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I don't know much of the inside of how missile weapons work, but from stats alone it would seem that crossbows are better than bows hands down. Take a typical example, steel bow firing steel arrow. The bow says damage 1-25 and the steel arrow 1-4. The average damage would seem to be 15.5 (13+2.5). A steel crossbow does 20 damage always and the bolt 2-4, so the average damage would be 23. Is there some other factor that makes bows better? If my reasoning is wrong I will be very happy to be corrected.

I've been using a crossbow but from a roleplaying point of view I love bows and arrows, I would prefer to switch to a beautiful steel longbow I'm seeing right now in a store.

Yeah, the damage stats are misleading in Morrowind. The range relates to how far back you draw the bow. If you don't draw it back at all, you get 1 damage, but if you draw it back the whole way, you will do the full 25 damage. Same applies to the arrow: 1 damage if you don't draw the bow back at all, 4 if it's drawn all the way. Crossbows don't have a range of damage because they can only be set to one position. I hope that clears things up.

Personally I like to use crossbows at lower skill level and then once I get the money to train up my marksman I switch over to a Daedric Longbow. That thing kicks ass.

At what point do you know that it has been drawn all the way? I try to aim for a couple of seconds, does "aiming" improve accuracy any?

You can tell by the animation when you've drawn it back all the way. Holding it back for any longer doesn't offer any advantage. Often in Morrowind the animations don't match what actually happens. Your arrows will appear to hit, but the game will consider them to have missed. Conversely, sometimes it will appear that you've missed the target but you will still do damage. It has to do with your Marksman skill, basically; the higher your Marksman skill, the more likely you are to hit - even if it doesn't appear any different.

In true life, Longbows have proven to be more efficient than Crossbows. Still, I like Crossbows more. There's something "sexy" about them.

Moeboid wrote:Yeah, the damage stats are misleading in Morrowind. The range relates to how far back you draw the bow. If you don't draw it back at all, you get 1 damage, but if you draw it back the whole way, you will do the full 25 damage. Same applies to the arrow: 1 damage if you don't draw the bow back at all, 4 if it's drawn all the way. Crossbows don't have a range of damage because they can only be set to one position. I hope that clears things up.

Have you got any proof of that? im pretty sure ive killed some enemies with a fair bit of health with 1 or 2 half cocked shots..... if they were only doing 1 damage I find that very unlikely.

Once I came across those dwarven darts, I threw all my bows, crossbows and arrows out of the window

Arrows are more abundant in the game and more readily found on dead opponents and in storage containers, often with various magical effects. I use the Bow of Shadows and Auriel's Bow once I've found them.

You can also tell that the bow is fully drawn when the stretching sound effect stops.

Raynil dralas wrote:

Moeboid wrote:Yeah, the damage stats are misleading in Morrowind. The range relates to how far back you draw the bow. If you don't draw it back at all, you get 1 damage, but if you draw it back the whole way, you will do the full 25 damage. Same applies to the arrow: 1 damage if you don't draw the bow back at all, 4 if it's drawn all the way. Crossbows don't have a range of damage because they can only be set to one position. I hope that clears things up.

Have you got any proof of that? im pretty sure ive killed some enemies with a fair bit of health with 1 or 2 half cocked shots..... if they were only doing 1 damage I find that very unlikely.

Weapon damage is affected by your character's Strength, the Condition of the weapon, the Armor Rating of your opponent and whether or not the attack is a Critical Hit. Someone skilled in Marksman with high Strength could easily take down just about anything outside of an NPC and even some NPCs with one well-placed arrow, provided that the other circumstances were just right.

Furthermore for Marksman weapons damage is calculated with both the weapon and the ammunition. Those half-cocked shots are more like 16 damage or something similar, depending on the bow you are using and the kind of ammunition you are using. A Bonemold Bow using Chitin Arrows has more like a 2-31 damage range rather than just 1 damage from just the arrows. Drawing the bowstring to somewhere in the middle will give you about 15-16 damage a shot before Strength, Condition, Armor Rating and Critical Hit modifiers. That's just an example of course but I hope this clears things up.

To compare, the best crossbow in the game is the Dwarven crossbow, while for the bow it is the daedric longbow, (Well technically Auriel's bow since the damage is equivalent to daedric plus it weighs a lot less)

The crossbow deals 30 damage and fires quicker than a bow

The longbow inflicts 50 damage however is slower than a crossbow

If we then compare arrows to bolts, orcish bolts' damage are equivalent to glass arrows, and ebony and daedric arrows out-damage orcish bolts. Lastly bows have a much higher enchant value than crossbows.

And I also believe that longbows fire arrows further than crossbows fire bolts, so I should think that the only benefit of the crossbow is it's rate of fire.

@ The One Weight is a factor and Auriel's Bow is a good choice over Daedric but 7 points of enchantment is nothing write home to mother about.
Daedric isn't much better at 10.5 points.

Bonemold doesn't do as much damage (1-30) but you get 40 points of enchantment to do damage with, if that does ya.

In Morrowind I like using the Bow of Shadows.
It's a little less powerful than Daedric ( 4-40 v 2-50) but it has good enchantments that suit my play style.
It's 3000 health is triple Daedric or Auriel's Bow.
...and it weighs less.

Choosing the best is a subjective thing.
jus' sayin'

I never knew bonemold held that much enchantment! I have a habbit of selling everything to the museum for some reason, even if it's something I could benefit from, but it's really down to personal preference, perhaps the bolts stop at orcish becasue the crossbow fires so rapidly?

You can get a nice bow during this mod.

The bow, Mephala's Marksman, uses a Daedric bow model with some changes in the stats.
Vanilla 2-50 damage, 5-50 for mod's bow.
Weight is halved, condition doubled and 2 CE enchantments, Fortify Attack & Fortify Marksman 10 points each on self (150 points of enchant needed to duplicate the 2 enchantments) added.

The bow isn't mentioned in the lore but seems within reason for a gift from Mephala.

The only time i use a crossbow is with a heavy armor wearer that knows marksman. It just seems fitting to me.

Irishpotato HISTORY LESSON: the crossbow was invented to give to any peasant or unskilled bowman, to bulk the army quickly, because it was easy to learn. No training required. But a company of welsh longbowmen would destroy them anyday

Crossbow. Use a crossbow and tell me you don't feel like the coolest vampire hunter to ever walk the face of Tamriel.

yoginc wrote:Once I came across those dwarven darts, I threw all my bows, crossbows and arrows out of the window

this

i used the crossbow mainly because it seemed a neater way of doing things and it suited my characters more. I also have always seen xbows as a more brutish weapon for some reason, maybe i associate the bow with notions of the Art of Marksmanship or something lol, i dunno - but the brutal suits the ashlands perfectly imo

Moeboid wrote:Yeah, the damage stats are misleading in Morrowind. The range relates to how far back you draw the bow. If you don't draw it back at all, you get 1 damage, but if you draw it back the whole way, you will do the full 25 damage. Same applies to the arrow: 1 damage if you don't draw the bow back at all, 4 if it's drawn all the way. Crossbows don't have a range of damage because they can only be set to one position. I hope that clears things up.

Actually, this isn't true at all. The "range" on the damage indicates a random variable result, just like melee weapons are similarly rated for damage. This is the evolution from the old "pen and paper" system of random dice rolls to hit and damage. It added an element of chance into the games and helped make them more exciting because there was always a "chance" you could do max damage or a crit, but there was always that chance of a "crit fail" (critical failure), fumble or misfire, where you only scored minimum damage. And, personally, I'm partial to the Bound Bow since it also adds a "Fortify Skill" effect to a weightless, daedric quality weapon that was a dirt cheap spell to cast and available from first level, meaning I missed those shots much less.

godsmack wrote:

Moeboid wrote:Yeah, the damage stats are misleading in Morrowind. The range relates to how far back you draw the bow. If you don't draw it back at all, you get 1 damage, but if you draw it back the whole way, you will do the full 25 damage. Same applies to the arrow: 1 damage if you don't draw the bow back at all, 4 if it's drawn all the way. Crossbows don't have a range of damage because they can only be set to one position. I hope that clears things up.

Actually, this isn't true at all. The "range" on the damage indicates a random variable result,

Err... no? Where did you come up with that information? It defies not only my own testing (and hundreds of hours played) but our own wiki info too. http://uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Combat#Weapon_Damage