Bow And Spear Combination Guide (Patch 1.3.4)

• Attributes
• Builds For Bow
• Builds For Spear
• Gear
• Gems
• Equipment Perks
• Consumables
• FAQ

The Bow focuses on a single target and area of effect damage, mainly, mid-range while also providing high mobility. Learning how to headshot is essential because it automatically makes the attack a critical hit.

The Spear is a melee weapon with plenty of crowd control options and one of the strongest Rend applications in the game. Since Spears has more range than any other melee weapon, you’re encouraged to manage your distance during an engagement.

This weapon combination is effective at every range and has a high burst single-target DPS, enough area of effect damage, and crowd control. But at the same time, they both got thrust type of damage weak against Lost and Angry Earth-type foes.

Attributes

Both the Bow and Spear scale mainly with Dexterity. It makes them a fantastic pairing, so focus on obtaining as much Dexterity as possible to unlock passive skills on 50 points breakpoints.

Constitution is a decent secondary Attribute, especially for PvP, 50 points will be enough to unlock 20% effectiveness to all health consumables, but you can get those 50 points with your gear or using +40 Consitution food:

Builds For Bow

For more information, you can check our Bow Guide.

Since most Bow active skills are pretty situational depending on your playstyle and the way you are going to use the Spear, there are a lot of build variations.

1. For example, this build for heavy Area of Effect damage, useful in Expeditions or Wars:

If you don’t use heavy attacks, you can take Arrow Range instead of Aim True or Opening Strikes, but you still need 10 points in the Hunter skill tree to get elite ability – Concussion.

In the Skirmisher tree, you can pick Infected Arrows and Direct Hit if you’re sure you can land the Poison Shot directly, or the Barbed Arrows and Hooked Arrows if you’re not the only Bow user and can stack Barbed Arrows.

2. If you don’t like to be stuck while casting Rapid Shot, you can take Penetrating Shot instead:

In this build, you can switch between Poison Shot and Rain of Arrows passive skills depending on what you need more, single target damage or putting bleeding debuff from Rain of Arrows.

3. This Single target build is mostly used for open-world PvP:

Here you can also swap between combinations of Aim True plus Opening Strike and Arrow Range or Mark if you don’t use heavy attacks or have some other players with you to apply debuff and make Mark useful.

4. If you don’t like Rapid Shot for being an easy target while casting it, you can try this mobile build, which becomes more popular:

5. Mixed build with Rain of Arrows will give you both area of effect and single target damage for different game content:

6. Mixed build with Poison Shot if you prefer this ability instead of Rain of Arrows:

The most important thing about the rotation is using Rapid Shot before Penetrating Shot. So basically, you will do roll – Rapid Shot – roll – Penetrating Shot – roll, etc. If you use Poison Shot, it will be your opener.

Builds For Spear

For more information, you can check our Spear Guide.

1. If you use Spear for PvE or character leveling as the main weapon you want as much damage as you can get:

We don’t use Deep Wound in this build since short cooldowns will let us reset bleeds fast enough. You can use Deadly Reach instead of Exacerbating Crits if you are doing the right rotation to apply debuffs before they take off.

For PvP, Unerring Precision is an option since you’ll probably meet Great Axe and War Hammer users pretty often.

2. In PvP Spear is mostly used as a secondary weapon, so this build is concentrated around mobility and defense:

The usage of Refreshing Precision and Deadly Distance is pretty hard in PvP, but you can use this option if you feel confident with it. Unerring Precision is also optional. You can take any other passive you like.

As for rotation, it’s possible to stunlock your opponent with this build in PvE. The rotation is pretty simple: Sweep, two light attacks, dodge, Vault Kick, two light attacks, dodge, Sweep, and again.

The reason we don’t pick Coupe de Grace is that you won’t be able to make two light attacks if you Sweep someone, so this actually makes your DPS go down. But if you don’t use stunlock rotation, you can take it instead of Deadly Consistency.

3. If you prefer more survivability, you can take Perforate instead of Javelin and combine it with Fortifying Perforate perk:

4. For mass PvP like wars you might want a full crowd control build with the Cyclone:

5. If you want a ranged attack in PvE you can use this build:

For example, you can take Refreshing Precision and Deadly Distance instead of Deep Wound and Defensive Stand, since it’s easier to land a headshot in PvE:

Or take Deadly Consistency and Deadly Reach instead.

Gear

Light armor gives you a +20% damage bonus and the best amount of movement with a quick roll since normally you’ll keep the distance and don’t take damage.

Medium armor will give you more protection, +10% damage bonus, but you’ll not have a quick roll. You can use it if you’re fighting in close combat pretty often.

Also, you can combine different types of armor, light with medium, staying under 13 kg, or medium with heavy, staying under 23 kg. You can change your armor type by simply replacing 3 parts.

Maxed Medium Armor 22,9 lbs build (1L + 2M + 2H): Heavy Chest, Light Pants, 2 Medium and 1 Heavy piece.

Alternative Maxed Medium Armor 22,9 lbs build (2L + 1M + 2H): Heavy Chest, Heavy Pants, 1 Medium, and 1 Light piece.

Maxed Light Armor 12,7 lbs build (4L + 1M): Light Head, Medium Chest, Light Gloves, Light Pants, Light Boots.

Maxed Light Armor 12,6 lbs build (3L + 2M): Light Chest, Medium Pants, 1 Medium, and 2 Light pieces. If you need more in-depth information, how tankier you would be wearing a certain kind of armor of a certain Gear Score, feel free to use the New World Calculator by Mixed Nuts.

Armor Type	Light	Medium	Heavy
Head	1,5 lbs	2,6 lbs	4,7 lbs
Chest	3,5 lbs	6,2 lbs	11,0 lbs
Gloves	1,5 lbs	2,6 lbs	4,7 lbs
Pants	2,0 lbs	3,5 lbs	6,3 lbs
Boots	1,5 lbs	2,6 lbs	4,7 lbs
Shields	2,7 lbs (Round)	5,4 lbs (Kite)	11,0 lbs (Tower)

Look for Armor with Dexterity on it for best results or with Dexterity and Constitution if you need 50 points to unlock 20% effectiveness to all health consumables.

Gems

Your Gems can change your playstyle a lot, and you should become comfortable switching between them depending on the situation.

1. Cut Pristine Opal:

Since Evasive Tactics gives you 20% Bow damage boost for 5 sec every time you dodge, and Aggressive Maneuvers reduces all Spear cooldowns by 20% after successful hit with an ability for 2 sec every time you dodge, you will find yourself on low stamina quite often. This option may give you the most all-around damage output anywhere in the game.

2. Cut Pristine Onyx:

You will be able to open with your most potent ability against full health foes. This Gem is beneficial to land headshots with the Bow.

3. Cut Pristine Emerald:

This will help you to execute enemies running away.

4. Cut Pristine Diamond:

Fits more for a group play since you are likely to be at full health while fighting at a distance.

If you’re fighting mostly against one enemy type, for example, farming something, you can use to convert your damage:

1. Cut Pristine Amethyst to fight against Ancients:

2. Cut Pristine Aquamarine against the Lost:

3. Cut Pristine Ruby against Angry Earth:

4. Cut Pristine Sapphire against Corrupted:

5. Cut Pristine Topaz against Ancients:

Damage Effectiveness	Slash	Thrust	Strike	Fire	Ice	Nature	Void	Lightning	Arcane
Ancients	-15%		+20%	-40%			+15%	+30%
Corrupted		+20%	-15%		-40%	+15%			+30%
Angry Earth	+20%	-15%		+30%				-40%
The Lost		-15%	+10%		+15%	+30%	-30%
Beast		+20%

For Armor gems you can use Cut Pristine Emerald for PvP while fighting against other Bow and Musket users:

If you’re already level 60 and farming chests or mobs for gear, you need a Lucky Gem:

For other situations to provide generic damage absorption:

1. Cut Pristine Onyx:

2. Cut Pristine Malachite:

3. Cut Pristine Diamond:

Equipment Perks

If you’re going to use mainly one weapon, you can check our Bow and Spear Guides for specific Armor Perks. Here you can find only the universal ones.

1. Armor Perks

Refreshing with Resilient can be a universal choice depending on your secondary weapon:

Refreshing Evasion is useful because you’re dodging a lot:

Physical Aversion is useful for PvP against Musket and Bow users:

Fortifying Perforate:

This is one of the stronger self-Fortify effects. Granted, it takes multiple hits for the full effect; at the higher end, it doesn’t need to be fully stacked to be helpful.

Fortify is great in PvP. In skirmishes or wars, you may even be able to get more value out of the skill by hitting multiple targets and stacking it up faster or higher.

Fortifying Rain of Arrows:

This Perk is nice for adding a bit of survivability to the Bow, which is always nice to have. As this Perk scales with Gear Score in terms of Fortify amount and duration of the buff so you can potentially keep this buff up almost all the time at high Gear Score.

2. Weapon Perks

Vorpal is one of the best perks for Bow since you try to land as many headshots as possible:

Keenly Jagged is a nice choice since you’ll crit a lot. If you land a critical headshot with this perk you deal a lot of damage over time:

Keen and Vicious are still a strong pair of go-to perks:

Refreshing Move helps a great deal with getting more skill rotations out:

Alternatively, you can use Enchanted and get plenty of damage that way as well.

You can also go for Lifestealing for Spear if you want to gain health back on hit:

For PvP against healers, you can use Plagued Crits or Plagued Strikes. The maximum amount of healing decreasing is 24% for GS 600 weapons.

Plagued Crits require lowering the target’s health to 50% first:

Plagued Strikes don’t require anything but a heavy attack, but in PvP, it can be easily dodged, so both options are pretty situational:

Plagued Strikes can be combined with Trenchant Crits or Trenchant Strikes for more damage:

Trenchant Rend:

Or Trenchant Recovery for surviving:

3. Amulet Perks

Slash Protection and Thrust Protection cover most PvE and PvP incoming damage:

Divine will give you more healing and Health – more HP, everything is simple here:

If you really want to heap on the defenses, Fortified Recovery grants a fairly strong 30% Fortify for 5 seconds when hit below 50% health, but has a 90 seconds cooldown for the effect:

4. Earrings Perks

Beloved and Evasive can both help you mitigate aggro making you less likely to pull aggro in expeditions:

Purifying Toast and Refreshing Toast are both great utility options for open-world PvP where health consumables tend to be used more. These all also help in PvE as well:

You can also grab Refreshing here as well if you don’t manage to get it on your armor.

Nimble helps the somewhat excessive use of Stamina from this build by boosting Stamina Regen slightly:

5. Rings Perks

Keen Awareness is a strong option for higher burst damage potential and Thrust Damage is a small damage boost in general:

Refreshing is also decent Utility with the lowered cooldowns, but that’s also available on armor:

Thrust Protection can be useful against other Bow and Musket users:

Hearty will add you enough Stamina for one more additional dodge. If the bow player has 109.5 total stamina and each dodge takes 40 stamina (with 150 Dexterity attribute bonus), a player can dodge twice (leaving the player at 39.5 stamina), wait a fraction of a second for stamina to regenerate to 41, then dodge twice more for a total of 4 dodges.

Blood Letting works great with Keenly Jagged on your weapon:

Consumables

In this chapter, you can find information about endgame consumables because you don’t really need most of them on low levels. You can easily find the low leveled versions of them because the names only differ by one word, except food. 

1. First of all, you need Health Regeneration Food:

Health Potions:

And Regeneration Potions:

2. Attribute Food:

As a DPS player, you might want to increase your Dexterity. This food gives you an option to put 40 points from Dexterity to another Attribute.

You can use food with both Dexterity and Constitution bonus to increase your health and damage at the same time.

Constitution / Dexterity combination with more Dexterity is also available.

Also, you can use Constitution food to maximize your health.

To find more food, for hybrid builds please check our Cooking Guide.

3. Powerful Honing Stone will increase your damage and, as a result, threat level. They can be bought or crafted at Smelter if you reach 170 Weaponsmithing level.

4. Powerful Gemstone Dust can be also bought or crafted at level 170 Jewelcrafting.

5. Powerful Oakflesh Balm can be bought or crafted at 170 Armoring level as well.

6. Powerful Incense requires 170 Furnishing level to craft. Otherwise, it can be bought for cheap from the Trading Post.

7. Weapon Coatings give a 15% damage bonus against certain types of enemies. These coatings are usually used in dungeons, where you’re fighting mostly against enemies of the same type, for example:

8. Ward Potions increase your damage absorption against certain enemy types. They can help you mitigate heavy incoming damage. 

9. Absorption Potions can help you not only in dungeons but also in PvP against mages. They increase absorption by 15% against certain types of elemental damage, for example:

10. Corruption Tincture and Blight Tincture remove afflictions and give 97,5% resistance to these afflictions for 5 minutes.

11. Infused Encumbrance Potion will help you a bit with bringing your sack to the nearest warehouse. It lasts 3 minutes and increases the Encumbrance Limit by 100.

I know that feeling, bro, even one Flint or Green-Wood must not be discarded.

FAQ