Just curious on how effective they are.

Strongest in the game 1v1 imo.

lets just say if you don't know what you're doing you will die a lot.

The hardest type to play since you need to actually think about what you're doing. But they're the most rewarding in the end. And extremely fun to play.

Godlike.

I'm playing one now. Lvl 30. With most of the archery perks and stealth perks. x3 sneak damage with bows, +80% damage with bows from perks, plus Powershot to stagger enemies, plus a helm and bracers than both individually increase bow damage by 20%.

Let me put it this way - I can almost one shot a giant with a glass arrow tipped with poison and an enchanted bow.

Coming from an experienced TES archer, my build straight up pwns. It's a Archer/Alteration/Conjuration/Stealth build, but I kill nearly every humanoid in one shot, and have great crowd control/distraction and sneak attack capabilities too.. I love it really...

Is that on master difficulty?

You can farm sneak by attacking an essential npc while he is sleeping, then walk a little away and when he gets up again he will go back to sleep and you can attack him again

This makes you lvl sneak really really REALLY fast and you will get in high lvl quick, combined with pickpocketing every man woman and child made me in high lvl very fast on my thief/rogue/archer/whatever.

Also you can use arrows to distract mobs, kinda awesome to shoot an arrow into a wall and then the mob run there and then you send your 2nd arrow killing them, kinda like Noise makers in Thief: Deadly shadows

Adept Difficulty i.e. the default normal difficulty.

If I can get the drop on an enemy I can kill them all nearly instantly. However, big caveat: you DO have to think and plan, because if you are seen and they close to melee range . . . well, you're screwed. But otherwise I may as well be the "finger of god" reaching down and touching my enemies with instant and unseen death. That's the name of my bow, by the way. "Finger of God".

EDIT: gajolmand is right. You can use arrows to distract and lure enemies. I've actually killed bandits by using my arrows to lure them into their own traps.

First I cried out "is that what they call archery being more powerful?!"

Than I took some perks and that shut me up.If you get some,you'll be satisfied too.

The perks are essential. Archery does not scale well without them.

If you're an alchemist, toss on a frenzy poison to help with troublesome groups.

Has anyone tried archer + stealth with a little bit of destruction? I would imagine archery combined with rune traps it would be very effective.

Level 17 right now with a sneak archer. The forward roll sneak perk combined with the slow time eagle eye archery perk doesn't give the enemy a chance to react.