Weapon choice?

[cleveremailaddr]

I dont want to play the typical melee warrior, 2h or 1h and shield. I play mostly solo. Are the daggers or the bow any good? I did try the bow for a bit but it seems pretty weak.

Thoughts?

[BigBombz]

Base damage on daggers is pretty weak, but bleed - and in some endgame daggers poison - DoT is quite good. So daggers are viable option as your main weapon.
Bows have their uses, with special arrows you can do all kinds of damage from concussive damage to poison and explosion. I wouldn't use a bow as my main weapon though.

[matantemetal]

The bow is great I think. But only when you have distributed your skill points accordingly and you have a high-performance bow such as the stellar metal one and good arrows in star metal or the one i like the most, poison one from the religion of set.

At the highest skill level, a headshot is deadly. Also shooting in the legs slows the approach of enemies towards you. Really usefull to shot again and kill.

However in close combat you will need better protection otherwise you will suffer too much damage.
Personally I always opt for the ax and the shield. The shield is very useful to protect against archers.

But daggers are also an interesting option, especially if you have distributed your points in agility and precision and if you're good at dodging.

[DarkFire]

Bows are miserably bad as primary damage weapons. As tools to apply status effects or knock out prospective 'recruits' they have few equals. There are a huge variety of arrows available that will do all sorts of interesting things like applying poison, bleeding, cripple etc to your target so they're poisoned, slowed and bleeding before they even get in to melee range of you. As direct, primary damage weapons though they suffer horribly compared to all melee weapons. It's also the case that there are no A or S-tier armours relating to archery while there are very much top-tier melee focused armour.

Daggers? Basic dagger types tend to be a mediocre at best. Top tier and unique daggers can be excellent, especially dagger types that apply poison or other status effects. The attack speed is extremely high with daggers which enables you to jump in, get in a few attacks and then dodge away again before you take too much damage in return.

Depends on your preferred fighting style I guess.

[cleveremailaddr]

I love the idea of bleeds and/or poisons.

[cleveremailaddr]

Str to increase dagger damage? Does anything increase bleed damage?

[emitfudd]

I started out using mace and shield. I came across a legendary 2 hand sword and at first I didn't like 2h weapons because the animation was too long. Way too long. Then I figured out you can break the animation by dodging right after. I can take out 5 or 6 NPC's all at once when they aggro you and you can't even get out of their pack. I just keep swinging. I currently have my obsidian mace, legendary shield and legendary 2 hand sword on my quick access wheel. It's handy to be able to walk into a camp with your shield and block archers arrows and let NPC's hit you while you're looking around for specific crafters. It's also handy if you go in with a truncheon.

[Macdallan]

If you build your character carefully and use the right equipment bows are decent.
Some people find them underwhelming but it depends on your expectations. I recently made a bow build and I am really enjoying it. Keep in mind that many of the strength perks also affect bows and other ranged weapons. The 15% bonus damage to crippled enemies you gain at strength 20 (Salting the Wound) is nice to have with the bow because it's quite easy to cripple with a leg shot and keep shooting the legs with power shots for 15% bonus damage on each shot.

Using daggers that cause a DOT bleed (and poison damage if you add that to your daggers or have a rare dagger that also poisons) that doesn't depend on base damage output or strength bonuses works well as a backup to the bow. I also like to use the one handed mace with no shield and no offhand item. It's usually my go-to but I'm trying to force myself to try other weapons more often.

Originally posted by cleveremailaddr:

Str to increase dagger damage? Does anything increase bleed damage?

Strength will increase dagger damage, strength increases all melee damage. No, bleed is static but stacks up to 20 times. You get the same with stone daggers, starmetal daggers, and the bleed from other weapons like the axe, katana, or spear is identical. It's a stacking Damage Over Time (DOT) effect that doesn't depend on weapon quality, strength, or other buffs/bonuses. It interrupts item healing when it processes (procs) every 1 second. It also ignores armour. As long as you add a new bleed before the stack runs out, which takes 8 seconds, then it adds a stack and refreshes the timer back to 8 seconds.

From the wiki:

Bleed deals 1.35 damage per stack each second for 8 seconds and can stack up to 20 times, for a total of 27 damage per second or 216 total bleed-only damage over 8 seconds.

[thurgond]

If bows and daggers are both agility weapons (seems logical) in 3.0 there will probably be some synergy there.

The problem I see with daggers is their big benefit is bleeds. Much of the endgame content in the Exiles Lands is against the undead which don't bleed. On Siptah the Grey Ones bleed, but as glass cannons either they or you will be dead before stacked bleeds will have much of an effect on them. Since all the damage they do including kick has a bleed effect, you will get to experience stacked bleeds if you are not careful.