Tears of the Kingdom Best Bow: All 30 Ranked by Damage

A Savage Lynel Bow says 32 in the menu. It does 96.

That is not a bug or a hidden bonus. It is the multiplier the inventory screen prints in small type and then never applies for you: six of Tears of the Kingdom's 30 bows fire more than one arrow per shot, and their listed attack power is the number each arrow carries. The other 24 fire one. Compare a 32 against a 50 and you will reach for the wrong bow.

Below is the whole set — all 30, straight off Zelda Wiki's bow list, with the arrow count broken out and the volley damage worked out so the comparison is like for like.

The number on the bow is not the damage it does

Six bows are multishot, and here is the entire list of them:

Three Lynel bows, the Rito Champion's bow, the Korok-made bow and the Yiga Clan's twin-shot. Everything else in the game fires a single arrow, so its listed strength is its damage.

This matters more than it looks, because it interacts with Fuse. A material stuck to an arrow applies to every arrow in the volley — the fuse guide covers what to attach and why a multishot bow is where cheap materials get expensive results. What that guide does not answer is which of the 30 bows you should be firing it out of. That is this post.

All 30 bows, sorted by volley damage

Compendium number, listed strength, arrows, damage per shot, durability and range — the columns Zelda Wiki carries, with the arrow count pulled out of the strength field. Sorted by what one full shot actually does.

Compendium entries 441 to 470, thirty consecutive numbers, no gaps. That is the complete bow roster.

Two things jump out of that table. The Royal Guard's Bow hits 50 in one arrow, the highest fixed single-arrow attack power in the table above — only the Demon King's Bow, which scales, ever puts more than that on one arrow. And it carries a durability of 20, the same as a Wooden Bow's. Its own in-game description says so plainly: high rate of fire and firepower, low durability. And the Phrenic Bow, the Sheikah zoom bow, does 10. It is a targeting tool with an attack stat attached, not a weapon.

Lifetime damage is a different ranking

Durability in Tears of the Kingdom is a use count, not a percentage — Zelda Wiki describes it as the limited number of uses equipment has before it shatters. So multiply the two columns and you get a rough figure for what a bow is worth from the moment you pick it up to the moment it breaks. Take this as arithmetic on two published columns, not as a measured value: it assumes one shot costs one point of durability, and nothing I could open states the per-shot cost separately for multishot bows.

The order changes at the top. The Savage Lynel Bow wins the single shot; the Great Eagle Bow wins the whole bow, 5,040 against 4,320, because 60 durability is the joint-highest in the game and it is spending it three arrows at a time. It is the highest lifetime total of all 30.

And look at the bottom two rows. A Gerudo Bow, at 25 damage and 40 durability, matches the Royal Guard's Bow over a full lifetime — 1,000 apiece — because the Royal Guard's 50-damage shots run out after twenty of them. The Royal Guard's Bow is a burst tool for a boss window. It is not a bow you travel with.

Five-Shot Burst only lands on four bows

Weapon Bonuses in Tears of the Kingdom come in two tiers. Tier 1 adds 3 to 5 attack or durability; tier 2 adds 6 to 10. Bows can roll Durability Up, Attack Up, Quick Shot (faster draw, tier 2) and Five-Shot Burst (tier 2), and that last one is restricted.

Five-Shot Burst is available on exactly four bows: the Forest Dweller's Bow, the Lynel Bow, the Mighty Lynel Bow and the Savage Lynel Bow. Zelda Wiki's Weapon Bonus table lists them by name and marks every other bow as unable to receive it. Those four can roll Quick Shot as well: the same table marks Quick Shot possible on both of its bow rows, so it is not the trade-off it looks like. And a bow carries one weapon bonus at a time, never two, so Five-Shot Burst is one outcome of the roll rather than something you add to a bow.

What the roll is worth, on the same arithmetic as above:

A Savage Lynel Bow with Five-Shot Burst is 160 damage per shot before you fuse anything to the arrow. Since a Rock Octorok both replenishes a bow's durability and spits it back out with a new weapon bonus, those four are the bows worth feeding to one on purpose rather than only to save a broken favourite.

Three bows you cannot improve at all

Zelda Wiki's Weapon Bonus page lists the equipment that cannot normally receive a Weapon Bonus. Three bows are on it:

• Great Eagle Bow
• Demon King's Bow
• Dusk Bow

No Attack Up, no Durability Up, no Quick Shot, ever. The bow you find is the bow you keep, and the numbers in the table above are final for those three. The Demon King's Bow goes one further — its own page states it cannot be directly repaired by a Rock Octorok either, so its 42 durability is a hard budget with no refill.

That reframes the lifetime ranking. The Great Eagle Bow's 5,040 is a ceiling. The Savage Lynel Bow's 4,320 is a floor, and because a bow carries exactly one weapon bonus it is one or the other: a Durability Up+ makes it 96 across 55 uses, or 5,280, and a Five-Shot Burst makes it 160 across 45, or 7,200. Either clears the Great Eagle Bow.

The Demon King's Bow is priced in hearts

This is the only one of the 30 whose strength column is a rule rather than a number — its attack power depends on your save file. Its power rises by 2 for every heart in Link's maximum life gauge, capped at 60, and hearts currently locked by gloom damage do not count. Zelda Wiki gives the worked example: 20 hearts with five gloom-damaged is 15 counting hearts, so 30 attack power.

Which means it is weakest in the fight that drops it. A Phantom Ganon at low health starts spreading Gloom around itself to drain Link's maximum health, and every heart that comes off the gauge takes 2 attack power off the bow with it. Clearing the gloom damage restores the hearts, and the hearts are the bow's attack power, so the two go back up together.

One source note, because the two pages do not match: Zelda Wiki's bow list prints its strength range as 6 to 60, while the Demon King's Bow page prints 2 to 60. Both are the same rule seen from a different floor — 2 per heart, so 3 hearts gives 6 — and the mechanic itself is stated identically on both. Trust the rule, not the range.

Phantom Ganons drop it on defeat: the one that rises where a Gloom Spawn's last arm falls, the two waves fought inside Hyrule Castle's Sanctum, and the one inside the Great Deku Tree in Korok Forest. Gloom Spawn are a Depths staple, but this is not a Depths-only bow.

Range is three values, not a scale

The range column only ever reads 20, 30 or 40. Twenty-one of the 30 bows sit at 20. Two sit at 30: the Royal Guard's Bow and the Demon King's Bow. The remaining seven are the long ones:

Three Rito bows, the Gerudo Bow, the Sheikah zoom bow, the Yiga twin-shot and the Dusk Bow. Of those seven, only the Great Eagle Bow also finishes in the top three for damage per shot — the other six run from 30 down to 8, which is a large part of why it tops the lifetime table.

If you are sniping from a skydive, the Rito line is the family the game built for it — but note that the Swallow Bow and Falcon Bow buy their draw speed and range with an 8 and a 14. They are positioning tools.

Shooting in midair costs stamina, not time

Aiming a bow in the air in Tears of the Kingdom does not drain stamina continuously the way Breath of the Wild's slow-motion did. Each shot costs 30% of a Stamina Wheel, dropping to 10% in low-gravity areas.

That is three airborne shots per wheel, flat, whether you hover for one second or ten. So there is no cost to lining a shot up carefully, and a real cost to spraying. In a low-gravity room the same wheel buys ten.

Worth knowing alongside that: bows were not hit by Gloom during the Upheaval, so there is no such thing as a decayed bow — none of them turns up pre-weakened the way the surface's decayed weapons do. The only thing that moves a bow off the numbers above is a weapon bonus, and that moves them up.

Where the odd ones come from

Four bows in the table come from named places rather than turning up on whatever enemy happens to be holding one:

The Bell Tower goes unnamed in Tears of the Kingdom — on the map it is just the top of the castle — so a bow with 30 attack power and 40 range sits in an alcove nothing on the map points at.

That last row matters more than it looks. The Great Eagle Bow takes no weapon bonus, so the 5,040 in the lifetime table is the whole of it — but Teba offers to make a replacement whenever Link's is broken or lost, provided it is not still retrievable. The bow that cannot be improved can at least be reordered.

Quick Action Checklist

• Six of the 30 bows are multishot. Savage Lynel, Great Eagle, Mighty Lynel, Lynel and Forest Dweller's fire three arrows; the Duplex Bow fires two.
• Savage Lynel Bow is the biggest single shot: 32 x 3 = 96, before fuse.
• Great Eagle Bow is the biggest whole bow: 84 a shot across 60 durability, 5,040 total, the highest of all 30.
• Royal Guard's Bow is a burst tool. 50 is the highest fixed single-arrow attack power of the 30; its 20 durability matches a Wooden Bow's.
• Five-Shot Burst only rolls on four bows — Forest Dweller's, Lynel, Mighty Lynel, Savage Lynel. Those four are the Rock Octorok targets.
• Great Eagle, Demon King's and Dusk Bows take no Weapon Bonus at all, and the Demon King's Bow cannot be Octorok-repaired.
• The Demon King's Bow scales at 2 damage per undamaged max heart, capped at 60. Gloom-locked hearts do not count.
• Seven bows have range 40, 21 have range 20. Only the Great Eagle Bow is top-tier in both range and damage.
• Every airborne shot costs 30% of a Stamina Wheel, or 10% in low gravity. Three shots per wheel, so aim.