Originally Posted by Quaker

As you can see, ask 6 Rangers, you get 7 opinions.

These days I carry a Shortbow, a Recurve bow, a Flatbow and a Longbow. The majority of the time, I am playing solo with H&H, or with only 1 or 2 friends and heroes. These groups do not involve "tanking".

Basically, I use my Shortbow almost exclusively, for three main reason. One, the short bow has the fastest refire rate and can be used to interrupt. Two, since there is no tank, the enemies will be in various positions and most often be within Shortbow range anyway. And three, Heroes and, particularly, Henchmen, (including the monks) will always run in to within spellcasting range of the targets. If I use a bow with a longer range, this puts me behind the H&H, which leads to them taking the brunt of the damage, which leads to them dying, which leads to general ugliness.

I started carrying a Recurve lately to experiment with it, but generally speaking, because of the above reasons, I don't find it has any advantage over the Shortbow (for me). If you are with the right group and are functioning as an interrupter, the Recurve bow is a good choice.
I don't use the Recurve bow at all any more - I could go back to bringing a Vamp bow instead, but I never used that either (not worth the hassle).

The Flatbow I still use fairly often, like when I'm in a Ranger group using [[Favorable Winds]. It used to be my primary bow before I got used to using the Shortbow.

I use the Longbow for pulling and it has +5 energy for when I might need that. In either case, it's just switched in and out as needed.

Regarding strings: I use Sundering strings almost exclusively. (gasp!)

I've never found that using things like Poisonous, Barbed, Silencing, etc., were worth it. You sacrifice the extra damage potential of Vampiric or Sundering, for a small increase in condition time which is usually not needed because the enemies die quickly enough and/or the condition is re-applied before it runs out anyway.

The various elemental damage strings have benefits when used against particular enemies or when paired with particular skills, but overall I don't find them useful enough. The one exception is an Ebon string combined with [[Ebon Dust Aura] - works great on my Dust Hero (Jin).

Zealous is somewhat the same - you sacrifice the extra damage for a possible, but small, energy gain which you shouldn't need if you have enough in Expertise.

People will go into great debates about Vamp vs Sundering. The "leets" will crap on sundering mostly because it's the leet thing to do. The bottom line is that there is very little, if any, overall difference in the damage potential of either one. However, because of the nature of Vamp weapons, you always need to to switch them out between battles so you don't keep losing health. So, because I'm lazy and/or buzzed most of the time, I just use Sundering instead of Vamp.