Marksmanship Skill: Guide to Lower Level Crossbow Skill-up

Use of the Crossbow

Crossbows may be one of the most underrated ranged weapons in the game. This is because a crossbow generally lacks the higher DMG of a bow or gun throughout the game. However, a crossbow has something that no other ranged weapon will ever have, a large variety of status inducing bolts. Crossbows use your Marksmaship skill.

• The primary uses of a crossbow, besides pulling, are these

1. Aid in soloing levels leveling, crossbow provides the potential for a fairly powerful first hit. Crossbow also has a geater damage/delay ratio till lvl 5, when the Longbow's very high DMG is arguable.
2. The Acid Bolt; this bolt is first avaliable at lvl 15, and is the most powerful bolt for quite awhile and useful bolt for eternity. This is one of the few things in the entire game that will reduce an enemy's DEF, and the only one that will activate as often as it does. This bolt can be used with amazing effects all the way to the end of the game.
3. Training for the use of gun without the extremely high cost of a bullet.
4. Use of a sleep bolt in emergency situations. However, the sleep bolt is a fairly unreliable bolt overall and sleep is fairly short lived.
5. The most likely common use is for the Bloody Bolt. Another one of the eternally useful bolts of the crossbow. This Bolt drains an enemy's Hp when hit and transfers it to the attacker. This bolt can be used by backup tanks to restore HP, a DD who is forced to temporarily tank, or more commonly in farming situations to lower downtime to nearly nothing.

What to bring for Skillup

Luckily, as many RNG as can tell you, there is overall an abbundance of fairly inexpensive ways to get a decent amount of +Ranged Accuracy. This is useful for landing your shots, since your typically going to be attacking monsters you battled at lvl 10-20 with initially level 0 skill. The basics are outlined here.

• For a ranger, most likely what you are currently equiped with will work just fine.
• for any other job, invest in the non +1 version of the highest lvl +Ranged Accuracy rings. These are generally very cheap and are all jobs equipable.
• Also attempt to get Drone or the non +1 earrings. +6 AGI is +3 Ranged ACC, so second concern is to get some +AGI equipment.

Jobs for skillup

Ideally, a Ranger should be used for skilling up any ranged weapon. However, Ranger is often the reason people level Marksmanship. The second choice for skillup is Thief, since it has high base AGI and often wears +AGI equip.

For subjobs, the best choices are Ranger for sharpshot and ranged Accuracy bonuses, White Mage in order to lessen downtime since this is likely going to be done solo, Thief's evasion boost can be useful for reducing downtime and AGI boosts, and Ninja has access to Utsusemi plus fairly high AGI.

Things you should know

• 1. The earliest levels are most likely going to be the hardest, and the higher level your job is, the more frustrating it can become. This is because you will be missing very often if you fight on even extremely low leveled monsters, and because of the extreme inflation of your STR compared to what it would be at lvl 1-10. A sucessful shot did approximately 150 damage, and instantly killed anything until I moved to my second area. Skillups will be slow because everything is one-shotted. So it's one shot, hope for skillup, kill another monster to even hope for a skillup.
• 2. These are the areas I suggest for skilling up:

1 - ~15:

Kill level 1 monsters outside your Town; this is basically all you can do. If you wish to attack higher level monsters, you will waste alot of money on bolts.

15 - 30:

Go to a nearby area with lots of monsters and no people go to for experience points... this can also be a good time for weak NM hunting. I suggest places like Giddeus and Ghelsba Outpost, with lots of beastmen. Around this level, monsters will actually begin to survive a few hits (approximately 4-5 for me as a lvl 31 WAR), so skillups become a bit easier.

30 - ~75:

There are quite a few areas you can go to such as Buburimu Peninsula and Fort Ghelsba. My personal Favorite is the Valkurm Dunes. However, if you go here, you must take care to not be stealing mobs from EXP parties. Why the dunes? Because on my server, lvl 1 bolts go at 1-1.5k per stack. Selbina sells Crossbow Bolts at 6 gil each; 6 x 99 = 594 gil per stack. This saves you quite a bit of money over time, especially since you only average about 4-6 levels per 99 bolts.

• Hints for avoiding party'ss monsters in Valkurm Dunes
  • You want to start on Lizards, these are far easier then gobs or clippers till you decent accuracy, they last till 50. I suggest fighting these in the cave you must travel through to reach Konschtat Highlands. Partys avoid here because it is fairly easy to link lizards, and the pop of sand bats are a threat. People will actually appreciate you saving their skin from sand bats.
  • After this, you can fight Snippers or lower tier gobs till about 65 skill. After this you move on to the higher tiered gobs (muggers, Leechers, Gamblers).
  • Note: I do NOT know when these monsters actually cap on skill, These numbers are approximations I made.

75 - 100?:

My information on this area is limited, since the only time I ever skilled up anything to these lvls without a skillup party was Daggers on a 42 WAR in Carbuncle to 100 for Viper Bite. Go to kazham and fight Mandys in the more remote areas or when partys are limited. If you do not want people to get mad, then you have no choice but to fight Goblin Smithy's, these are rarely fought for XP; but I will say that goblins will dish out far more damage to you than a mandy. There may also exist better places to do this that I do not know of.

to be continued