My main crafter is a fletcher.
Two things I'd like to see:
#1: I'd like to be able to have some control of which mods the runic will place on the bow. A chance of affecting a single mod to be the one I want would be a significant improvement. If it had some kinda negative tradeoff that DID NOT change the individual bow I was crafting (say maybe a decreased chance of producing the bow at all, or if it took 2 charges off of the runic instead of 1), even that is better than what's there now. See, we fletchers are not mindless goobers who enjoy blowing through a hellish-to-obtain 'runic' fletching kit and having the results be a batch of mixed-up things.
Having minimalistic control (choose ash, yew, frostwood?) is nonintuitive and frustrating. Ash is only really helpful if the runic hits for SSI in the first place, yew only so if it hits for DI, exceptional chance, or HCI. Using those woods is not a real choice in the runic bow crafting, it's just an effort to augment that mod that you would like to see, IF it even happens.
#2: The non-artifact-class, player-crafted-recipe bows are TRASH the way they are now because of the deliberate, zero chance of making the bow exceptional. Go check the vendors in Luna if you have any doubts as to this. Nobody makes them, sells them, buys them, uses them. They are poop and the lack of realistic/any exceptional chance is why.
To clarify, an example of the non-artifact class is the "Lightweight Shortbow", a bow which, when crafted with a runic kit, does come out with runic mods. Well-known examples of the "artifact class" bows that don't need exceptional chance (and never come out with runic kit mods) include the mischief maker and night reaper.
The damage amounts on these bows have already been nerfed from their original release, and when you give them their exceptional chance, those exceptional bows get the DI that they need to be viable. Only then is there a reasonable possibility that you will make something that is useful for either pvm or pvp.
The extremely occasional, runic-based DI you can get when crafting these bows on a runic kit doesn't justify the ingreds, you end up with a lot of charges blown and ingreds used to get a big pile of junk plus maybe one example of what is still probably not a bow that anyone would want.
When run through a runic kit, the results would be much like any other bow except that those extra ingreds would give you the extra mod associated with the bow type. The results would not necessarily be god-like, but the bow would just be proper and usable thanks to the exceptional chance being for real.
The number of good, player-crafted bows on the market would presumably increase with this change. I don't feel like that's a bad thing. Archery is right now a world of the haves and have-nots - bows that the most powerful archers carry cost hundreds of dollars to get (the sellers dont take gold, just money), or are literally priceless.
A side note:
On my home shard, the best bows are known to be extremely rare cross-sharded dupes that the rest of us *literally* *cannot* *get* at any price. I went to test shard and burned up the equivalent of many heartwood kits just to see, and did not get a single bow like the cross-shard dupes in the hands of the cheaters! Better bows on the market wouldn't hurt from that perspective. Kinda not fair for the people in that awful cheater speedhack dupe guild to truly have the best, inobtainable bows.
