Crossbows are odd...

[Xenobunny]

Very excited I just got the crossbow. However, the thing unloads itself every time I switch weapons. There is no way to load and retain the bolt while using a second utility it seems. I was also surprised that there is no way to "shoulder it". It fires from the hip. It's nifty but hoo wee, is this thing gonna get me killed? Should I stick to my Draugr Fang and frost arrows?

[Veseljko]

Crossbows are nice addition to the game and i like to use them. Just because they are cool, not because they are good. They are weaker than bows when it comes to DPS. And you cannot use them in combat like you can use bows.

Also they come very late in the game when most of the players have their bows skills upgraded and switching to crossbows at that moment feels like downgrade.
Maybe if we get them earlier we could find better use for them (shooting down drakes in mountains for example). That way we would maybe find them more useful and start leveling the skill up.

I did some testing and upgrading the crossbows skill will not significantly reduce loading time which is odd.
Bows profit from upgrading skills by increasing damage, reducing stamina use and reducing draw time. Crossbows only increase damage… probably stamina use as well, but that’s completely irrelevant for crossbows.

Yeah, stick to the bows. You will find much more use for them than for crossbows.

[esbenmf]

Crossbows shoot straight. That is an advantage. And you can move around with it loaded with no stamina cost.

[Veseljko]

Originally posted by esbenmf:

Crossbows shoot straight. That is an advantage. And you can move around with it loaded with no stamina cost.

That’s true. But at the time we acquire the crossbow, we are already so experienced in bows that we can shot an enemy at render distance so i don’t consider that as significant advantage.

[blackphoenixx]

You can still reload while walking and while in the air with a feather cape. Takes a little practice, but staying out of melee range while you reload isn't too difficult imo.

The main advantage over bows is the huge alpha strike and the low stamina consumption.
A sneak attack easily oneshots most things and seriously damages even tougher enemies like Gjall or Fallen Valkyries.

Bows on the other hand have higher dps, scale better with skill and get access to frost arrows. Also post-swamp bows come with various amounts of bonus poison or spirit damage. Since a lot of stuff in later biomes resists pierce that's a pretty significant advantage, especially in Ashlands where nearly everything is weak or neutral to spirit and frost.

On the downside they constantly consume stamina while aiming (quite a lot for higher tier bows too) so stamina management is more of an issue than it is for crossbows.

[Zombits]

slow weapons can get you killed. I remember what happened with dundr in ash ...

[konstantinoskountousias]

crossbow is much more powerfull than any bow but slow as well so i use it instead of bow. If it was keeping its load status then someone could make like 10 and have a machine gun by switching them

[Zep Tepi]

Instant fire and straight shot means I can hunt those twiksey wabbits.

[Gal Kraft]

Leveling it up helps.

[McTec Ind.]

In the end it is just a matter of taste. Bows are easier to handle and by the time you get the crossbow, your bow skill as well as the overall DPS will be a lot higher in comparison. I mainly use the crossbow as Valheim's sniper rifle. If you can see it, you can shoot it... sometimes in one or two shots. Others can hit things on the horizon using only their bow. Whilst I can also do this to some extent it is not so much a certainty in my case, so a crossbow is pretty much my easy way to do it. Though I must admit that I started to switch to magic during Mistlands/ Ashlands. So in short you should probably just stick to the bow for now, seeing that you have already gotten used to it, as it feels far less like a gimmick to you.^^

[Gal Kraft]

I haven't tried it myself, but someone in another thread said that your crossbow stays loaded when using the ship rudder.

[McTec Ind.]

Huh. Didn't know that...

[Exodite-Dragon]

Originally posted by Veseljko:

Originally posted by esbenmf:

Crossbows shoot straight. That is an advantage. And you can move around with it loaded with no stamina cost.

That’s true. But at the time we acquire the crossbow, we are already so experienced in bows that we can shot an enemy at render distance so i don’t consider that as significant advantage.

I always felt it was an alternative option for folks that don't quite have the hang of the arcing shots at long ranges with standard bows. More choices are always nice, but I do much prefer a standard bow myself.

[Sotanaht]

Originally posted by Veseljko:

Crossbows are nice addition to the game and i like to use them. Just because they are cool, not because they are good. They are weaker than bows when it comes to DPS. And you cannot use them in combat like you can use bows.

Also they come very late in the game when most of the players have their bows skills upgraded and switching to crossbows at that moment feels like downgrade.
Maybe if we get them earlier we could find better use for them (shooting down drakes in mountains for example). That way we would maybe find them more useful and start leveling the skill up.

I did some testing and upgrading the crossbows skill will not significantly reduce loading time which is odd.
Bows profit from upgrading skills by increasing damage, reducing stamina use and reducing draw time. Crossbows only increase damage… probably stamina use as well, but that’s completely irrelevant for crossbows.

Yeah, stick to the bows. You will find much more use for them than for crossbows.

It also takes ages to level Crossbow. With bows, once you have decent armor (silver works, maybe iron) you can take a couple of weak bows and several stacks of wood arrows, find a Skeleton spawner and just spam uncharged shots until you run out of durability or ammo. With sufficient armor the skeletons can't hurt you, and uncharged shots level the skill just as fast.

For crossbows, there are no uncharged shots and the charged shots take way longer even compared to 0 skill bows. Plus they'll kill skeletons in 1 hit even with the weakest crossbow and bolts, so you're going to be bottlenecked by enemy spawnrate unless you use something bigger and more dangerous to grind on. I think Crossbows are probably the second slowest skill to level after Cooking which is bottlenecked by the resource requirements. Although at least with cooking you could technically do a MASSIVE amount of farming and then just craft vegitable-stuff to technically level it quickly.

[Veseljko]

There is a trick to level up your crossbow skill too. Here is how i did it:
I had a plains farm on a small island that was on prefect distance from the closest shore. I could see loxes on the shore, but they were too far for the game to take them into the calculations (i think that’s what people refer to as the render distance). So they weren’t moving at all, and the most important thing - they didn’t take damage but my hits counted.
I fixed my character with walls in V shape (so knockback from crossbow shot don’t move me at all) and recorded a macro to click left mouse button every 5 seconds.
And since i was at the island that was completely spawnproofed, i didn’t need to worry about raids. So I would just start the macro and go watch YT for hours, getting back every 10 or so minutes to repair.
That is how i got the skill up to level 50. It took a lot of time and I got nothing. Loading arbalest was still painfully slow.

[Gisbert]

Ah.
You mean the famous weapon everybody wanted and voted for all the time?
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fricjaajk3qp81.jpg