just to clarify: the Dwarf longbow ("counts as bow") is strength 2, with ordinary human bow range, right? 3 points seems expensive for a downgrade in strength and some extra distance over the Dwarf short bow. Can someone with Dwarf battle experience tell me: is the shorter distance really such a tactical disadvantage? Are those additonal 3 points per Dwarf Ranger well spent? Thanks

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"make me lunch... worthy of Mordor"

I believe someone did the math for it and the Dwarf Longbows came out as more likely to kill than the normal bow. You are paying for a better shoot value too, and you get extra range, which means an extra turn of shooting and you are more likely to hit. But then I dont play dwarves and this is all speculation, though I do recall their being a thread about it somewhere.

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It costs 3 points because of the shoot value of the Dwarf Ranger. I still feel this is the wrong way of the points being allocated, but others disagree.

Basically, think of it as 10 points for a Dwarf Ranger with bow and 9 points for a Dwarf Warrior with Dwarf Bow and it seemes a lot fairer. Ultimately, it was worked out the extra shot or two was better than the extra strength.

Absolutely, there is another thread out there, but Noddwyr summed it up perfectly.
The extra shoot value and range make for a much better archer.
It is somewhat scenario dependent (I have both types, rangers and warriors) as to how much the range really helps, but that's the case for all archery anyway!

Rangers: Shoot value of 3+ means you have a 2/3 chance of hitting, let's say you have 10 archers, you would expect to hit 6 2/3 enemy models from there it depends on their armour.
If it's just against normal goblins (defense 4) you'd then have a 1/3 chance of wounding, so you'd kill 2 2/9 guys.
Against D5 you'd kill 1 1/9.
Against D6 you'd kill 1 1/9.
Against D7 you'd kill 5/9.

Warriors: Shoot value of 4+ means you've got a 1/2 chance of hitting, so with 10 archers, you'd expect to hit 5 models.
If it's just against normal goblins (defense 4) you'd then have a 1/3 chance of wounding (same as the strength 2 bow), so you'd kill 1 2/3 guys.
Against D5 you'd kill 1 2/3.
Against D6 you'd kill 5/6.
Against D7 you'd kill 5/6.

And then if you add in that the rangers get a whole extra turn of shooting due to their longer range...

Rangers over 4 turns of shooting you'd expect to kill (with 10 archers):
D4: 8 8/9 (close enough to 9 guys)
D5: 4 4/9 (close to 4.5)
D6: 4 4/9 (close to 4.5)
D7: 2 2/9 (close to 2.2)

Warriors over 3 turns of shooting you'd expect to kill (with 10 archers):
D4: 5
D5: 5
D6: 2 1/2 (2.5 guys)
D7: 2 1/2 (2.5 guys)

Hope that helps (and that I got the maths right with all that Christmas "goodness" still coursing through my veins).

If you can exploit the range difference, you can kill more guys, but it does depend on the defense values.

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It's 3pts for the bow because GW mucked-up LOME and they wanted to use the same points as in LoME for Khazad-dum rather than admit to yet another mistake - this was before they decided to totally throw LoME out of the window concerning points costs and model production. Originally they were to have S3 24" bows but this was dissaproved of by the playtesters as it meant dwarves being the equal, if not better, with elves in a shooting contest.

As Hashut says, just look at what you get for the total point cost and you will find that it's pretty much spot on.

Great; thanks everybody. I suspected the 'have to keep Elves the best archers' logic. A shame about the strength trade-off, but the extra range appears to be worth the price.

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"make me lunch... worthy of Mordor"

I find a combination of Dwarf Warriors with bows and Dwarf Rangers with Dwarf Longbows works best.

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