This is the Den, can we cut with the stupid and define actual problems before we start suggesting solutions?
3.0: Enhancement Bonuses to Bow stack with enhancement bonuses to arrows (3.0 DMG page 176-177). This might have been to "balance" out the fact that mighty bows only went up to +4 Strength rating (3.0 PHB Page 113-114) in 3.0.
3.5: Enhancement Bonuses to Bow overlap with Enhancement bonuses to arrows, only the higher applies. Abilities other than Enhancement bonuses can be applied to result in pseudo-stacking in many cases. Thus it's possible to have a +1 Flaming, Frost, Shocking, Thundering bow firing +1 Holy Undead Bane, Spell Storing arrows and get the benefits of all those effects with each attack.
However the actual problems are that
- 3rd level Wizard Spells make enchanting ammo foolish.
- The system's attempt to "balance" ranged weapons by giving them a cap of roughly 2/3rd the damage of melee weapons is laughable.
The first of those is easily fixable with Tome attitude. Characters who use bows should just get access to
Greater Magic Weapon,
Keen Edge,
Flame Arrow and the various energy-substituted and admixtured versions of
Flame Arrow without having to use Leadership to do so.
You could write up whole classes that gave level-appropriate abilities, and you could carefully track combat buffs against the action economy, but it's easy enough to illustrate with something along the lines of:
Archer [Combat]
You use a bow (or other missile weapon) as a weapon in the world implied by the rules of this game
Benefit: You can cast
Greater Magic Weapon as an at-will spell-like ability
+1: You can cast
Keen Edge as an at-will spell-like ability
+6: You can cast
Flame Arrow as an at-will spell-like ability.
+11: You can apply each of the 5 flavors of Energy Substitution feat to the
Flame Arrow abiltiy above when you use it. Thus it's pretty much expected that you'll layer all 5 energy types on to your arrows - unless you are dispelled, caught off-guard or running low on prepared arrows.
+16Any projectile you fire gains Distance, Ghost Touch and becomes a Bane weapon against whatever it hits.
And boom, that feat takes the place of caring about the costs and expenditure of magic ammo and mid-level archers no no longer have wizard cohorts following them arrow to prep their arrows.
However the 2nd problem is actually unsolvable at the design stage. In D&D, Missile weapons are better than melee weapons for the following reasons:
- More than 75% of the entries in the monster Manual are incapable of harming a foe more than 6 squares away.
- A non-trivial number of melee-focused monsters in all editions of D&D are more badass in melee (the entire Giant Type, some animals) than even the most optimized melee weapon PC of appropriate level can hope to be.
- Of the 3.x monsters with ranged abilities, a substantial portion have missile capacity that is vastly inferior to a moderately optimized missile weapon PC of appropriate level; and even the most ranged-focused (3.5 Eryines, Beholders) are only on par with optimized PC archers.
- Monsters with melee-punishing damage-shield and counterattack abilities (Remorhaz, Mimic, etc) exist in D&D. Monsters with missile reflection or similar ranged-punishing abilities do not.
3.x D&D "balanced" those advantages of missile weapons against melee by allowing melee weapon specialists to do roughly 150% of the damage of a missile weapon specialist. Now that might be possible in the abstract, but the variation in actual playgroups encounter engagement ranges really throws a wrench into that idea. Some groups are going to wing it with mapless description, some groups will use only rough sketches on a notepad, some groups throw things on a 30"x30" Chessex battlemat and some groups have 12'x8' game tables with 3-dimensional foamcore terrain.
Thus at the design stage it is completely impossible to predict engagement ranges (despite the DMG rules for such) and how many rounds of missile fire before the PCs and the monsters are in melee, and attempting to balance melee against missile by damage ratios or ammo, or action economy will never actually work. To fix these issues, an entire rewrite of many fundamental parts of the game is necessary.
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Hence the 4.0 idea of PCs being either totally melee or totally ranged focused and making it rare for anybody to be able to target enemies more than 10 squares away. This approach was (more) disciplined and resulted in a better balance between the two -- but as has been stated ad nauseam on this forum,
made for a less interesting game.