Elden Ring Archer

Any tips for playing as an archer? I have beat the game as both an unga bunga and transhumanist cosmic mage so I wanted to try something completely different. Is it even viable to play as one? What bows/crossbows and skills are worth looking into? Both at the beginning and end-game.

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I have started playing one myself too if only for a little bit.
Apparently the scaling on bows is trash so your damage will mostly comes from weapon upgrade. Someone else will have to confirm though.

You can shot very fast after a roll.

After progressing a little you can go at the ash of war shack and kill a bell fucker at
night for infinite bones for your arrows.

Statues effect are king, make sure you unlock thing like poison arrows early and burn those miranda flowers for their stuff.

bow is broke in pvp with self buff/the dollar store flynns ring

I tried like +8 black bow on bosses a few times. It felt terrible and did no damage. I would never go full archer

Speaking of crossbow, I'm still seething how useless they are.
>No scaling but the base damage is shit
>No fucking weapon skills despite bows getting several
>Early game they are somewhat useful as they will do roughly the same damage as melee attack trading speed for range, late game however it barely deals half of the damage your normal swing has making it completely pointless
>No sleep bolts for utility
>Limited number of rot bolts per playthrough
>Range isn't even useful since most mid and late game bosses can close gaps incredibly fast
>Due to shit damage, low speed and lack of utility its only real use is being an offhand weapon
>Except it has useless 2nd ammo slot so you can't use your fucking weapon skill while every other offhand weapon like casting items, dual wielding or shields allows you to still use your right hand weapon skill
>In the end the only times where it provides you any benefit is when boss is doing an AoE and you can't get close
Using a crossbow is gimping yourself, they do you more harm than good.
Literally zero reason to use them over bows or magic because they're useless as offhand weapons.

man i tried using a bow and crossbow for my dex build and they do absolute shit damage, used albanauric bow and the crossbow from roundtable hold, both fully upgraded and 80 dex. total shit.

>late game however it barely deals half of the damage your normal swing has making it completely pointless
I’m sorry, do you expect ranger attacks to do the same damage as melee moves? Would you have crossbow shots doing comparable damage? Are you fucking retarded?

I haven't played an archer in Elden Ring, but my experience from older games is you probably want to do a dire build where you get yourself in danger health and abuse your abillity to rapid-fire to stack damage quickly

Magic does similar damage and lots of it auto-aims, you don't have to grind or use runes for ammunition either.

Lategame is absolutely miserable bow-only, but if you start a fresh character, rush to some upgrade materials and get either the Short Bow or the Misbegotten Short Bow (basically a STR-leaning variant) and overupgrade them a bit you'll have a blast for a while because they feel fun with the rolling and running attacks.

Captcha: 2ARMS

Avelyn is still in the game isn't it? Its the science crossbow you get at Gelmir

Magic is tied to a second bar you have to give up healing items to maintain. It's arguably more expensive to make up for it hitting harder and having utility

Most magic has either insanely long windups or endlag. “But magic does it” isn’t even an argument anyway, you’d have a game where fucking MELEE is the weakest option. You have no idea about game balance.

Ok, so now I'm thinking that I'd use some melee weapon on the offhand. But I wouldn't want it to be just some typical dex weapon since I already played with a dex/arcan blood focused build. Do claws or daggers scale with simila stats as bows and could be used to accompany them?

I did my first playthrough Archery only. The scaling is never great and falls off in the late game. You need Talismans to compensate. I ran with the blue dancer charm and minimal equipload, the bow damage talisman and sacred sword talisman. I’d have a dagger with sacred vow on offhand but I didn’t know it existed in my first run. Best advise I can give is that you really need to ration your rot butterflies since rot is awesome against almost every boss but it’s easy to run out of them. Bleed arrows are the second most useful one and it’s easy to farm those. Far as bows goes, long bows are great for dungeons, short bows with their quick shot after dodges are great for bosses. Your biggest enemies will be shield and spear knights, probably. They were mine.

>You have no idea about game balance.
So making bows not a viable option is balance? Dragons dogma somehow allowed playing as a ranger to be fun.

So what was your stat spread? Did you invest lots of points into arcane or just focus on dex?

Triple crossbow on my samurai bleed warlord destroyed the game

>So making bows not a viable option is balance?
Yes

Claws are only good if you two-hand them so you'll break your fingers switching from bow to claws all the time. Thrusting swords, katanas and spears are boring and the latter looks like shit while on your back. Daggers do shit damage, if you want something really sexy pick up one of the many whips and maybe carry a Dagger or Misercorde for backstabs

>Is it even viable to play as one?
No, it really isn't.
It basically devolves into a faggy ranged bleed build because scarlet rot arrows are a limited resource and the others can be a bitch to farm, but you can buy everything you need for bleed arrows from some specific merchants/bell bearings

As a dragons dogma autist, you arent helping yourself.
Bows are completely fuck busted in that game. They out perform everything else

Personally, I would improve bow weapon scaling, and provide a skill that lets you dodge and immediately shoot similar to MonHun's current bow. Also a higher storage size, 600 or whatever it is just isn't enough.

>Magic is tied to a second bar you have to give up healing items to maintain.
*casts terra magica, chugs cum flask, holds down comet azur button*
Sorry, what?

You can do dodging and running attacks with a Shortbow at least.

>No sleep bolts for utility
There are sleep bolts.

Is he ok?

And blackbow
Its the entire reason it is worth it. Has the shortbow moveset

Sometimes I forget that there are ranged builds in Souls games
Why would anyone ever play them?

Now what do you do against the other 20 enemies or if the one you are attacking slightly moves to one side?

Oh that's interesting, I should check it out.

It's possible, but it isn't fun. Jumpshot is your best tool for short/longbows, but it puts you in a position that's like the opposite of the typical ste build playstyle, without the bonus of staggers and damage. Keeping status effect arrows well stocked requires more effort than it's worth, proccing poison with the bow that boosts the effect highlights that for me.

This thread just reminded me that I have the hand ballista. I'm gonna level it up and see how it holds up in late game. Getting ballista bolts was too much of a pain in the ass so I stopped using it ages ago.

They need to delete crafting or introduce you to a vendor who will sell you what you can craft. I will not fucking craft arrows, I will not fucking craft grease

Can you? I know you can roll, and shoot after a roll, which isn't as fast as the jumping shot. Running shot is fine. It needs some useful mobility skill IMO.

>Why would anyone ever play them?
Variety is the spice of life, user.
I actually ran all ranged build in Dark Souls 3 but quit out of boredom after the Abyss Watchers. It's so fucking easy.

In ER, it's not even that different from the majority of melee builds.

*spams Adula's Moonblade in to crown, killing them in 3 swings max*
Huh? Sorry, speak up, couldn't hear you over the rune drop sound from all these dead mobs?

So you cheated and gave yourself infinite mana. No wonder you got bored.

*whispers*
Use the one eyed shield instead
Its a super secret balista that shoots wicked fireballs

Drink flask and spam Moonveil weapon art :)

I have that too. I'll give it a go since my build is greatshield+greatsword

How do you hit anything in pvp?

Youll love it.
Doesnt scale with anything other than weapon lvl, but it can knock an omen on his ass and does about 1300 to 1600 dmg. Takes a fuckload of stamina tho

Comet Azur is honestly a huge meme. Swapped it out when I got quad shot arrow and never looked back. Astel Meteorite does way way more damage with the added bonus of actually dealing poise damage

Basilisks in Lake of Rot respawn and drop Aeonian Butterflies for rot arrows. You can get roughly 10 arrows per minute. 30 minutes of farming should get you enough arrows for rest of the game if you save them for bosses.

There's a bell bearing that unlocks unlimited animal bones to Twin Maiden Husks, both thin and heavy.

Well shit I got a lot of stamina too. I'll try it out, thanks.

>want to play bow build
>maybe fromsoft will make it viable this time
>highest scaling is D
>cant infuse with other elements
>arrows do shit damage
maybe dark souls 8 will fix it, 8th time the charm after all ha ha

Range build is very viable
>longbow/pulleybow/greatbow +15 minimum for small fries
>pulley crossbow with bleed/rot/poison bolts for bosses
and rolling lots of rolling
also hand ballista if you want to be a ranged unga bunga

Damage you can deal with 3-4 blue flasks and leveled mind is probably 10 times higher than damage you can deal with 99 arrows you are permitted to carry. Way higher damage per second as well. Projectile weapons are bad beyond any reason in ER.

Don't remember how it was in DS1 but bows are 100% viable in DS3.

>Are you fucking retarded?
Are you?
The trade off for the range is how fucking slow the crossbow is to fire, you are safer but you could probably do 3 swings with your melee in a time it takes to fire a bolt and reload.
It's just useless when it's both slow and deals fuck all damage.

they were too clunky and slow to be viable in 1, and i cant remember anything from dark souls 3 except some scenery, even though i replayed it last year

Unless you're willing to grab a cheat engine table you're gonna be buying a lot of bones.

Scaling on bows is shit too so expect your damage to start falling off hard lategame.

Actually thinking about it more, on top of the critical health damage up talisman you can probably stack it with the perfume that powers you up and gives you a damage shield as well for max carnage while still being able to take a hit if enemies close the distance.

The Black Bow is pretty much THE bow you want to utilize and build around because it's a longbow with a shortbow moveset. Essentially, you can jump/roll and shoot with it while still have long range. Furthermore, it has Barrage, probably the best Ash in terms of DPS/status build-up.

Besides that, your options are pretty limited. You'll want a healthy stockpile of bleed arrows (you can start making these pretty early) and frost arrows (which come pretty late). These will become your primary ammo types because the procs make up for your otherwise unremarkable damage.

In terms of talismans:
>Arrows Sting, increases bow damage
>Spear talisman, increases thrusting counter damage (arrows are thrusting damage)
>Blue Dancer (lower equip load = higher damage)
>Ritual Sword (increases damage at max HP)
>Alex Shard (to boost barrage damage)

Build your physick around max stamina and stamina regen since you burn through it VERY quickly on bow builds. Since bow scaling is shit your morst reliable damage boost is to grab Golden Vow and Flame Grant Me Strength. Gear that boosts jump attack damage doesn't affect bows which is really fucking lame since you jump attack a lot on bow builds.

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It's not a general use spell, it's for when you get bored of fighting i.e. erdtree avatars and you just want to infinity-beam them down and move on

Even as a cheese spell there's better options though

The wiki says its 150 runes per thin beast bones. Is that actually true?
I can't imagine thats worth over just farming sheep for them.

It's certainly worth it if you have access to a rune farming location. It's like 86 bones per bird at Mohgwyn since it drops 13k runes with the Talisman.

But I mean, ranged builds break the game, what's so fun about standing in a place where the enemy AI is too retaded to reach you and just shooting a defensless retard
Or just staying out of range of a very slow boss

>cheated
Nigger did you never find the cerulean tear?