Skyrim Character Building » Discussions


Character Build: The Arcane Archer

Tags: #Character Build Archer  #Character Build Elementalist  #Character Build Enchanter  #Rank:Legendary 
  • October 8, 2013

    They don't or I would have said...

    Bows fire faster, and the bow is a conduit for the heavy magical damage. A slow shooting weapon like the crossbow will result in more staggers but lower dps...

    The crossbow could still potentially work well against single tough enemies but in crowds you want to work with a nice solid bow to get that magical damage across fast and drop them quick...

  • Member
    October 8, 2013

    I assumed as much, just wondering. A little sick of the crossbow after my Demonhunter playthrough the good old fashioned bow is a nice change for me right now. Just need to sort out some armour and I'll get started on the build.

  • October 8, 2013

    It opens up a bunch of possibilities mate, the Nightstalker path is my favorite, get some nasty looking soul cairn summons and a Supple Ancient Nord Bow (very fast fire rate, good damage) and you're set...

  • Member
    October 8, 2013

    I was going to go with the Nightstalker path anyhow. Vampires are always fun to run. Probably will play as Breton, Nord or Imperial. Making them look good as vampires with Dawnguard will be the hard part....

  • October 8, 2013

    I think you need to join for her to train you...

    Deep Freeze is a level 60 perk and yeah it only works while running a cloak spell, aspect of terror won't increase enchantment damage either I'm afraid...

    The Champion of the Night vampire bonus however WILL boost the power of that bow we were just talking about, makes it a god item, a true pleasure to use...

  • Member
    October 8, 2013
    Head to Ironbind Barrow and grab the Fiery Soul Trap weapon there. Fiery Soul Trap is great on an arcane archer at low levels.
  • Member
    October 18, 2013

    Hi Mason, Long time Lurker of all your builds, i must say this was one of my first builds i ever did, although when i first tried it i did not understand much of it because i had no idea what was what, but i decided that i would retry this,

    My only issue is that i was playing along and did not level up, my enchanting was shooting up, my alchemy was shooting up just so i could get money to buy the soulgems which i then made loads of daggers, low and behold i got to Windhelm to do the speech training and i needed to level up after 5, as per normal, now i thought i could level up when i wanted but alas it's not the case, i was level 12 before i had done anything i wanted.

    I think i will restart this, but what are the general rules/guide to avoid this, i need money to buy speech, but to make money i level quickly as i need daggers/soul gems so this levels, its catch 22 really, how did you make the money needed to buy the speech but not bulk level at the same time?

  • October 18, 2013

    Thanks Chris! I guess it just depends how quickly you want to get those speech perks put in place...

    You can always just choose to develop enchanting and the other core skills (archery, light armor) until your enchantments are making a big profit (in other words just play naturally) and then go after the speech perks and training at about level 20 (when your bows start needing to cause more damage).

    Or you can get it out the way as early as possible with a little bit of craft grinding. From level 1 I chose to completely ignore enchanting and simply make a bunch of potions to take to Windhelm with me. I chose decent ingredients (blue butterfly + blue mountain flower recipe, loads of resist frost potions) and then used the potions as leverage for speech training with Revyn Sadri. You can't really help but level alchemy up as you sell/train/craft but sometimes you need those extra levels of alchemy in order to level up and recieve a fresh 5/5 in speech training so in some ways the levelling speeds up the process...

    If you do this too early in the playthrough though there isn't actually much use for the merchant perk anyway, you haven't got anything really expensive to sell and you don't have the resources to mass-enchant daggers.

  • Member
    October 18, 2013

    Thanks, i will give this a go again, i ended up just command console the speech to 50 once i realized my mistake, not before trying to find every speech glitch on the internet, but once i cheat i ruin the game for myself, no fun playing a game i cheated in.

    So i will try to collect these ingredients, although Blue Butterfly wings seem to be very rare for me, any "Known" hotspots for these? plus is there any other commonly found ingredient found on the way to Revyn Sadri that will make good money?

  • October 18, 2013

    I usually find a ton of them around Whiterun and up near the Ritual Stone, purple mountain flower, thistles and snowberries also make a ton of resist frost potions.

    I can't tell you how much money you need to make in order to get speech to 50, when I played this for the first time I was perking alchemy a little bit as well so my potions would have been worth a little more. I've played this build again recently without perking alchemy and I can assure you that as long as you don't skimp on ingredient collecting this method still works fine...