Opinions on 13 Green Bows

I'm not sure why there's all the hate for damage while in stance. I never leave home as a damage ranger without some sort of IAS, and that means offensive stances. Damage while in stance is fantastic when you're using things like Tiger's Fury constantly. Shhh, you're going to inflate the price...

Stinger
(aka Poisonous Hornbow of Marksmanship +15 stance)
Best of the green bows for a ranger "spike" build. Hornbows have 10% armor penetration, and while they are slow to reload, they fire interrupts (essential to spike) just as fast as any other. Add Poison and this is one deadly bow, especially in PvP.
Negative: A PvP Spiker will prefer a custom "Sundering Hornbow of Marksmanship +15^50" more, though a perfect stat custom bow will cost about 50 times more. This is probably the most common green bow out there. If you want one, just go to LA1 and say "WTB Stinger 2K" and you'll likely get an offer.

Tarnok's Recurve Bow
(aka Sundering Recurve Bow of Enchanting +15 enchanted)
If you are an R/Mo, this is an excellent bow to keep handy! Healing Breeze, Vigorous Spirit, Protective Bond, Holy Veil, and Judges Insight(!) all last 20% longer when using this bow. Recurve's are ideal for interrupting, and this is the only green recurve that is not vampiric or zealous.
Negative: Not so ideal for non R/Mo's. Usually spikes use a Vamp Horn and a Sundering Long.
Prot Bond and Veil don't last 20% longer since they are maintained...

That's really narrow-minded.

I don't know how many PvP or PvE battles you've been in, but when is the warrior ever the main target? You can get away that rangers may be least likely targeted with other targets, but just because you have a warrior in your party doesn't mean you'll be immune from attacks. My comment was regarding PvE. Warriors take most of the damage in PvE battles.

How would your team benefit if you were to stand 30 feet back, but shoot twice as slow because you're afraid to get closer to the action?

Well, here's how I'd look at it.

Drago's Flatbow, Boulderbeard's Short Bow, Forgerunner, both Tarnok's, and Thornbeard's Horned Bow all suck due to their strings. Sundering is crap, and if a Ranger wants to do elemental damage, they are better off running Kindle Arrows.
There are quite a few situations where the elemental bows are quite useful. e.g.- I use forgerunner to solo ice imps and ice golems. Preperations like kindle arrows are not always a good option because barrage strips preperations. Plus, what if I want a different preperation but still want to use an elemental bow? (apply poison is one of my favorites) Elemental bows work much better against warrior mobs than a lot of the other bows. Though I'm not a huge fan, there are those builds that use conjure flame/lightning which would work quite well with the forgerunner, thornbeards, or boulderbeards short bow.

Just for the record, I would never use a horn bow for barrage. Much too slow and as such you can't do a constant spam of barrage with a horn bow.

It really depends on the build you are using, but my favorites from the list at the beginning of the thread are:

1. Graygore's Zealous Shortbow
2. Elswyth's Recurve bow (excellent for BP in tombs)
3. Boulderbeards short bow
4. The Forgerunner
5. Dragos Flat bow (not particularly useful, but I love taking screenies with it because its so freekin huge)

I mostly use golds nowadays but greens are great if you don't want to spend uber cash for godly perfect weapons.

After all the research I did, I finally concluded that the only green bow worth permantly keeping in a weapons slot is the Elswyth's Recurve.

Drago's Vampyric and Graygore's Vampyric are worth keeping in storage for certain kinds of farming runs. Perfect vampyric strings are really getting up in price, so going green is still cost effective.

The Tarnok bows look great, but grab an ascalon bow and throw on a fiery or icy string and you get the same results, which is pretty much what I did.

For my pve play style, I have concluded that the only two types of bows I need are recurves and flatbows. The recurve excells where the flatbow is weak and vice versa. So my bow slots:

1. Gold Composite Bow of Defense
2. Fiery/Icy Flatbow (icy in fire islands or desert, fiery in shiverpeaks or kryta)
3. Elswyth's Recurve (in the middle of fighting I can switch to this for more damage/health, then switch back to 1 to stop the the health degen)
4. specialty farming bow, or something that makes me look cool holding. my collection 4/5 are green bows:
1-Elswyth long Bow (for solo)
2-Elswyth recurve (for extra damage as you said)
3-Stinger or Zealot storm bow ( pvp )
4-Dragos flat bow (to take nice screen shots and show off )

Flatbows are fine if you are an avid RtW, or FW user. That straightens the arc out and makes it much more accurate. Thus with it's faster fire rate, it becomes quite useful. But, if you don't use one of the 2 speed-ups, leave it in your storage. Ok, I dont really use RtW or FW now. I prefer using Melandru Arrows when I dont need these skills. RtW/FW are used, for me, to interrupt.

I have Boulderbeard short bow and Elswyth Recurve bow. I can say I prefer to have Lightning (Boulderbeard short bow) dmg than Fire or Icy. Anyway, is the Flat bow has a poor accuracy rate? I say that because I wonder if Drago Flat bow has this problem. If so, I wonder why the popularity? I'm sure its not for the perfect sundering i was testing it, and wrote on a post above the EXACT answer
just few posts above yours

i was testing it, and wrote on a post above the EXACT answer
just few posts above yours Well, I have just see the first threads thats all (I was in a hurry at my job). My bad if you said it before .