How strong is archery/psionics?

Do you not have to invest a skill tree and 4 skills on tinkering just to get the bolts to use it?

If you ask me, tinkering is an archery skill. I won't pick it if I don't intend to shoot anything.

Can't call it a 0 to 1 mana skill because that implies you have unlimited bolts, which you don't.

 

Either way, to the OP: you would have been better off just putting one more point in Psionics and focusing on some Mage gear and spamming Pyrokinesis vs. worrying about Archery. As stw and others have been saying, Archery is in a weird and broken place right now:

1) The Skill Tree itself confers VERY little damage benefit and eats up precious Skill Points better spent elsewhere.
2) The Overpowered Bolts in the game - Bolts of Squid, Clockwork Drill Bolts, Bolts of Mass Destruction, even Poison & Acid Bottle Bolts - are game-breakingly powerful regardless of the Crossbow they are fired from. By contrast, the standard Bolts don't seem to scale at all and never seem to add much more than a token amount of damage to your shots. The difference between a standard Copper Bolt and a Cruelly Barbed Steel Bolt ends up being like, 3 damage/shot. Pathetic.
3) Unlike other weapon skills, a character with no Crossbow skill does not receive the "bad weapon" debuff when equipping a Crossbow.
4) Crossbow damage tops out at 20, which in theory is in-line with single-handed weapons. However, melee weapons benefit more from Primary Stats than Crossbows do and in effect, a character with a lot of Warrior Levels and an Artifact one-hander is going to do far more damage than a character with a lot of Rogue levels and an Artifact Crossbow.
5) You simply cannot walk into Morder play an Archer as an Archer without Tinkering because you will run out of Bolts constantly, period, end of story. So you end up wasting 2 Skill Trees (Crossbows, Tinkering) just to be able to deal mediocre damage from range, while using up 1/3 of your Inventory hoarding Ingots and various Bolt types.
6) Crossbows work better as Stat Sticks (read: ring/amulet that happens to have built-in damage) than they do as weapons.

My conclusion: I've been trying Archery/Caster builds and honestly, the Archer part is a pain in the ass and underwhelming, while the Caster part actually kills things and generally keep me alive. Archery is pretty terrible right now, although it IS a fun change of pace vs. a Pure Caster or Melee-centered build.

 

Yeah, I had Pyrokinesis down to 4 mp at the end. Was basically Pyro everything once then spam shove till dead on dlvl 8-10. Soon as I figured out just what Shove was all about, I barely shot my bow for the rest of the game.

Also, you're not wrong about the Bolt of Squid. First time I used it, it was on a zoo and I was just OoO. I assume the AoE dmg from Squid/BoMD is based on the bow? Or is it just a flat rate of dmg, regardless of what it's fired from?

 

I'm almost certain it's based on your magic power, since mages seem to get way more mileage out of squidbolts than warriors do.

 

I dunno, I can clear huge chunks of Floor 8/9/10 Zoos with a Bolt of Squid followed up by a Brimstone Flask or a few smaller AoE items like Acid Bolts/Flasks, regardless of character build. On lower Floors, the Squid Bolt is all you need, really.

 

My experience was that a mage using a squidbolt would outright kill a large portion of the zoo, while a warrior using the same would just soften the targets up. Looking through the effects for Generic Tentacular Doom (the spell invoked by squidbolts), it invokes Corpse Blast and Nightmare by way of Zalgo1. Corpse Blast has a toxicF of .15, which I believe is a magic power scaling factor; likewise Nightmare has an asphyxiativeF of .15.

The big takeaway though is that squidbolts work best when you've already killed a decent number of enemies in the zoo. That gives Corpse Blast something to work with and sets up a nice chain reaction (corpse explodes, making new corpse, which explodes on the next round). Otherwise you're just spreading Nightmare around a bit, which isn't so amazing.