Sunshark Bow - My Personal Favourite (Patreon)

One of the things I most lament about the Vespertine Bow and Flower Knight in general is how vastly it overshadows and spoils the progression of Bow users in the game.  It reached the point where we no longer build the Vespertine Bow because we were just not exploring the other options in the game.  The Ink Blood Bow and Arc Bow are both top tier weapons that deserve a huge amount of attention - but you cannot blame people for taking the easiest route.

However, it is the other bow that is the focus of this article, a bow that is utterly unique and has a huge amount of interesting things about it; the Sunshark Bow:

I've written about this one before here and there (in the Gorment Armor Ranged Builds and in the Top Weapons Article); but I'm not sure if you guys were aware that this is my #1 favourite bow in the game by a long, long margin and today I'm going to try and sell you guys on why I love it so much.

Statistically the Sunshark Bow is something of an oddity, it's a Range: 1 weapon with 0 + Sharp strength that has 3 Speed.  You can also turn it into a range 1, slow 4 + Sharp strength with the addition of three red affinities.  However it is also a melee weapon, which gives it a bunch of unusual traits when compared to other bows.

We'll start with an examination of the Bow itself.  The fact that it is a Melee and Ranged weapon holds a lot of interesting interactions that should be considered.  For a start, it can have its range increased by items such as the Quiver and Sunstring, now this isn't easy to activate a lot of the time, but one of the easiest ways to get it is to use the Cycloid armor from the Sunstalker.  Here's one build from an old campaign, mostly for the example.  This one has some quirks that are not 100% efficient.

(As always, remember that affinities are all three colours).

You can see as well in this build that it is very easy to get the slow version of the bow activated just by placing it in the top right corner of the build.  

Ultimately, Cycloid Sunshark sets are very easy to design, because the armor set is so flexible.  However because the Sunshark Bow is already Sharp, the Scale Sleeves ability isn't as useful as it would be with other items.  So often, unless you have two sets of Cycloid, it's worth handing the armor set to a rogue type using a less powerful weapon type, so they can take advantage of the sharp.

Range 3 on a bow, surprisingly, is all you really need. So the Quiver and Sunstring is pretty much a 'must have' item. The remaining 2 builds are going to give you two other examples of how you can use the armor set.  

First up we have the cheap option:

If you want the Slow +4 Strength option on this bow, you can rearrange things a bit by swapping out the bone dagger for something else (it's just a utility slot there).  The Lucky Charm can also be a Fecal Salve or Cat's Eye Circlet.   If you are playing with more expansions there are a number of other items with an up red that will work instead of the bone dagger.

However, that build isn't interesting, it's just cheap and effective support/DPS/utility. Let's now look at the interesting build.

White Lion Armor

Yup, we're here again. Despite my general feelings that the White Lion set is underpowered and not as interesting as it could be, the Sunshark bow is one of those super interesting weapons that has an unexpected interaction with the White Lion Armor set.  It's a Melee Bow!

This means that you are able to 'Pounce' with it when you use the White Lion set.  Giving you bonus accuracy and strength! Now there I would never argue that this is a top tier build, but it's pretty fun and interesting to employ and you would have to agree that the concept is good fun.

Here are a couple of example builds:

(Remember that the new Arrow has a blue affinity to join up with what we already have - this will stack with a Bow Master's ability of Deadly 2.)

You can get the Quiver and Sun String activated even without the aid of a Crest Crown, but not enough people talk about the Crest Crown, so I wanted to remind people that it exists.  It shuffles the discard back into the deck people, that's insanely good!

The main limiting factor here is still the affinity issues on the WL set.  There isn't much we can do about that, the WL set is what it is and it has badly positioned affinities.  

However, it is a LOT of fun to pounce with a bow master and smoosh up the monster!