What to do with the explosive bow

[Agarillobob]

I just finished my first playthrough and I don´t know what to do with the explosive bow. I tried using it on bosses like U3 and saddler but it did minimal damage compared to rifle or shotgun.
The explosive power might be nice for groups of enemies but you rarely even get so many they group up except in the last 2 chapters and even then 1 grenade is only 1 inventory slot the bow is like 6x3 or something and I can always melee hit into an entire group so its not even needed.
my approach will probably be something like use initial arrow and then sell.

Did anyone make any great use of it so far?

[lucent]

I put it in storage to save space, maybe on my second run I will check it out.
(p.s.)
I'm pretty sure you can't put the arrows in storage, that kinda sucks.

[fnart]

i swapped it out for the shotgun/rifle on playthru 1 just to burn ammo and get the challenge for bow kills. For professional/S+ runs I can think of a few places it'd be good for group staggering/clears, essentially an impact frag with massive space requirement. Definitely not for boss damage tho, save up for rpg or upgrade either rifle/red 9.

[Anima]

The Blast Crossbow is easily her most powerful weapon. It does do ridiculous amounts of damage but you need to hit weakspots on bosses for it to be effective. It can be tricky because it's a projectile. You can stun Saddler if you shoot his eye directly with one bolt and a sniper shot (on standard).
It also made El GIgante fight much easier on professional. I ran out of ammo, but the crossbow saved my ass.

[GEORGIOSMGEORGIADIS4]

Originally posted by Anima:

The Blast Crossbow is easily her most powerful weapon. It does do ridiculous amounts of damage but you need to hit weakspots on bosses for it to be effective. It can be tricky because it's a projectile. You can stun Saddler if you shoot his eye directly with one bolt and a sniper shot (on standard).
It also made El GIgante fight much easier on professional. I ran out of ammo, but the crossbow saved my ass.

Agreed! It's a very powerful weapon, but I personally consider her TMP as the real og.
I use it mainly on two instances;
El Gigante's head in order to spawn and then kill his plaga fast and
especially on the first form of U-3 (you can almost stun lock him to death with around 10 lvl 4 explosive bolts if you've upgraded a few time the reload speed too) on chapter 5. Thus you can easily save ammo (particularly for the TMP) and unload it on U-3's second form right after without worrying much about your ammo situation.

[tools guy-kun]

I think of it as a grenade storage device, and the arrows are just stackable grenades. I tend to use it whenever there's a crowd in front of me. it's not fully upgraded yet so it doesn't kill everything the radius touches, but I feel like the final perk upgrade will help out with that a lot.

with a fully upgraded case, hell even the upgrade directly beneath it, I was able to rock the blacktail, the TMP, the sniper and the crossbow altogether, and still had space for other essentials like ammo and heals.

[WhitePhantom]

Good for crowd control in Mercs. Didn't touch it in campaign. The classic handgun, shotgun, rifle combo got me through.

[Mögbär]

Takes too much room in the inventory. Used up the bolts on the chainsaw dude in the factory, then sent it to storage.