For early game dealing with skeletons and general swarms of things the Stag Breaker was pretty solid, slow but solid.

Just upgrade it a couple times,

You can try ranging a troll down with fire arrows with the basic bow or wait till you have the metal to make the bronze ax to cut trees for fine wood for the 2nd tier bow.

If I recall correctly Leather armor and the Stagbreaker was OK for running dungeons. Just have to be ontop of things like poison skells and spawn piles.

After that the bronze mace was better at dispatching skells and greylings for me so I shelved the stagbreaker.