I'm about to start a Jade Regent campaign and have gotten my players characters. A barbarian, a magus, a witch and an alchemist. A fifth player has mentioned being interested but since he asked to join yesterday he hasn't had the time to make a character yet.
Of the four known players three don't have much need for weapon loot though. The magus is picking the black blade archetype so weapons will become less interesting as far as loot goes once he gets that if I understand the archetype, the alchemist is going for natural weapons with claws and a bite once he gets the feral discovery and will use regular claws out of mutagen time, the witch would have little use for them most of the time in regular play but is playing a white witch so he'll likely default to ray of frost as a default filler attack making them even less interesting.
So with a group where weapon use is the exception to the norm I feel I might want to replace some of the weapon loot with some other goodies. What sort of goodies would be good replacements for at least a few of the less important weapons?
I'm currently running for a similar party: our druid favors wild shape combat, our magus is the Amatatsu heir wielding Suishen, and our bard is slowly upgrading a long spear that has immense sentimental value. Only my sword and board paladin is interested in acquiring a new weapon.
We're just getting into The Hungry Storm and I've already resigned myself to seeing many of the cool weapons of Minkai be sold for crafting supplies. I've made two changes that have worked fairly well this far. I've swapped in a couple of strong niche weapons that are outside the characters specializations but are good enough that the party decided to keep then around. A ghost touch axe I tossed in pretty early in the campaign became the only thing that prevented Old Magyu from immolating the party. I've also swapped out some of the loot for magic items with fun, impactful active effects. My party has had a blast with their ring of the ram.
As an aside, that witch fire seems pretty ridiculous for its CR. If I hadn't played her with poor tactics she'd have obliterated the party even with their ghost touch weapon.