What do you enchant your bows with? I have one bow that only has soultrap (lots of charges) and I made another with Fire Damage and Paralyze 5 sec (only 51 charges). I'm not at all sure that the paralyze was a good idea. Maybe I should have just done fire damage alone or fire+ice. Any ideas on what are good bow enchants? I'm hoping to keep opponents out of melee range as I'm fairly squishy.

I did a soul trap with fire damage on a daedric bow and a soul trap with ice for another daedric bow.

1 is for mages/archers the other for any sort of tank like a warrior or bear.

Paralize is OK if you're quick on the bow. It nails them down for a second sure shot.

I'm not sure if this is an enchantment, but I've had poisons before that "slow" the guy you hit. So you could just enchant it with that, or just made tons of those poisons. Unfortunately, the poisons make you go to the menu to use.

If this actually works, then this would be much better: If Ice enchants slow the opponent, then just put a massive amount of damage on the Ice enchant, and hope it slows the baddies when they get hit.

As for what I put on my bow, I usually put Fire damage, or Soul Trap. But I haven't gotten far enough up in the enchantment tree to really make use of anything else efficiently.

I like paralyze when it works, but I don't like variables like that... So I tend to use absorb stamina. It works beautifully allowing you to constantly keep you stamina filled, AND it works on dragons too!

Also firey soul trap is nice... It's two abilitys wrapped in one... So if you don't get the insta kill on a sneak attack the fire has a chance to finish them off.

But its all what works best for you! Get some randome bows and enchant them, and see what works best for you.

I use only fire enchant but am thinking of adding shock for mages. Paralyse in from perks anyway and I love to soul trap with my dagger stealth kills

I wanted to enchant a bow with a 'fury' spell, but even though I know the spell it won't let me enchant anything with it... do I need to find something with that spell already and disenchant it? Are there actually any items around with a fury spell enchantment?

Actually, I'd love to do a 'calm' one as well... just pump arrows into a bandit while he stands there... :thumbsup:

Fire damage with soul trap.

This is an amazing thing to have on my bow. So easy to trap souls now from a distance

Shock damage that also drains magicka. Works best against those mages. And I also have another one with soul trap for when I'm running out of filled soul gems.

Just a semi-off topic question to anyone who knows: Bound weapons can't be enchanted right? (I've never used one so I'm not sure..), I only know there's a perk so that bound weapons come with soul trap enchantment or something..

You're right, bound weapons cannot be enchanted as they never show in your inventory. That would be pretty badass tho

I used to use Shock Damage+Soul Trap, but lately I've not been bothering save for Soul Trap, and dropping even that after I get Enchanting to 100, since I can always buy a few filled Grand gems from the local magic-user to apply to my final gear. Then again I fight almost entirely from concealment, so damage enchantments aren't really contributing anything; they don't get multiplied while the bow's damage does, so they end up being a minuscule percentage of the total damage. There are very few opponents against whom I need more than 1 shot, as I play on Adept, and in those cases where I do need a second shot the damage enchantment(s) wouldn't have mattered anyway.

Now, if you're using Archery 'out in the open' instead then I could see enchanting it, since you're probably going to get hit and an absorb health enchantment can keep you topped off. How much armor and magic resistance you're packing is also a factor, since the more of both you have the less you need to steal health from your opponents. I went with Shock damage because very few opponents actually resist it and I can get decent numbers with it; I tried Absorb Health as well and was capped at a much lower value, which got me rather annoyed. As it turns out I should have used both together, but I wanted to have Soul Trap as well since I didn't feel like carrying a second bow just for refills, so that wasn't an option at the time.

Based on that, I would say that if you're going to enchant a bow for damage, you should dual-damage it and carry a second bow with just Soul Trap for refills; yeah, you're going to give up a little inventory space, but just one damage enchantment really doesn't do much against most opponents, even if it's Fire-based.

i use two bows, one, a glass bow with a 1 sec soul trap enchant and an ebony bow with max frost damage effect, i think stamina damage is a good one to enchant bows with for living type enemies.