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Bows have the capability of not only having properties not available on any other weapon, such as Balanced which allows potions to be imbibed while holding a 2 handed weapon, but also at intensities that are not possible with anything else. You won't see any 40 SSI Ornate axes floating around, yet you'll see quite a few heavy crossbows with it.
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All of the 'one-handed' vs. '2-handed' concepts within UO, and the corresponding ability to either drink-pots or not, plus the whole idea of a 'balanced bow', are UO-specific. They could change the whole thing tomorrow so that all bow-users can drink pots with no problem, and to hell with 'balanced'. Also the idea of bows being able to go up to 40 SSI may indeed not be overpowering considering that other weapons only make it to 30, as the fastest bow has a slower base speed than the fastest melee weapon anyway. In the end its not how the numbers work out, its the total effect it has on the game balance.
I wonder if all bows should behave as 'balanced' actually, because there's a discrepency right now.
On my shard, an extreme minority of players have reportedly spent serious amounts of real life money to get these certain, extremely rare balanced bows (usually crossbows, actually) crosssharded over to them. On test shard I tried to make bows like they had, and ran through the equivalent of many heartwood kits, and didn't get one. On production shards they are EXTREMELY rare and are generally not available for sale or aquisition by any means. From what I can tell, if such bows are ever sold, its for real cash in the hundreds of dollars.
Without those special bows, those people's templates don't even work right. They have to chug pots of practically every type, the template is built around it.
I literally don't have access to bows like theirs so I cannot make templates like that work the way that theirs do. The result is that their archers are more effective than anything I am allowed to make.
The extreme rarity of bows that perform like this is essentially unfair. Those guys will be able to kill any archer I ever make under the existing system, they are always under the full influence of potions (probably scripted pot chugging too but that's another topic).
If I could chug with any bow at all, the availability issue would disappear because that basic type of bow exists everywhere. The issue with the common bows is that they are enhanced loot bows and therefore are never 'balanced'.
I'm not holding my breath on this one but just saying -- potions and bows - - it's all just computer code and none of it is set in stone, and the implementation right now isn't entirely fair.
