I was thinking about rolling an archer summoner? Is this a viable build? What race and skills (other than archery / conjuring ) would your recommend? Want to play on hardest difficulty. Thank you.

Bump

1) why would race matter?
2) whatever skills you enjoy using. archery/conjuration are the staples, the rest are for your playstyle.

If you really want to play as this character, you should be able to figure out what skills you want.

Race determines initial skills. And given trial and error I could figure out the best mix.... but I was hoping for some community input.

Anyone building archers. Share what you know.

Im archer myself too, and planning on working my way to Necromancy as casting undead minions. So i made a dunmer female and named her "Bloodraven" from ol' game daiblo II lol. So far im doing pretty good and fun watching peoples running from my pets time to time.

I'm a Bosmer (Wood Elf) Archer/Cannibal. Bosmers are known to be the best at using Archery. I think investing in stamina is more important than health, since Archers normally have low health anyway. Using zoom-in perk with the bow is very helpful, but drains a lot of stamina when you're trying to aim carefully at a target. I recommend investing in Sneak for use with Archery, they have a perk where you can do much more damage with the bow.

The bosmer was my first choice, wanted to play female bosmer, but it was tooo ugly as hell. So i picked Dunmer instead. Hopefully they add some nice chrisma for some races, esp the ladies.

Race realy doesn't matter a lot skill wise as all races can level the skills you want. What matters, I think, is how you want your character to look and to some extent what abilities/power you prefer. Role players could also stick more to the lore and pick a race depending on it's history.

I was dismayed at first by the new Bosmer look too, but then I got used to it and the hood made my Bosmer look even better and now I love them. But you can still use the character customization option to make him/her look better anyway.

I haven't messed with archery that much yet, my characters initial focus for the first 15 levels has been dual wielding and heavy armor as I wanted to make kind of an in your face soldier of fortune. However a couple of things that jumped out at me right away that are worth considering.

1. Heavy armor impedes movement. Its not that noticeable until you ware heavy armor for a while and than switch to light.. than its like ... wow, Im a hell of a lot faster.
2. Heavy armor and sneaking are like oil and vinigar. Even with a releatively high skill in sneaking I can't even avoid being spotted several hundred feet away in bad weather when approaching a tower guard in heavy armor, but in light or no armor I can pull right up to him and pick pocket him without him noticing, so if your planning on combining archery with sneaking to get that benefit I strongly advise light armor (or better yet none), though if you go with none you really gotta avoid that close combat stuff and know how to duck and cover. Tough to do in dungeons.
3. Archery requires considerably more twitch skill than say melee or magic. Its a bit more percise and it can be hard to predict your max range at first. It takes a bit more skill to play as an archer.
4. Magic and archery don't blend that well because both your hands are taken up by the bow and switching while relatively fast still takes sometime.
5. At first you move slow as hell with your bow, so you need to get the perks for improved movement with a bow as mobility is really important to archers in light or no armor.
6. Stamina is actually not as important as you might think with an archer since actually shooting doesn't really require stamina (only if you do the zoom in). So its good to go with a little health or a lot of magika if you are going to combine it with spell casting.
7. Despite being an archer I think given that you are sometimes forced to fight in very close combat having a bit of skill with a melee weapon is very helpful. Might not be a problem later down the line, but the speed of swords for example can't be beat in a tight situation.

Thats about all I have figuired out so far.

I learned a lot from this. Very well-written! Thanks!