As long as you have some form of ranged damage you really don't even need to get hit by the spider since it can't pass through the door out the room it descends into.

Ya i tried that but the spider kep't going over to the guy tied up... So I couldn't shoot him..

I'm just kinda shocked that I went out of the way to ask a history major what history thought of crossbow vs. bow, history says that the crossbow will lose in a matchup between the two and crossbow is only widely used because it's easier to train people with it, and yet people completely ignore that and continue to say the crossbow is 100% superior.... :C


On a side note, how good is the Dawnguard crossbow with:

-Reload speed. Is it noticeably slower if I have the perk to draw bows faster or is the difference negligible?
-Long distance. Does it have more trouble firing from long ranges, or does it perform fine OR is it only bad at firing at distances that aren't incredibly neccesary anyways?

The crossbows are very well balanced. Beth did a great job. Thank you Todd.

i own real crossbows and various longbows and have shot (not 'fired', no gunpowder or emmissions with bows!) both for many years.
a longbow or warbow of any kind takes years of practice befor you can be accurate and consistant, particularly the heavy poundage ones used in war.

i knew a man who was restoring some of the longbows recovered from the wreck of the mary rose. the bows they found varied from 90 pounds draw weight up to 150 pounds.
this confirmed the theory that longbows,used en masse were hitting the enemy from 250-300 yards away. for a bowman to do this takes many years of dedication.
the heaviest ive shot is a traditional made english longbow,120lbs draw weight shooting hand fletched bodkin point war arrows 30 inches long.
i can consistently hit targets 120 yards away but you get tired and accuracy suffers.

a friend of mine uses a 150 pound draw weight longbow (and he's a monster!) . ive seen him hit targets at 300 yards.
arrows with the correct points and construction from both these weapons will pierce a milanese steel briastplate up to about 80 yards,the heavier bows obviously having more chance of doing so.
crossbows are much easier to learn and shoot.a crossbow used for war would usually have a draw weight exeeding 350 lbs,depending on the material the prod is made from. ( prod is the term used to describe the 'bow' part of the weapon).

bows of this weight cannot be drawn by hand because the string will cut into your fingers,so a mechanical device has to be used.
i own many medieval type crossbows. the smaller draw weight that can be spanned useing your hands are hunting bows and would not trouble an armoured opponent at all.
the war weight bows i own start at 500lbs draw weight and the heaviest is 850lbs.the lightest of these needs a goats foot lever to span it and it can be done whilst kneeling down,but from loosing a bolt to loosing the next bolt takes at least 10 seconds.

the heaviest bow needs a device called a crannequin which is in essence an attachable pulley that you have to crank with levers.
in medieval warfare these particular weapons were used by highly trained mercenarys who carried a portable shield that could be erected in front of them (called a 'pavisse'} because you had to stand up to load them! mine takes at least 30 seconds shot to shot.

the bigger crossbows have immense penetrating power over ranges up to about 100 yards but the bolt (or quarrel ) loses momentum very quickley.
up to 100 though,they penetrated any armour we tried them on. up to 50 yards they will blow through bullet proof glass 3 inches thick!

ive only used the starting crossbow in the game and the loading mechanism is roughly the same as that on the chinese medieval repeating crossbow.
in reality,uncrafted it might pierce leather armour at point blank range but not much more. (oh, and crossbows have no recoil!)

the most powerfull crossbow ive shot had a draw weight of 3000(!) pounds and was therefor technically a wallbow i.e,meant to be shot from a castle wall.
it did however shoot a bolt that weighed over one and a half pounds and destroyed a gothic briastplate at 100 yards!

just thought id throw my two 'penneth in about weapons ive used all my life,im glad crossbows have made an apperance at last, cant wait to see what the modders make of them! cheers

I don't think your grasping my meaning, it's like comparing a rifle to a shotgun!! There really is no argument as to which is better, because both where made for different situations. The bow is a long distance weapon where a crossbow is a heavy hitting close quarters weapon meant to punch through armor, a bow is not really meant to punch through armor ( all be it there are different arrows used for punching through armor but not as effective as a crossbow bolt ) The crossbow is going to have a harder punch then the bow at close range but that slackens the farther away the target is, a bow isn't meant for close combat unless you " prey and spray " which isn't drawing the bow to it's full extent so you can fire quickly but the arrow will keep much of it's kinetic energy when traveling long distances allowing for a longer reach with little loss to lethality.
Yes the cross bow is OP compared to a bow when in close quarters, when put into a long range situation the rolls change and the bow is OP compared to the cross bow. But this is not what OP is arguing, OP means that it's imbalanced because you can get a heavy hitting crossbow at low levels. But there is nothing imbalanced about that, you should be able to get a crossbow even if you don't know how to use one.


No you completely ignored my post......
If memory serves me right it was that battle that brought the long bow back into the " lime light ". The fact that the English archers where very well trained is what made them so effective in that battle breathing new life into the long bow. Had the English lost that fight the bow would have been lost to the ages in favor for the crossbow all because it's easy to train someone to use a crossbow when compared to a bow and the fact that it's a hard hitting weapon that's deadly in even the most inexperienced hands. Like I said people are like water in that we will always take the easier path, crossbows being that easier path, had that battle been won by the French the crossbow would have been put forward as the " better " weapon. But to compare the two is like comparing apples and oranges OR a sniper rifle / service rifle to a shotgun / machine gun, each are OP when in the situations they where meant for.

Not quite the OP is making the point that once you have the crossbow bows become redundant. It hits harder than any bow and the reload is not slow enough to make any difference. The point is that theres no downside to using a crossbow rather than a bow. Other weapons have downsides for instance a battleaxe does more damage than a great sword but swings slower. The crossbow hits harder than a bow and has no downside to its use so bows become pointless.

But that's the thing, they don't become useless once you get a crossbow. I still carry both on my person, crossbow for crypts,caves,forts ( close quarters ) and a bow for those long range shots ( sniping situations ). I even bounce back and forth when fighting dragons, crossbow for when their on the ground and bow for when their in the air. I could be mistaken but * to me * the bow seems to have a longer reach then the crossbow so I keep it for the times that I want to stay outside of the targets sight. The fact that it hits harder then all bows is not an argument for being OP because a crossbow is supposed to hit harder but it's range shouldn't be anywhere close to that of a bow. Which I seem to experience, I could be wrong but it seems that the crossbow does not have the same range as the bows in game.

Well I don't actually have Dawnguard.. I was commenting how people say its okay to have one super powerful weapon since its realistic.. But if its not.. From what you say.. Im not gonna say otherwise and just go with all weapons should have pros and cons..

Bows are not pointless. Bows are not underpowered, so you are not forced to use to use crossbows just to survive. If crossbows were the only weapon that ranged characters could use because bows were underpowered, than I would agree with you. But you can play the game only using bows and you would get by just fine. And I do that, and I'm not even tempted to use the crossbow.

As for there being no downsides;


This is why the crossbow is only useful on my melee characters. I fire one or two shots, but once an enemy closes in I switch to my swords, axe, ect.

You might be right about the range as I have experienced the same thing the bow just seems to have that bit longer range. Crossbows being harder hitting ( at least in the real world) seems to be a bit of a myth. A crossbow may have a much higher draw weight but is not as efficient at transferring that energy to the bolt as a bow is at transferring its drawn energy to an arrow. The result is both crossbow bolt and longbow arrow travel at very similar speeds as speed is the main factor in determining damage crossbows and longbows are about equal in range and damage.

So were bows, before the crossbow ban. Both bans were ignored.

And crossbows weren't superior to bows, performance wise. In fact, they were worse because of how dreadfully long it took to reload them. The reason crossbows became so popular was that even peasants could put them to good use with almost no training, whereas a skilled longbowman took years of constant practice (have you fired a traditional bow IRL? It's incredibly difficult when you start out to hit anything smaller than a barn because you need to train your brain where the arrow will go, something called instinctive shooting, as traditional bows have no sights). And thus, it was cheap to mass crossbowmen. But get the same amount of longbowmen as crossbowmen and the former will completely annihilate the latter due to the vastly superior rate of fire.

Actually if we are going to talk about the damage levels for bows and crossbows in the game the hunting bow does more damage than the longbow. This really should not be the case a hunting bow is a short bow with nothing like the power of a long bow.

In order to actually get the best crossbow + bolts early on you actually have to be constantly doing the ancient technology quests and even then you can't get them by level 10. It is true that it is possible to get the best crossbow + bolts early on if you dedicate yourself to that but you can also get the best bows + arrows early on if you dedicate your character to smithing training. In order to do this you will need to do some pretty specific things with the purpose to make your character overpowered and most people do not play like that.

I do archery and a bow can take years to fully master and build up your finger strength (I only use a 40lb draw weight, 100lb+ which was required to penetrate armor must be incredibly hard to even fully pull). So that's a downside of bows. Some argue that crossbows are more accurate, and arguably on short distances they are but a skilled bowman can shoot just as well (the difference being the crossbowman needs a few weeks of training in opposition to the bowman's several years). This was balanced out by the fact that a good crossbow costs more to make and needs a trained craftsman. The only real area where a crossbow clearly beats bows is penetration power. Also, these "historical match-ups" which one often finds on "historical" television are funny because you have to take so much into account that it will never be realistic. Crossbows were a precursor to muskets, which finally knocked bows out of the ballpark (especially as they became continuously faster to reload).

Leave my Crossbow alone! If you want weaker crossbows then wait for a mod.

Every single crossbow should have higher damage and longer range than its bow equivalent. Crossbows do. The only advantage a bow has over a crossbow is faster loosing of projectiles. That's it. It's inferior in every single other way.

Your avatar correctly represents my expression. What advantage does the bow even have over the crossbow in this game? Besides the fact that it shoots a tiny bit faster, but that hardly outweighs the benefits of using a Crossbow over a Bow.

Crossbow 100% Stagger when used with Power Shot, Travels Faster, More Accurate, Far more Damage, less perks in smithing needed to use it at full potential, draws faster.

Bows are vastly inferior to Crossbows in this game.

That's what I said - they SHOULD be vastly inferior, though surely the crossbows in Skyrim don't shoot faster than bows, do they? I wouldn't know, I'm not buying anymore Bethesda games until they hit rock bottom prices.

Not really, a skilled bowman can easily shoot as accurately at short to mid distance as a crossbow and at long distances it starts not to matter as even a gust of wind can blow the projectile off course. The fields where a crossbow beats a bow are sheer power (packs a way harder punch) and the user doesn't have to be as trained.

I think a good balance would have been for Crossbows to level up your archery at a rate much lower than Bows, but to be stronger and slower. A fully trained bowman would be able to do almost as much damage as a crossbowman, but make up for it by firing faster.

Crossbows shouldn't be ultimately superior or inferior, but should be designed to accommodate a different playstyle/character for rping.

How would this be balanced? The person could just train using bows, and when he/she makes its to lv 100 switch to Crossbow. Its not exactly hard to level up skills.

In reality, for this idea to work, Crossbows and Archery would probably have to be under separate skills, but that's not likely to happen.

several factors could be added in to balance them out.

1: Crossbows benfit less fro mskill progression then bows IE bow's get bigger boost to damage via skill. crossbows stay more constent. Perhaps only gaining boost on the classic "25 point" gamesas thresholds.

2: While packing much more punch then bows of "equal" material rating are noticeable slower (bow's shoot like 2-3 arrows) for every one from a crossbow.

this way crossbows would kill enemies that could take say 1 arrow with only a little health left in one shot instead of having to load up, aim and fire off another arrow. So in the long run bow's would be "more upgradeable" then Crossbows with skill but suffer from weaker damage per bolt. Crossbow's disadvantage is skill effect them less, and they reload slowly and perhaps even suffer from reload interruption in melee as well as slow speed while reloading.