Should I buy a bow or wait for a reward to obtain it? [closed]

Solution 1:

Buy them. As I remember the only way to attain the bow in the base game is to purchase it. There is a slightly better bow you can obtain through the Bozak Horde if you own that piece of DLC (but it will be difficult to obtain until later on when you have more skills) and if you own The Following expansion, you can craft two versions of a crossbow (base and advanced) but it requires you to complete a decent chunk of the story, and the following contains spoilers for the base game, so if that matters to you, you likely won't get around to doing that until you complete the base game. The bow represents the first (and without The Following, only) ranged weapon that is silent. It also allows you to retrieve your arrows after firing (they'll stick out of the body so you can retrieve them or you can just pick them up if you miss) so it's quite economical as well. Purchase it, you won't regret it.