Magic Bows and Ammunition

[Isaac Zephyr]

Plotting an Eldritch Archer Magus going into the Arcane Archer prestige class.

The Arcane Archer enchants mundane ammunition automatically, where the Eldritch Archer uses the Magus Arcane Pool to augment your weapon, which would be the bow?

So how does magic enhancement work for bows? Do you enchant the bow with Distance +1 etc, or do you enchant the ammunition with Distance +1 etc. And if you have both, I assume you simply use the better of the two?

[Meirril]

I sincerely dislike magic ammunition in Pathfinder.

If a bow and ammunition are both enchanted you get the benefits of all effects that aren't duplicated. Any abilities that are duplicated, choose the greater of the two because they do not stack. So you have a +1 seeking, flaming, holy bow. You decide to use a +3 flaming, bane: dragon arrow. What you get is +3 to hit and damage, seeking, 1d6 of fire damage from flaming, maybe 2d6 damage from holy and maybe the effects of bane: dragon (+2 to hit, +2d6+2 damage that stacks) if you hit a creature of type:dragon. A +1 to hit and 2 instances of flaming don't stack so you only get one of each kind of effect.

[Isaac Zephyr]

That is kinda broken... You're looking at something like the potential for a +19 weapon at that rate.

Only remaining question then is to do with similar abilities, like Flaming and Flaming Burst. Is Flaming Burst just considered an upgrade or would you apply both?

[Claxon]

Be careful when looking at the list of magical enhancements that the bow can actually pass to ammunition, because several are non-intuitive about how they don't work.

As far as stacking goes though, I can tell you that you definitely wont get more than a +10 effective bonus on an arrow. The +10 is a hard cap regardless of any other abilities.

[Meirril]

flaming burst says it counts as flaming. So no, it won't stack with the lesser version.

Also the best you could achieve would be +5 to hit and +5 in ranged weapon enchants, and +5 in ammo enchants. It is important to list them that way since the list of possible enchants isn't exactly the same. Also paying 72k for 50 arrows seems a bit excessive. That is almost 3 wishes for disposable magic items. As in that is the kind of money you don't just throw away unless your GM is allowing you to have exploit levels of gold.