What are the best ranged-weapon types for each class, and are they always worse than melee weapons?
Nerva
Member Posts: 133
I'm wondering if there are any webpages or guides that have done a thorough analysis of what the best ranged-weapon types are for the various classes, after factoring in the proficiencies that each class or multiclass can get. It's OK if people want to call out exceptions for certain specific weapons (i.e. "normal bows are always better than normal crossbows, but the +8 Crossbow of Awesomeness in Icewind Dale is better than any bow in the game.") but I'm trying to get a baseline understanding of the basic types first.
My impression has been, for example, that bows are better than crossbows and slings, but I have no idea how thrown weapons compare, or how bad darts really are.
I'm curious how the rankings are affected when you factor in single-class fighters with Grand Mastery vs. Warriors with Specialized vs. non-Warriors with only Proficient -- do the rankings change? Or are certain ranged weapons better than melee weapons for certain classes -- i.e. does a sling beat a quarterstaff for a mage?
My impression has been, for example, that bows are better than crossbows and slings, but I have no idea how thrown weapons compare, or how bad darts really are.
I'm curious how the rankings are affected when you factor in single-class fighters with Grand Mastery vs. Warriors with Specialized vs. non-Warriors with only Proficient -- do the rankings change? Or are certain ranged weapons better than melee weapons for certain classes -- i.e. does a sling beat a quarterstaff for a mage?
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Druids don't have many different options and it's perfect reasonable to single out one weapon as the best for a druid, but fighters can specialize in any weapon, making the optimal choice too hard to define. Instead, I'll just point some classes that have particular synergy with certain weapons.
1. Wizard Slayers are very good with darts. Darts have 3 base attacks per round and in BG2, you can create +5 darts from the Cloak of Stars, allowing you to bypass almost any mage's defenses by switching in between nonmagical darts and +5 darts, applying spell failure through Stoneskin. Assassins and Blackguards also benefit thanks to Poison Weapon, but the nerfing of Poison Weapon has made the ability much less important.
2. Kensais, Berserkers, and Barbarians can deal more damage per hit than other fighters, so it's usually a good idea for them to dual-wield weapons to maximize their attacks per round. Belm is an excellent off-hand weapon since its APR bonus is granted to the main hand, but since there aren't a lot of other good scimitars that are easy to obtain, it's often best to specialize in a weapon besides scimitars.
3. Thieves who backstab (anyone but a Swashbuckler) and Stalkers benefit from weapons that have high base damage, as they deal higher damage on a backstab. The ideal weapon for backstabbing before ToB is the Staff of Striking, which deals 1d6+9 base damage. A single-classed thief with no other bonuses will deal a minimum of 50 damage when using the Staff of Striking; a level 21 Assassin with 19 Strength and one proficiency point in Two-Handed Weapon Style can deal up to 126 damage without a critical hit. The Staff of Striking only has so many charges and needs to be sold and re-purchased from a merchant to recharge it (which can be expensive), but proficiency in staffs also lets you use the Staff Spear +2 you find on Xzar in BG2, a good choice for backstabbing when the target isn't important enough to burn a charge from the Staff of Striking.
4. Dwarven Defenders, Barbarians, clerics with Armor of Faith, and any fighter with Hardiness will especially benefit from using the Defender of Easthaven, since it gives 20% physical damage resistance and stacks with other resistances. A high-level Barbarian dual-wielding the Flail of Ages and the Defender of Easthaven in the off-hand will have 40% physical damage resistance, or 80% when using Hardiness.
Note that the best choices vary dramatically between BG1, SoD, and BG2. Longbows are excellent in BG1 and SoD but are relatively weak in BG2, where the Tuigan Bow makes shortbows more useful. Daggers, hammers, and longswords are a good choice in BG1 because of the Dagger of Venom, Ashideena/Borok's Fist, and Varscona, but in BG2, flails, katanas, and axes are more useful because of the Flail of Ages, Celestial Fury, and Frostreaver.
Two-handed swords are great in all of the games: you get Spider's Bane in BG1; Trollkiller and the Dragon Blade and some other +2 sword in SoD; Carsomyr and Lilarcor and the Warblade and the Soul Reaver in BG2; and Gram the Sword of Grief and the Psion's Blade in ToB.
Carsomyr is the best choice for any paladin or any fighter/thief with Use Any Item; the Staff of the Magi is the best choice for any mage.
Bows are really the king of weapons in BG1, but struggle a bit more in BG2 and beyond. They can still be quite potent in the hands of a skilled archer (kit).
The unfortunate downside to range weapons (other than slings) is that they do not gain your strength bonus. Generally, fighter types are running around meleeing with many attacks per round and a high strength bonus. They may get some benefit from slings, but I have not managed to stay interested enough in a play through to see. I do hear good things about fighters using throwing axes for range though, as they benefit from the same weapon specialization as the melee axes.
One of my favorite PCs was a halfling fighter who took grand master in darts, so his low strength did not matter. At level 13, he has +1 APR from fighter levels, and another +1 from Grand Master (since level 9) giving the maximum 5 APR, which can double to 10 APR with improved haste. The +5 damage bonus from grand mastery was quite useful too, along with +3 for the crimson dart (I make this an early target). In BG1 I would use the gauntlets of weapon specialization for another +2 damage (4 times/round) but that is much harder to find in BG2. While not a game killer, you can quickly reach respectable damage levels. This was even more fun for an Assassin (or Blackguard) with the old poison rules.
Generally though, melee weapons win, if for no other reason that the stronger melee weapons have additional bonuses beyond straight to-hit/damage, and are restricted by hoarding ammunition.
Yes, many dangerous enemies are immune to piercing damage, but many, such as illithids, are not. It is not really more difficult than that you switch to melee and cast strenght of one and defensive harmony when that happens.
The main advantage, early game at least, is that longbows give +1 THACO and shortbows gives one extra APR (again, unless this has been patched) something definitely worth considering, and that bows and crossbows gives double THACO bonuses. How do I mean? +1 crossbow +1 bolt = +2 THACO. Late game, magical arrows are incredibly rare - I mean, you can get plenty +1 and +2 arrows as long as you have the gold, but anything +3 or higher should be saved for special occasions. Still, +3 bow with +2 arrow is higher THACO bonus than a +4 axe... still again, strength bonus items are more common than +dex items.
Also, I know many people rest after every encounter to beef up on spells, personally I consider that a lemur tactic - I rest only when it thematically makes sense (outdoors in a tranquil area, in an inn etc). (For me, spells are a special treat used against strong enemies, or when I know I can rest soon). When chars are seriously injured and I am out of healing spells, or I want to save my heals for stronger melee fighters, I send them to the back where they can use ranged attacks instead. I even switch, sometimes, sending uninjured ranged characters to the frontlines to protect seriously injured melee fighters. And, of course, sometimes enemies flank you, so the weak melee are the closest and the strong the furthest, or are far away and moves slowly, and it makes more sense to switch to ranged.
Basically, ALL my chars are both melee and ranged, though some are permnent-unless-injured-or-entangled-etc melee fighters.
Finally, all chars with shitty str but high dex serve better as ranged chars, due to THACO - of course, this is not a problem if you fill your team with dwarves and halforcs, so this is a personal preference thing, I suppose.
Anyway, general rule of thumb:
More APR is better.
Weapons that add strength to damage generally benefit more from boosts to APR.
Weapons with +APR are generally more important to non-fighter classes.
The best overall weapon for them as can get it is tyically Throwing Dagger, because you can hit 24 Strength and use Firetooth, which is 2D4+3+1D2+12 at 2 APR minimum. 21.5 DPH (Damage Per Hit) average.
Compare that to the hardest hitting (correct me if I'm wrong on anything, a lot of all this is from memory) Gesen with BG1 Acid Arrows 1D6+1 +2D6 Acid +1D8 Electric +2 - 18 DPH average.
Or XBow Firetooth +5 which gives, if I remember, +7 damage with bolts of Lightning 1D8 +4D4 - 21.5 DPH on a failed save.
Adding APR is awkward, since it varies by class, but there's one notable which is flamer ammo from the Big Metal Unit on Firetooth, which sets APR to 5, making it the best weapon ever, but an example for how it goes down is:
Ignoring external bonuses, Dagger Firetooth can have:
Base 2 APR (43 DPR)
2.5 APR with gloves (53.75)
3.5 APR with Fighter/Specialisation. (any multiclass - 75.25)
4 APR with Fighter/GMastery. (86)
4.5 APR with gloves on top. (96.75)
5-9 APR with iHaste (193.5)
10 APR with Whirlwind (215)
And with various bonuses like +2 from gloves, +5 from GM, and +3 from strength above 24, +13 from Kensai or whatever, just multiply it by the APR in question. Tuigan Bow can get 3.5-5, Gesen and an X-Bow of speed 2.5-4.5, Slings and axes and normal XBows 1.5-3.5.
And generally I consider throwing daggers to be fundamentally superior to melee in normal operations, rather than vice versa, because you're not actually losing much damage output to gain significant survivability.
Also see https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/40063/archer-damage-calculations Throwing daggers, hammers, axes and slings still get STR bonuses to DMG and DEX bonuses to " to hit" chance in 2.x versions.
D&D 2nd says hurled weapons receive a STR bonus to damage, and why a bullet from a sling is not a hurled weapon? See this thread for more discussion: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/9503/str-bonus-to-damage-to-darts (especially by @bigdogchris )
People seem to have some very strange ideas about how slings work. If anything they should be giving a multiplier to strength bonus, since they are literal force multipliers like the atlatl.
This is how a sling works! Centrifugal speed, not the strength of the arm using it, is what matters!
Though some might view that as a teensy bit too easy.
Slings are armour piercing, long ranged, highly accurate, and downright bloody lethal weapons that, when the Peruvians used them against the Conquistadors their accounts claim that their rocks hit almost as hard as Spaniard's firearms.
Also, the "point" of the druid/cleric restriction never made sense, because it certainly wasn't for competitive balance, or in the case of the druid, anything remotely approaching sanity.
Bows store mechanical energy you put in through your draw. So do crossbows, but they usually contain a mechanism that increases the efficiency of energy conversion (such as a winch). Slings use various effects to their advantage, but still require a body to provide the energy. In each case, a physically stronger person has the potential to put in more energy - and thus get more energy out of it as well.
HOWEVER!
The design of many of these weapons doesn't allow for arbitrary scaling. If you're throwing an axe, then it's fairly easy to scale - you throw it harder, it hits with more force. More strength, more damage. Done. (Ok technically there are also material limitations but let's not get into the whole throw-so-hard-it-heats-up-to-melting thing)
But with, say, a bow, it's different. While you need a certain strength to draw a bow and supply its energy, THIS IS A STATIC VALUE, more or less, defined by its material properties. You cannot simply overdraw a bow to get more power out of it - material limitations prevent that. What you CAN do is make ANOTHER bow that has different material properties, i.e. one with a more powerful draw which can then convert more strength into kinetic energy. This is reflected in D&D by the STR requirement of certain bows - you need to be this tall to ride, but being taller doesn't make the ride go faster.
The same applies to a sling, though of course the material properties involved are different. In terms of efficiency, you would probably also be better off with different designs based on the strength used - tougher cords, bigger bullets, there's a number of factors. The range of possible input strengths is wider than with a bow, though my guess would be the energy conversion efficiency is also lower than a bow's in general.
According to historical sources slings had a range advantage over every type of bow barring the English longbow and heavy composite bows. There are Greek accounts where they suffered massive losses against the Persian slingers before recruiting the services of Rhodians (not Greedo) who used lead, rather than stone, for their slings and thus turned the range advantage around.
Of course, concerning strength requirements at the far end of things you'd be looking at the trebuchet, which is basically a mechanical arm with a sling, and the ballista, which is a glorified giant crossbow. Not sure there's much difference in material between the siege trebuchet and the corded material of a typical sling of course, but with magic it's a moot point anyway I suppose.
Googling found me the reason for the cleric restriction at least. Clerics in D&D are notionally confined to blunt weapons that "did not draw blood". Sling bullets killing without bloodshed would be entirely within their remit.
So, I think its fair to not give strength bonuses to slings, because I just dont see how you can achieve the same kind of force with a simple flick of the arm (although, certainly, the exit velocity if you rotate is probably such that it rivals most bows).
Ironically, of course, I would love to see someone throw a throwing dagger as deep into a ballistic gel as they can if they slung a sling (if they rotate), or put a dent of the same size into metal armor, but whatever. Daggers have larger surface area. I mean, I would rather be shot in the leg with an arrow, than get it chopped off with a longsword.
aerie can hit with 25 str bonus, twice x round if hasted, and do more than 60 dmg/round.
imoen and nalia are more effective with sling than with bow, as long as you rise their str and use a cheap party wide haste instead of wasting on them IH, but they are even better with throwing daggers, that give 1 more apr, that more than compensate the dmg increase of the enchanted sling bullets.
and, talking of casters, to have few attacks that deal more damage is an advantage compared to bows that give more attacks with less damage each, more time of the round is left to cast spells, my typical imoen or aerie starts the round with 1 or 2 ranged attacks ( about 40 or 60 dmg on average) and has plenty of time to cast a spell before the round ends, with 4 apr (tugian and haste) or 6 apr (tugian and IH) the time left to cast is much less.
bows are useful because they can use special arrows (acid and fire ones to kill trolls, dispelling, poisoning), but in my experience slings and daggers are often the better choice.
xbows, even if they loose an apr from bow are also interesting weapons.
all this is true for many charnames and npcs, not for charnames build to use ranged weapons or some rare npcs, mazzy is better with tugian and later gesen, but she has GM in short bow, not all the fighters types (npcs or custom made) will reach GM in bow or xbow.
Now that you can carry over the dart Biter (+2 THACO/damage, +1 acid) from SoD into early SoA, I find this another interesting option for breaking down mage defenses. This is a really decent spell disruption tool that is not so expensive and available right out of the starting dungeon in SoA.
I agree with crossbows being interesting. I actually think they are more useful than shortbows, but I would guess I am in the minority!
Unsurprisingly, this favors classes with either APR bonuses (e.g. GWW or Grand Mastery) and on-hit damage bonuses (e.g. Kensai, Archer, or STR for applicable weapons) and classes with access to both (e.g. Kensai or Archer) are most effective.
Bows/Crossbows have very high base damage, but few on-hit bonuses; Archer is basically the only one, and a big reason for why the kit is so, so good. Thrown weapons, conversely, have very low base damage, but gain a number of damage bonuses (STR, Kensai). APR is usually fairly comparable, though of course some specific choices are better than others (throwing daggers and Tuigan Bow each get +1 APR, for example).
Depending on your class/kit choices, damage can be very comparable. If you min/max values to the highest degree, though, Kensais usually win - because they have similar level-dependent per-hit bonuses to Archers (albeit slightly lower) but also apply STR bonuses to very high APR weapons (e.g. Fire Tooth throwing dagger). Of course, things like Called Shot and the THAC0 bonuses are also a consideration, making things far from clear-cut.
In the end, it mostly depends on what you're running with - what bonuses can you stack, and what skills (like GWW) can you employ. The less stacking bonuses, the stronger the high base damage of bows/xbows; the more bonuses come into play, the more of a relative gain for thrown weapons and other STR-benefiting ranged weapons.
about the question about a mage using a sling or a quarterstaff i would answer sling. a mage lacks thac0, but often has good dex. dex improves sling thac0, also the sling and bullet enchantment level do, they all stack, so a mage with a good sling and the right bullets has a chance to hit where he would have missed with the staff. str dmg is applied to both and mages have a low level spell that rises their str for a long time.
the primary task of a mage is casting and being far from the enemy makes the chance that he takes damage and is disrupted while is casting less likely, this is an other advantage of using the sling. he has spells to protect himself from damage, but a stoneskin lasts a long time if he is far from the first line, is quickly eroded if he gets there.
there are situations where i send my mages with their staves on the front line, if i need a tank against some foe that can hit hard my fighters, the mage with the right spells can draw their attention for a good number of rounds taking no damage. sometimes the mage uses the staff and its long reach being right behind my tank, but in most of the situations he is using the sling and cast spells while keeping distance from enemies.
for a something/mage or something->mage the things are different, fighter mages or cleric mages using the right spells work really well also in mlee, but as you talk about staff or sling i assume you are talking of single class mages or sorcerers.