Mordhau – Best Ranged Weapons – Ultimate Guide

Archery in Mordhau makes it a different game entirely to playing as a duelist or an engineer. There are specific strategies and methods of playing when you’re using a ranged weapon, but you also have to consider which weapon is right for you in the first place. Each ranged weapon in Mordhau suits a different type of player.

If you’re specializing in ranged weapons, then you will be happy to see there are relatively few choices available compared with melee weapons. Less choice isn’t always a bad thing, here it will make it easier to find the weapon that works for you. Each has its own benefits and disadvantages. They are all pretty distinct from each other. Finding which works for you is as important as properly optimized settings and perks to win more Mordhau matches. Before you can experiment with all of these, you will need to grind enough Gold and XP to pay for them all to build your own character class.

If you need to practice with a Ranged Weapon in Mordhau, it isn’t as simple as when dueling. You can’t just head to a dueling server and start picking off enemies as a sniper. The best practice spot for ranged weapons is the horde mode, these enemies might be bots but it offers you a chance to use a ranged weapon under pressure. You should play around with each bow before settling on one.

The Longbow

The Longbow is a preferred ranged weapon in Mordhau, it is likely the weapon you’ll see the most out in the battlefield. It features a really strong damage rate, so it is best suited for accurate and considered shots. You can’t fire this ranged weapon off at random and expect to get any kills. Instead, you need to emphasize well-placed shots.

It will take you a while to pull back the Longbow. You need to memorize this timing and learn how to place your shots considering this pullback. After some practice with the Longbow, this length of time should become muscle memory. Although you might struggle with this aspect of the ranged weapon at first. You can’t fire this weapon off quickly, but it is possible to fire it off as soon as the animation is finishing without having to react with a button press. Rather than holding down the fire button during the draw, clicking it instead will make your character run through the pullback and let the arrow off at the first available opportunity.

The Longbow is going to cost you 11 points when you’re building a loadout. This makes it quite a heavy investment, so the rest of your class needs to be economically structured around this purchase. The Longbow isn’t easy to use. It is comparable to sniping in traditional shooters. The best advice on how to get the most out of it is to practice your aim. Head into Horde mode and practice getting your aim just right. Without precise aiming, you’re going to struggle with such a fickle ranged weapon.

Ranged Weapons – The Recurve bow

The Recurve Bow is really quite similar to the Longbow but balanced. With this ranged weapon, you don’t have to commit so much to staying outside of the action making slow precise shots. Instead, the Recurve bow is a little more multi-purpose.

It costs significantly less in points when you’re building a player class. This means you can balance it a bit better and actually have a chance to defend yourself in melee combat or wear some proper armor.

The Recurve Bow has the fastest fire rate of any ranged weapon. It fires considerably faster than the longbow and a bit faster than the crossbow. This allows your firing to be a little more dynamic, making it closer to the gameplay most people are used to from shooters. You reload your arrow about three times as quick as a Longbow too, so you can actually fire pretty rapidly with this weapon. This makes it more forgiving than the Longbow.

To balance this out, the Recurve bow doesn’t do nearly as much as damage. It is the least effective ranged weapon for hurting enemies, but you’re capable of hitting them a lot more often. It also suffers from bullet drop, or arrow drop as it should be called in this context. Being quicker and lighter, the arrows naturally don’t have the same power behind their fire and will drop. You can adjust your shot to accommodate this but it will make aiming harder. This makes the Recurve bow a good weapon for mid-range rather than long.

Ranged Weapons – Crossbow

The Crossbow is quite different to the other bows in the game since it is by nature mechanical. This is about as advanced as the ranged weapons in Mordhau are likely to get, so if that’s what you’re after you should go for this weapon.

The Crossbow even handles differently, for a start you can aim indefinitely with this weapon. You can spend time looking down the sights like you would in Fortnite or PUBG. This makes it a bit easier to line up a shot than with the traditional bows.

The Crossbow is a pain to reload. You are locked in place for 2 whole seconds while you run through this animation and reload. This is a bit of a pain. Even though the crossbow is quite fast, the practicalities of reloading the thing make it pretty unforgiving. It is closer to the Longbow in this regard and a clumsy player will be punished in this time.

The main upside to the Crossbow is its damage and speed. When you fire off a bolt it will travel much much faster than even the longbow. This makes aiming a lot easier since you don’t have to accommodate the arrow’s trajectory. It also has a higher damage rate than the Longbow. If you hit a target you will do some serious damage with the Crossbow.

Ranged Weapons Summary