Castanova said:
Is there any place with either a guaranteed or likely longbow?
Longbows are quite rare. If you can make do with a shortbow, roam the plains until you find a buch of barbarians to assrape. First, switch to coward and milk some arrows off them, then kill them all and you may get lucky.
Also, kobolds can drop shortbows from time to time.
Although I owuld advise to take your time and train the crossbow up a bit. IF you happen to find some nice slaying quarrels, it will be a boon.
@desocupado
If you have a hard on for spells, I would suggest a priest, too.
As far as "middle classes" are concerned, try anything with high learning and mana, that has the concentration skil.
Magic missle looks deceptively weak, but in fact it is the only spell that can damage some 'immune to all' monsters. You need a bit of patience and a lot of proficiency in it, though.
If you are having problems with sickness and poison, try and play a healer, they get nice skills (concentration included iirc), and recover pretty quickly.
Otherwise, if you don't have the Healing skill, get it asap. Also, remember that you can use First aid to lessen the effects of poison & sickness a bit.
Of course, rule #1 for such cases should be - if you see something killing you repeatedly, just run for it or kill it at a distance. If you start getting surrounded, use 'T' to change tactics to coward. While on coward, it also has a nice effect of making you run away faster if your hp are below 1/3.
Now, if you DO get poisoned or sick, from my experience, it is best to lock yourself up in a room (or in the wilderness) and walk it off, sickness seldom kills (just lowerst stats and halves HP, which is the true danger Best avoid combat at this point), and poison is more dangerous (especially if the enemy got a critical which lowered your hp considerably). Take note that you can get poison reistance by eating spider corpses.
Later in the game, when you stock up on healing herbs and potions you'll find that it is a non-issue.