Quartz said:
The character would have to be 10th level at the earliest with my suggestion of stacking. Your paladin likely has a holy sword by that time.
Earlier in the thread, I explained my reasoning for "pricing" these effects more than standard weapon enhancements.
1/ They stack with standard weapon enhancements, and with
greater magic weapon, and with
flame arrows,
keen edge, etc. Sure, your own
gmw will suck thanks to your low caster level, but you could get one cast by someone else.
2/ This class effectively removes the #1 nasty anti-archer tactic: sunder his frikkin' bow. (An Arcane Archer can pull out ANY old bow and ANY old arrows and lay down some smack.) Have you seen how horribly hosed an average archer is when his super-bow is sundered? Relative immunity to that tactic is not an obvious consequence, and it's not spelled out in the class, but it is strong IMHO.
Do you see where I'm coming from?
If I were making an optimized Arcane Archer, I'd have two or three Ehlonna's Quivers full of (masterwork) composite longbows, which would be darn cheap by level 15. I'd have the usual golfbag of obscure alchemical metal arrowheads (silver, cold iron, adamantine), and one quiver full of various bane arrows.
My main bow would be +1 speed, and I'd have a backup just like it. My arrow enhancements would be: good alignment trait, thundering, seeking, good -> holy, ghost touch. Possibly in that order.
... but I could see a very different build for an Eberron archer.
For one thing, I'd take the merciful trait, so I could deliver
repair critical damage to my (theoretical) party's Warforged front-line fighter... and I'd turn that trait off most other times.
Finally, it's my opinion that classes should err on the weak side, especially in their early levels. This class does the archer thing well, and allows you to conjoin arcane-ness with archer-ness in ways that you can't get just by taking Battle Sorcerer 16 + Fighter 4 (which will net you BAB +16, caster level 16) or Battle Sorcerer 8 / Fighter 2 / Eldritch Knight 10 (BAB +18, caster level 17).
My one worry: the first level class ability is really, really weak. That's the one thing I'd really like suggestions on fixing: making an ability that's not dip-worthy but is cool and useful and fun.
I've made some builds that get up to caster level 13 while retaining BAB 16-18. It really depends on what you want to do. IMHO, the Arcane Archer is mostly an Archer, but one who dabbles in the arcane arts, and who figures out how to do magical stuff with arrows.
If you want full BAB, mostly full casting, the Eldritch Knight does that. I consider it to be one extreme, and therefore it acts as a limit on what I give this PrC.
Anyway. Hope that clears up what I was thinking. Clearly I'm set on verbose mode today.
Thanks, -- N