improving usability of quivers, bucklers, and new ammunition types.

[Jaid314]

Alright, so i've got a repeater crossbow mechanic rogue. It's great, i'm enjoying the character, and it's fairly effective (obviously i wouldn't mind getting it to be more effective, but it's good enough that i don't feel the urge to scrap the concept entirely).

there are a few things i have noticed however that could use improvement.

1) quiver management. now, one of the advantages to bows and crossbows is that we can break DR more easily simply by switching arrows. this is great. it's a tremendous advantage, and i greatly appreciate it. but it would *really* help if it was a little bit more easy. as it stands right now, if i want to change what bolt i'm using, i must open the quiver, shift out a stack of 100 bolts, move the remainder of the stack to the top (so that it's first choice for reloading), grab the stack of 100 bolts that's in my inventory, and move it to the ammunition slot of my character. this is rather cumbersome, to say the least, and is not exactly optimal if you suddenly run into a golem and wish you had adamantine bolts out, for example.

what i would *like* to see, ideally, is the ability to interact with the crossbow bolts that are inside the quiver. to be able to drag those bolts to the hotbar, and when i click on them (or hit the appropriate number) the bolts are immediately loaded into the ammo slot and the previous set of bolts that i was using go into the quiver, plus the stack of bolts i clicked on would be moved to the top of the quiver's list. even better if i could have multiple quivers and have the stacks from each of them in the hotbar, and it would also switch the quiver into the equipment slot as well when necessary.

2) bucklers. as it stands, i'm not quite sure why anyone would even use a buckler, but i've noticed there are a few in the game. i'm not asking that crossbow (and bow, and i suppose THF users) be able to benefit from them constantly, but simply that we be able to equip them to benefit from increased AC and DR while shield blocking only. obviously, when attacking the buckler can't be used properly (well, maybe if you were to spend a feat on improved shield bash or whatever it is), and it may be appropriate to apply the buckler's armor check penalty to attack rolls (though with mithral bucklers or even darkwood bucklers, that would quickly become 0).

3) i can't for the life of me imagine why bludgeoning arrows and bolts should be impossible. all you have to do is grind down the pointy end until it's blunt. slashing might be unreasonable, but i wouldn't object to being able to get slashing as well (it would certainly fit with the way we can break DR for most other things) and it could probably be justified in some way or another if you feel like it. the silver flame already sells arrows to people they like enough, it would be nice if they also stocked bolts. finally, just in case, crystal bolts available somewhere would be nice (it would also be nice if we could actualy have a decent chance of getting our hands on magical arrows such as flaming, frost, holy, etc, since that is supposedly an advantage of ranged ammunition-based weapons also). also if they sold flametouched iron bolts... you know, being the silver flame, flametouched iron... kinda matches, see?

[Ravoc-DDO]

Although arrows/bolts are ammunition and thus consumables, they make an essential part of the ranged weaponry class. As such, quivers should be working more transparantly. They are arrow/bolt containers, nothing more. You don't roll open special backpack containers full of sheaths either to equip other blades.

That said, my suggestions are the following:

• Remove the character quiver slot, and make quivers work from inventory. They have an autogather, might as well give them an autorelease...
• Arrows/bolts should be able to be slotted directly from quivers onto hotbars.
• Arrows/bolts should also be memorized in its hotbar slot. If the last one was shot away, the hotbar slot shouldn't clear the corresponding arrow/bolt type.
  This suggestion should actually be extended to a full revamp of hotbars, allowing memorized scrolls, potions, components and weapon sets for every slot. To an extreme, hotbars could perhaps become containers for entire gear profiles and solve the 10+ hotbars everyone has to play with, freeing some screen estate for actual scenery.
• When a stack of arrows/bolts is used up, it should reload the same type of arrow/bolt automatically, no matter the order inside whichever quiver in inventory.

Only issue I can see with this is the Quiver of Alacrity (Abbot quiver). That item may have to be redone then, or provide its alacrity bonus straight from inventory.