Ranger Arrow Upgrade Chart

This is a chart covering what kind of arrows you should have and what bows you can get to make archery competitive during the EQL journey. Item enhancements are not considered here; rather, the intent is to identify when upgrades become available. Levels for fletched items assume you're earning about 5 skill points per level.

First, we'll take a selection of bows.

Bow	Damage	Delay	Level	Fletching Trivial
Sabertooth Short Bow	6	30	20	N/A
Deteriorated Ancient Faydark Longbow	15	55	16	N/A
Hemp Hickory Bow	10	50	3	16
Hemp Elm Bow	13	51	13	68
Carved Hemp Elm Bow	12	47	20	102
Runed Oak Bow	21	43	25	N/A
Trueshot Longbow	20	45	47	235

Next, here's arrows you can acquire or fletch:

Arrow	Damage	Level	Fletching Trivial
Arrow	1	1	N/A
CLASS 1 Wood Point Arrow	1	3	16
CLASS 1 Bone Point Arrow	2	13	68
CLASS 3 Bone Point Arrow	3	16	82
Crude Arrow	3	10	N/A
Forlorn Arrow	4	20	N/A
CLASS 3 Bone Hooked Arrow	4	20	102
CLASS 2 Ceramic Hooked Arrow	5	27	135
CLASS 3 Ceramic Silver Tip Arrow	6	36	182
CLASS 3 Steel Silver Tip Arrow	7	40	202
CLASS 6 Steel Silver Tip Arrow	8	40	202
Gloomwater Arrow	10	46	N/A
Steel Guardian Arrows	14*	50	335
Blessed Guardian Arrows	15*	50	335
Mithril Champion Arrows	14*	50	335
Blessed Champion Arrows	15*	50	335

Now for the fun part - let's look at comparable combinations for things based on available 2H weapons, which most cleanly maps to what we do with archery.

2H	Damage	Delay	Level
Headsplitter	11	43	18
Silver Plated War Sword	15	38	20
Bone Bladed Claymore	17	45	15
Enchanted Fine Steel Bastard Sword	20	42	24
Verishe Mal Greataxe	26	52	42
TornEar Thumper	16	30	37

With that, we can now do our comparison. In order to determine if the base damage of the item is better, we just have to add the arrow to the bow and compare it to a weapon in the same range. Here's an example chart.

Bow + Arrow	Ratio	Level	Ratio	2H
Sabertooth Short Bow + Crude Arrow	0.3	20	0.39	Silver Plated War Sword
Sabertooth Short Bow + Forlorn Arrow	0.333	20	0.39	Silver Plated War Sword
Sabertooth Short Bow + Ceramic Silver Tip Arrow	0.4	36	0.39	Silver Plated War Sword

What we see is that without changing your bow, you can incrementally get past 2H. However, you also have to ratchet up the other side of the table to see where the comparable options really are. Based on the last table, let's advance the bow and 2H to 36 (or as close to, because there aren't many bows).

Bow + Arrow	Ratio	Level	Ratio	2H
Runed Oak Bow + Class 3 Ceramic Silver Tip Arrow	0.63	36	0.53	TornEar Thumper

What happened? Well, the classic EQ itemization paradigm treats Archery the same as 2H weapons, but discounts the arrow entirely - reasons are for the reader to divine. This results in a damage potential that's actually rather insane - in practice players can acquire a max level arrow, a simple bow, and be rocking archery far above their weight class because of the way the calculations work. Rather than assault you further with copious sheets of data, I want to point out that as of July 24, 2026, bows are actually quite impressive. Use the methodology described here to find your own breakpoints, but the rule to follow that if your bow+arrow is better than a comparable 2H/DW rig, it's archery time.

- Jokon