easily reach you — archery is unusually pleasant to train because you can kite. Bring plenty of arrows and loot them back from corpses (40% recovery). A regular bow's higher speed gives more shots — and more gain rolls — per minute than the crossbows.
  3. Train in dungeons for 20% faster gains; guarded towns and houses are slower. On the newbie island Adena gains are doubled but capped at 70.0. See Skills Overview for all gain modifiers.

Keep cheap ammo flowing: a friendly fletcher (or your own Fletching skill — which also boosts bow damage) makes training nearly free.