Discussion: are bows too strong?

I’m on a third play-through with some self-imposed rules alongside some friends and one question that came up for extensive, heated debate was: “are bows too strong?”

One of our rules is simple: Death means all items lost. Food, weapons, armor, arrows, meads, resources… all of it. It makes the game very challenging and fun, but…

After a good dozen deaths we have slowly, if subconsciously, reduced our weapon selection to bows. They are very strong, versatile, and… the one important reason this might have happened is bows are quite inexpensive to make. We also realized that one can get by with wood or flint arrows with the abundance of resources required for these munitions. While the cost for iron and silver arrows might be steep, this is grossly offset by the abundance of obsidian in the mountains and obsidian arrow variants are very good.

I cannot think of many creatures in Valheim resistant enough to bows and arrows to use some other weapon, other than perhaps skeletons and Bonemass. Otherwise, we are finding ourselves asking: why we would use any other weapon than the bow? There are not many consequential drawbacks to using a bow. Considering how inexpensive and how powerful they are from the very beginning of the game, and how well the Finewood bow can even perform against premier enemies such as Fulings, we find there isn’t much incentive to use other weapons but we still fought this question lol.

So the question posed to r/Valheim after some game patches is: are bows too strong?