Archery
If you focus on Skill abilities, you’ll find that your Hero will be naturally better with a bow than other characters. If you intend to use a bow as your primary weapon, though, you’ll want to concentrate almost all of your experience points into Speed and Accuracy; Guile is more intended for thieving and stealthy characters, as it has little impact on combat, besides allowing you to sneak up on your enemies.
In order to succeed as an archer, you’ll need to ensure that you can get close enough to your enemy to shoot them without them getting wind of you ahead of time. This will require you to wear stealthy clothing; the Assassin’s outfit is naturally suited for this kind of activity.
Beyond getting in range, there isn’t much strategy involved in archery. Just get your bow ready and keep firing before your enemies get too close! You can manually aim by clicking the left analog stick; when you have high Accuracy, you can go for headshots, which instantly kill most enemies.
Spells
Multi Arrow: This is the only spell that directly affects archery combat. Needless to say, if you’re focusing on bows, you’ll want to max this spell out as quickly as possible, as it devestates most enemies; even boss monsters won’t usually be able to take more than two or three salvos from a maxed-our Multi Arrow.
Force Push: Force Push is more useful than Enflame in most cases, for archers anyway, although if you want the extra damage, feel free to concentrate on the latter spell.
Slow Time: When using ranged combat, Slow Time will let you pick out headshots on moving enemies with much greater ease, and will give you more time to strike after you make your initial shot.
Weapons You’ll only have two types of bows in Fable: longbows and crossbows. Bows are the standard choice for archers; crossbows deal a bit more damage, but require a much longer reload time, thus reducing the damage you deal over time. Unfortunately, the Legendary longbow is only available to greatly evil characters, or players who are willing to commit evil acts to obtain it.
Skorm’s Bow
Weight and Type: Longbow
Damage: 264
Augmentations: Lightning, Sharpening
Found: In order to obtain Skorm’s Bow, you’ll need to make a number of human sacrifices at the Church of Skorm. If you can persuade villagers to follow you in, you can use them; mercenaries also work well. If you want extra evil points, get your wife (or wives) to follow you here, then cast them into the void by talking to the NPC. You’ll obtain an age reduction and a new title before you get the bow, so you’ll need to spend a fair amount of time luring people to their death before you get the prize.
Arken’s Crossbow
Weight and Type: Light Sword of Aeons
Damage: 264
Augmentations: Flame, Silver, Piercing
Found: Found in a Silver Key Chest in Darkwood Lake.
Spellcasting
There isn’t much to say about a hard-core spellcasting approach to the game: start sinking your experience into spells and extra mana, and go to town! (In the metaphorical sense; actually casting offensive spells in a town will lead to hefty fines.)
Spells You have a number of spells to choose from here (obviously enough), and you’ll be able to reduce the time it takes to cycle through them all by eliminating spells that focus on melee or ranged attacks from your bindings.
Lightning/Fireball: You’ll probably want to get both of these up to a fairly high rank, if only for variety’s sake.
Physical Shield: This is critical for spellcasters, since you’ll have fewer methods of dealing with enemies at close range. If they can’t hurt you, though, you won’t have to worry too much.
Summon/Ghost Swords: You’ll need some way to distract your foes, so if you can get a high-level enemy as a minion, or summon four Ghost Swords, you should be much more able to deal with large mobs of monsters.
