arcane archer abilities PF

[elonin]

I'm playing arcane archer on the chassis of ranger 8 (hadn't occurred to me about taking a prc) wizard 1.

Is there a practical use for AA abilities other than being able to use in a AMF? For the most part the +1 and element damage only work on a non magic bow. I'm suspecting that the people who wrote the class thought they were lowering costs for the archer rather than just making the class suck.

How would you rewrite the class to make it viable?

Also, the character is using an item that levels along with the character but has maxed out at +2 frost fire bane. Is it worth suppressing these abilities (if i'm not fighting against fire creatures) in order to change the elemental damage? There is another complication in that I'm using the bow as my arcane focus as i thought it would almost always be at hand in combat. Does that necessarily make the item magical? My dm is not going out of his way to make playing the character hard, but isn't going to be over generous with rulings for poor tactical decisions (like taking levels in AA). He also ruled against bringing in 3.5 content (like practiced caster).

[BWR]

Non-magical arrows. The PrC explicitly says the enhanced arrows work with a magical bow. You can't stack enhancement bonus or apply same bonus twice but you can apply different effects from bow and AA.

As for improving, I quite like it as is, but I suppose we could fix the Enhance Arrows ability to work more like the bonded weapon of the Paladin class - add enhancement bonus or abilities equal to enhancement bonus to any bow or arrow wielded, stacking with what is already there.

[elonin]

That is what i get for not reading the last line of the ability. <elonin applies face to desk many times> I figured the fact that the bow imparts its ability on arrows would mean that the arrows become magical but that last line is clear.

Just after writing my post I thought of the Kensai ability to improve their equipment, but focused on bows. Or some sort of enhancement along the lines of item familiar or legacy items.

If I were the DM i'd open the prereqs to allow for divine entry as well, as I've thought ranger was thematically appropriate. On the other hand a arcane ranger variant might already exist without sword of arcane order shenanigans.