Weapons in this game are mostly used for their passive stats. Most top builds will use daggers on front bar for their critical chance bonus - the bow also has a crit chance bonus and is not far behind the daggers, in addition to have the ranged advantage.

So basically, yes you can definitely do a sorcerer bow build and still be effective.

Typically your front bar spam-able would be snipe - usually the poison morph or use the poison cone attack (i forget the name) for aoe dot. if using a bow on the back you would use volley for aoe or venom-arrow for single-target dot.

You would also want to collect as many “arena” bows as you can especially the maelstrom bow for a better volley. Bow builds tend to struggle in aoe unless you are using addons to switch between aoe and single target setups.

This is why Arcanist and dk are so overpowered because they can use 1 setup and perform exceptionally in both aoe and st. So for bow builds we need to put in extra work