Not sure which spec to take for my Archery Rogue...

If you are planning to use Focus skill a lot, then go Artificer. Temprst's focus skill is better suited for daggers, but it can be effective on archer as well.

Assassin archer is fun to play with right build; you can do lot of cool stuff. It was my favorite rogue build.

If you go this route, focus on unlocking Emprise Du Lion. Rogues can capture Suledin relatively early, after which they can easily get Great Bear Hide (which boosts crit chance) by gathering leather.

Based on my limited experience, the ranking of the rogue companions as archers is 1) Varric 2) Cole 3) Sera. Assassin abilities are pretty sexy with either bow or blade, but an Artificer with high critical chance can basically spam talents constantly.

The emerald graves are easier than emprise (combatwise) and do the job as well too for great bear hides...Spend one or 2 hours around the river and you'll have about 50 hides by fighting and you'll be rewarded by very good items through the trial system.
The war table is a sure way to get these hides this is true, but it's no fun and not rewarding at all in my humble opinion.
cheers.

lol, i know what you're talking about mate!
i guesss you may already have tried it and i know it's not particulary enjoyable but here is what i do:

Track your bears at both sides of the river, i mean the side at the very east and the side at the very west....these are the 2 main spawnpoints of the bear.
Everytime you see one, you have to be quick and save immediately because he will cetainly chase a nug or a halla direction giants/brontos LANDS as you said, try to get his attention with a taunt if you're not too far, or just reload your save.
After the reload , the bear should remain still for a few seconds allowing you to go after him before he moves.
Last thing, if you get 2,3 or 4 hides, reload again... it's not worth it because the great bear can spawn 10 times in one hour as well as being absent for 2 hours (beware these 2 situations are extreme and rare though :-)

sounds funny :-)
i also use ennemies to distract other ennemies and i like watching ennemies fighting each other by betting on the winner.
Ok so you want the trophy that proves you arrived in skyhold at low level, right? Are you playing solo (without companions) with "grizzly end" trial on and are you playing on nightmare for this trophy?
Dwarves have the best passive bonus imo, and can look really cool in the legion of the deads armor, and yes, nice point of view about the lyrium smugglers and your inquisitor:-)

cheers.

Good choice. It's something I never tried on my archers, mostly because the description didn't sound fun at first and later I crashed my game plenty of times when I was fooling around with builds for Varric. Those huge explosions people talk about in previous posts are no joke. Even with GTX 1080Ti the game just said "nope" to any Varric-oshima event and peaced out. The only time I seen anything else crash the game in the same way was my mage with triple Fire mine layout in the Descent DLC - there is a door with a crapload of critters waiting behind it. If you place the mines right after opening the door - bye bye screen.

My first toon was a Tempest archer and just didn't feel quite good when I revisited it few months ago to conclude the DLCs with it. On the other hand my Assassin Archer is still great fun. Mark of Death-Leaping shot from close range-Throw daggers+any dagger proc from gear-Stealth-Detonate = with guaranteed crit from stealth and tons of crit damage from gear...it is beautiful. There are probably better rotations, but that one is the easiest for me to pull without making an effort.

My Archer build was as follows:

Archery - Entire skill tree. (4 active skills, all slotted))
Sabotage - Poisoned Weapons, all passives (so you'll have to take Caltrops too, no need to slot it)
Subterfuge - Entire skill tree (only slot Stealth and Shadow Strike* though)
Artificer -Entire skill tree.

I didn't use any active skill from the Artificer tree, so I fooled around with other active skills at my disposal, but didn't really like any of them. I'd now go for the Focus skill, though it's really not necessary. This build is ridiculously overpowered already, cause there's almost no cooldowns whatsoever and your stamina bar is constantly being refilled too because of all the passives that work together.

You need a LOT of levels though if you want to upgrade all your active skills AND get all the passives you need**, so playing a human is almost a must and I'd also advise reconciling Celene and Briala for an extra skill point through the war table.

*melee skill, used when an enemy creeps up on you. Only melee skill you can take on a ranged class, as far as I'm aware.
** Mercy Killing and Ambush from the Subterfuge tree aren't necessary, but they do finish off the build really nicely.

But an Amulet of Power is an extra skill point, lol.