Silver Longbow

A Silver Longbow is a Bow-class Artifact weapon introduced in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn.

Basic Description

A Silver Longbow increases the wielder's base Attack by 150, making it the second-strongest Bow in the game (second only to the Sagittarius Bow). It can be sold for 15750 coins and subsequently re-bought for 21000 coins. It is also a pure-element weapon aligned with Jupiter, meaning the attacker's Jupiter Power and the target's Jupiter Resistance are incorporated into damage calculation.

The Silver Longbow is one of five pieces of equipment that can be forged from Mythril Silver by Obaba in Champa. Once Obaba forges it, she will give it to the player free of charge. Silver Longbows possesses three Unleashes: Double Shot, Undead Bane, and Star Dust. Double Shot is a Jupiter-based Unleash that deals 60% more damage than a standard attack. Undead Bane is a Jupiter-based Unleash that deals 70% more damage than a standard attack and may put the target to sleep. Finally, Star Dust is a Mars-based Unleash that deals 40% more damage than a standard attack and hits the enemies up to two spaces to the left and right of the target.

Analysis

The Silver Longbow is deceptively useful for either Karis or Amiti if it can be forged. Between its first two unleashes, Silver Longbow consistently unleashes a fairly strong damage multiplier for whenever it does not unleash Star Dust, but Star Dust is the main point of interest on this weapon; it is the only Unleash that hits with an area-of-effect range of 5, making its middling x1.4 damage multiplier much more effective than otherwise. Being a very wide area-of-effect attack derived from the equipped Adept's Attack statistic, combined with its elemental affinity being the second-most-common weakness among enemies in Dark Dawn, means that if Karis or Amiti are in a class with a high Attack rating and receive high Attack boosts from external sources, they can deal surprisingly enormous amounts of damage to every member of the entire enemy party with a given weapon strike.

Silver Longbow can be thought of as a source of potentially massive group attacks for Karis and Amiti, which are ordinarily associated with supportive roles while in their mono-elemental classes, and therefore can make either of these Adepts very useful against enemy groups late in the game. The Sagittarius Bow is essentially an even stronger take on this weapon because it has higher attack, the same Star Dust Unleash as one of its three Unleashes, and two other single-target Unleashes with higher damage multipliers than those of a Silver Longbow, but that weapon can only be gotten in a postgame file in Crossbone Isle, meaning that a Silver Longbow can be a powerful tool up through the final boss.