I'm starting a new char and I was wondering which is the best bow..
so far the things that come to mind are:

Bound Bow
+ Powerful Bow (almost as good as Daedric)
+ No weight
+ Conjures 100 Arrows

- Can have no enchants a part of Soul Trap, and requires a perk
- Takes time to cast, maybe too much in risky situations?
- Requires 50 Conjuration


Standard Bows
+ Potentially stronger towards endgame (smithing, etc)
+ More enchants
+ Definately faster to swap to

- Weight a bit
- Requires arrows (that for a me are a problem to find -.-)


What do you think?

Standard bows. Enchanting makes them fun, and I'd much rather have a nice frost/paralyze enchant than I would a soul trap.

If your specializing in conjuration I say go for bound bow but If your more of a warrior then I say go standard. They each have pros and cons and you should choose whatever one you like the best.

Can you enchant arrows and use those enchanted arrows over the conjured ones?

I rarely do archery in TES, but I do know that in Morrowind you COULD enchant bolts/arrows, but in Oblivion you could not (though you could still find/buy magic arrows somehow).

If you could enchant arrows in Skyrim, and choose to use those over the conjured arrows, then I would say that a conjured bow beats the living crap out of a normal one.

Standard bows. I can upgrade them, enchant them, and they don't cost Magicka to summon so I can stick all my points in health/stamina.
I can see an Arcane archer working well by the way, who uses summoned creatures and a summoned bow but that's not how I see the character I'm playing with right now.

I'd suggest a regular bow if you will be specializing in archery and using it very often. Bound bow requires x amount of magicka to conjure, and it also adds an annoying few seconds every single time you need it. Everytime you switch weapons or cast a spell or put it away to move faster, you will have to re-conjure it. Gets tedious quick. Makes a great backup to have available though if you run out of arrows.

That said, since my mage doesn't focus on archery, he uses bound bow. It's handy to get occasional sneak attack with it, plus it helps level my conjuration. I don't use it often enough on him to get annoyed with the extra time to conjure it. But when I make a archery specialist, I will be using a regular bow.

I play a conjurer-archer.

I just use the bound bow till I find a better alternaitve.

Find.

Find a better bow.
That is important.

Smithing is a no-no for me.

You can smith your way into oblivion and back and become a god through smithing.
When you have legendary deadric [everything], what the heck are you supposed to use your gold on?
Why bother to look what glowing axe that guy you just one-shotted had?
Why bother to open chests when not looking for a key to a door that cannot be picked?

Why bother doing side-quests for a mere daedric god artifact when you can make better weapons in 2 minutes?

Smithing ruined a character for me, and I won't do that mistake again.

I will still use enchantment, and will still improve the weapon and armor with the basic smithing skill + a store-bought potion, but I have no hopes of finding daedric bows, and I won't ruin the game by making daedric gear once again.

Yeah that's what I was thinking.. the only thing that I liked about bound bows were the look and the arrows, just those things -.-
Again, I hate having to scavenge for arrows everytime

BOUND BOW

On master difficulty I used +100% smithing gear to create a 132 damage daedric bow which ended up with 350`ish damage. Enchants only bring about +30-50 damage.

Daedric enchanted legendary bow (350 damage`ish) needs 2-4 sneak attack shots to kill a dragon priest or draugir deathlord on master.
Bound bow (no enchants) requires the same, maybe sometimes ONE arrow more to kill the same mob.

The importance lies not in the bow, but in enchanting fortify archery (Or fortify one hand if using bound swords) on your gear.

BOUND BOW: No weight. Free DAEDRIC arrows. Requires the same amount of shots to kill stuff as a fully smithed and enchanted regular bow but with weight.

After playing an archer through master i can with confidence say that a bound bow is just as good in pure damage and much more practical. Also... it looks awesome.

How would enchanting arrows work? One soul gem per arrow? and what exactly woudl the point be of enchanting each arrow when you could just enchant the bow to add each effect to the arrow?

Enchanting arrows is not practical and would just be stupidy.

If anyone is interested I just finished some testing.. here's my opinion:

to get the bow you have to level conjuration up to 50, and this takes some time if done without boosting, but it's not the main problem.
The bow costs 150ish magika to summon (and I didn't know that, I didn't even think about it) and a non-caster char like mine only has 100. Solution? Perks.
So you need 3 perks to get to the Adept level and spend "only" 70ish mana for the bow. It's not all: if you want the added damage and soul trap, it's another 2 perks.
Total: 5 more perks to have a good Bound Bow
Then, in a dragon fight, or in any fight with some chasing you will need to cast the bow more than once, and here come the problems. You summon it the first time and you're down to 30 magika, you switch to swords or whatever, fight, and maybe manage to get another 70 magika for the second summon, but after this you can pretty much say that you can not summon it anymore in the same fight (without using magika potions, of course). And each time you summon, you take some time.
Last, on console you have the opportunity to bind weapons or items to Left and Right. The bow though goes on the left hand, and when you switch through this method, you find yourself with the weapon you chose on the main hand, and STILL the bow on the left (and not the second weapon, shield, other magic [no problem if using 2 handed though]).
So yeah, pretty confusing post written hastly, but I haven't got much time.. hope everything is understandable


TL;DL If you're a warrior/thief or non caster in general, go for a Standard