'Melee Damage' and 'Weapon Damage' when taming?

[Kelthor]

So, a while back when I was kinda new to the game, I found a nice high leveled Pteranodon that I wanted to tame. Imagine my chagrin when a well placed arrow to the head, made him drop dead on the spot. I had put quite a bunch of points into melee damage at that point, and simply figured that MD has to apply to bows too, and have always fired my bow in taming situations with just enough power for it to let an arrow fly.
And so, earlier today I read someone elses post having the same problem, but one of the replies was that you should pull the bow to its maximum to decrease the total damage on the creature (which doesn't make sense to me).
So how does this work? Full draw, or just a little draw?
And also, since I recently came back to the game, tranquilizer darts has been implemented. Bringing another factor into the fray. Like, lets say that I have two different journeyman longneck rifles. One has a better stat in durability, but lower in weapon damage that the other. Does the one with more damage cause more harm to the creature? Or does the weapon damage apply at all in this situation?

[di eshor ribly]

Your character's Melee Damage stat has no bearing on bows, crossbows, slingshots, or guns. The pteranadon died because it had low health, and there's a slight damage buff with ranged weaponry against flying dinos. Wooden clubs and stun batons do benefit from your MD though. * Edit * : Try not to headshot pteranadons either. Headshots do a crap load more damage (and torpor) but they lack the health pool to take it.

For pulling the bow back all the way - the more damage you do per shot adds more torpor. If you plink away at something with half-shots you might not knock it out before it dies. You should also wait a few seconds between shots (2-3, basically a slight pause between a crossbow reload and firing) so the torpor has a chance to rise a bit, and so you don't shoot your passed out dino in the face by accident and mess up taming efficiency.

Tranquilizer darts - you want a longneck rifle with high damage. The darts do very little damage on their own (slightly more with higher damage rifles, obviously) but a lot of torpor per shot. They are the preferred tranq ammo for the 'squishier' dinos (pteranadons, argents, quetzals, kairuku) as tranq arrows do more base damage (and less torpor than a dart). The downside to darts is that they are more expensive than arrows (rifle ammo + 3 narcotics instead of 1 arrow + 1 narc).