General Guide
The hardest thing about being an archer is getting started. It takes time and levels to get your core skills opened and usable, but once you do the game becomes easier, and even easier as time goes on. While this is mostly a guideline of how I will be playing my archers at their core, this can also be taken as a loose guide as an effective way to start your own, if you want to look at it that way.
Stats
To start, it's pretty much always 2 Dex, 1 Con. I play Bow Archers and both bows and Bow Mastery are driven by Dex. Con is for survivability and to get Thick Skin as early as possible. 3% Resist all doesn't look like a lot at first, but it ends at 15% and the sooner you have that, the better.
When Dex becomes a grey stat at each level, I throw the extra point (if any) into Con or Str, depending on gear needs. If gear with +Con is in abundance, maybe back off it it a bit to increase Str for better gear, especially if Armor Training is part of the build. I think most characters can get away with just 1 point in Armor Training, which is just 16 Str; that makes Str a low priority so a build that needs Cunning might go that route instead.
Thick Skin needs 59 Con to max, so might as well make that a second stat to 60. After that, it all depends on the build.
Class Talents
Bow Mastery is the most important skill and gets maxed ASAP. This doesn't mean just dumping points blindly, though. As other useful skills open-up, it's worth delaying Mastery to get the new Shots. Being able to debilitate and debuff is the core of being an Archer, so that takes priority.
Steady Shot is also important, but it isn't as vital early game because you're not doing as much damage anyway. I usually max this out after I have my other shots available and 3 points in Flare.
First priority will look something like this:
Archery-Bows: 5/1/1/1
Archery Training: 5/0/0/0
Archery Prowess: 3/1/1/5
Combat Veteran: 1/1/5/0
Once that bit is accomplished, fleshing things out a bit more can happen. I'd possibly/probably give a bit more priority to getting Crippling and Pinning Shots to 3/5 or 4/5 than I would getting Spell Shield to 5/5, but I suppose that depends on the build, the drops, and probably mood.
I haven't decided on Excellence as a core skill just yet since I haven't given it a proper run. My first character will do that and I'll make a decision on it afterwards. There are some points where I imagine having Strangling shot early on will make a big difference, but I'm not sure the level requirement is realistic for those points. I'm also a bit hesitant to make a tree that requires a category point to unlock a core of all builds since that limits what wacky things I can do with other locked trees.
Either way, that loose build makes ~30 points leaving another 33 points (before outside sources) to invest in other skills. If my math is right, that's about level 22~ish. That leaves plenty of time to decide on Aim vs Rapid and any other class skills that might be interesting to whatever build I've cooked up.
Generic Points
I'll be totally honest, I don't think any build I make will avoid taking Thick Skin; I plan my stats around it, even! Likewise, Combat Accuracy is essential as well since Accuracy impacts how well archer debuffs land and there's apparently a bonus for having accuracy over your target's defense.
Other than that, the generic points for Archers are really flexible. Not counting racial trees, Archers only have three trees and many of the skills there are one-point wonders. My general goal with Generic points will be something like this:
Field Control: 1/1/0/0 or 1/1/1/5 w/ Excellence
Combat Training: 5/0/5/0/0 or 5/1/5/0/0
Survival: 1/1/1/0 or 1/0/1/0 w/ Thief rescue
Since there's not much else to spend them on, I may go for 3/5 in Heightened Senses to disarm traps or more Track, but it depends on the build. This is the lowest I'll take the talents, though.
So, with the best luck and no Excellence or heavy gear, an Archer can get away with 14 Generic points as a core. Very likely Racial trees will take priority, but in a lot of cases there are only one or two skills in a tree that will need 5 points, so ultimately there's a lot of room for fun with gifted trees when it comes to Archers. Absolute worse case, you get a race that wants full points in each racial talent (i.e., Skeleton) for 20 points, plus the worst case above for another 21. That leaves just 2 generic talents of the base 43 remaining. It is extremely unlikely that this will be the case, and seeing as I've already finished Skeleton I don't expect I'll run into this.
Cornac is going to suck, though. No racial means I'll probably get drawn towards two different generic gift trees and spend points horribly. Meh, we'll see how disciplined I am when we get there.
Prodigies
The only one I can say I will consider in all cases is Vital Shot, because it's so damn good. Most of the time I expect it will be unnecessary, but I also expect that, unless I really plan my build very well ahead of time, I won't qualify for many prodigies and I won't care about the majority of them.
Differentiation
This is probably going to be the most difficult point of them all; if I'm running so many Archers, how do I make each of them different enough that it doesn't become the same game every time? I have a few answers to this one, which I'm mostly putting here for myself because typing out the outline above sorta depressed me.
Class Talents: Archers have five different locked trees to play with that I haven't addressed; if I reserve one of those for each of the remaining races, that would be 5 different Archers out of the 7 remaining right out of the gate. Even more than that, I only accounted for 30 out of 63 base Class talents, meaning that even if I maxed every skill in a tree, I would still have point left to spend elsewhere. All in all, there's enough room here that I can make each archer different no matter what.
Generic Talents: The big one. I'm spending very few talents here as part of my core, which gives me a lot of room. Racial talents will be a difference outright as well, but I can also pick up trees from Prodigies, rescues, and the like. While some of these options are pretty crappy for an Archer, rest assured that I will think of some creative builds before I really get started and will be prepared to fall into them when possible.
Prodigies: A smaller point than the other two, but also important. Rather than being something that outright makes each character different, these can actually be a goal to aim for; an obvious example is Mystical Cunning, which seems to be the prodigy end-point for a poison build. Others might be more daunting to manage, but I'm sure I can do something.
The Races themselves: I imagine that Cornac, Higher, Shalore, Thalore, and Halfling will be fairly simple themselves, but their racials will impact the way I play. For example, I might go nuts and try to stack Blinding Speed with Shalore's Grace of the Eternals for a stupid fast character. Let's also not forget that Yeek and Ghoul are going to be really difficult to deal with; Yeek for the frailty and Ghoul for their speed. These are again early game issues, but they're going to be the biggest ones to deal with.
Challenge Rules: Like any other challenge created, I can make the rules. That means that if I think a class will be too easy or bland otherwise, I can make a difficult or silly rule to go along with it. I might decide that my Higher can't use any items with talents on them (including/excluding diggers). I also have plans for a challenge run that isn't the Archer class at all that I can mix in when things start to get a bit stale, if need be.
Mods: I don't plan on using any game changing mods, but if I stumble onto an interesting new race or something, maybe I'll run that for a little while. There is a lot of community created content to be tapped. The mods I do use in addition to the default mods are Plenum Tooltips and (until 1.05 anyway) the oldrpg tileset and UI. If I add anything else, I'll be sure to clearly make note of it.
