Tvättbjörn

Only the fighter skeletons seems to have decent DR. Doesn't the wizards have something like 4 standard DR, 7 piercing DR? Not really worth optimizing damage type then imo. I like war bows, with good damage boost I believe they have fairly competitive damage against targets with low to medium DR and they require very little micro compared to gun switching or just trying to not overkill too much. Using them with the NPCs can be problematic though because you really want high might. Hunting bows seem kind of meh though because the enemies they are useful against tend to be very easy to kill with AoE. If any ranged weapon is gimped it's probably the regular crossbow. There is probably no situation where it wouldn't be more effective to use a war bow or an arbalest.

If you're playing with custom characters you don't really need a healer, even on PotD. I have played with fighter+paladin tanks, a barbarian and three rogues (no godlikes). A good fighter can pretty much stay alive with self-healing, especially if you add a draining weapon and maybe retaliation. Paladin and healing gloves was plenty to keep the others alive. That's even without any strong cc. If you start to add cipher(s) to the mix you should have even less trouble.

I have to disagree. With a well equipped tank or two you can pretty much bring whatever you want in the remaining four slots, or you could solo if you want. You could probably just ignore tanks too and just rely more on cc and pure damage output instead.

POTD enemies have 15 more in accuracy and the four defense stats, they also have 25% more endurance. DR is the same and I believe they have the same damage too. Edit: Ofc I haven't checked every enemy type so there might be exceptions.

With good defense stats fighter tanks rarely take damage in most encounters (even on PotD), but they really don't deal any damage either. I would probably just take constitution for the extra health and endurance. As far as race goes just take the one you want to play unless you really want to min-max, in the end it won't make much difference for your combat performance.

Spells get additional caster level * 1 accuracy.

Faster weapons have higher dps against DR0 so accuracy generally benefits faster weapons more. Arbalest has prone on crits which might be worth more than the extra damage. Especially when the prone helps others deal more damage (sneak attack, lower deflection). Which weapon has higher dps depends on DR, accuracy vs deflection and damage boost. High damage boost benefits the war bow more. Of course there are talents and other buffs that can make one weapon better too. Arbalest benefits more from per encounter bonus damage abilities like the rogue ones.

I'm not a big fan of paladins because they just feel buggy. The DR aura for me has no radius, only applies on the paladin for some reason. Not sure if the other auras work, haven't felt like trying. The delay bad effects ability doesn't seem to work very well either, sometimes it feels like it just makes enemy cc even longer.

I won't deny what you say here. But I think that one also has to factor in whether the bow-user in question has a weapon focus on only one type of bow, but not the other. For example, if you have a charcter with the WF Adventurer but not WF Peasant, he'll have a +6 accuracy on his warbow, but not on the hunting bow. And in this case, it seems that it wouldn't be all that wise to throw away a parfectly good +6 acc bonus, just because you find yourself in a situation where a hunting bow might be a little better, if not for the WF issue. Ofc there are many things you have to consider, I only wanted to check how the weapons compare when you're just shooting basic attacks with everything else identical. It can be useful for determining what type of weapon focus you want to pick though. Sadly the description is wrong, it's only 20% extra damage. Hunters would be really strong with +20 damage per hit though.

Tanks usually take very little damage in this game, even on the most difficult setting. So you don't really need to get as much damage as you can, better to have an extra tank and make life so much easier. I can even see having three tanks being a perfectly viable option but I use a barbarian instead to keep any stray enemies away from my squishies.

With good damage bonus and average accuracy the bows are roughly equal against (effective) DR5 enemies. Boosting damage bonus and accuracy increases the DR threshold. If you have penetration you have to add that to the DR number. Lower DR means hunter bow is better, higher DR usually means that war bow is better but if the DR is so high that the war bow deals minimum damage the hunter bow becomes better again because of higher rate of fire.

I'm running a no caster party through PotD (fighter, paladin, 2h barbarian, 3 ranged rogues). The barbarian consistently does almost twice the damage of a rogue and she is definitely a valuable member of the team because she is the only non-consumable source of AoE damage. She also has decent survivability with the large endurance pool and the self-heal so she can help protect the rogues when enemies get past the main tanks. In a normal party I think having an extra melee that is more focused on dps but with some resilience can be valuable as well, but of course wizards and druids are better suited for pure AoE damage. It would be fun to try a 6 melee party with something like 2 main tanks, 1 single target dps and 3 barbarians. I think it could be very powerful, especially against shades and the likes because they don't have any overly squishy targets. It does make it more difficult to focus down important enemies like casters though and it's always nice to have some ranged damage dealers for chokepoint fights.