One common complaint about Oblivion is damage done by bows and swords just doesn't seem to be enough, regardless of armor or lack of armor it just takes an unrealistic number of hits to kill an opponent. Oblivion isn't nearly as bad as Heuristic Park's WIZARDS AND WARRIORS which really should have been named Wizards and Wussies since the balance between sword and sorcery was heavily in favor of magic. But it still seems like non magical combat just doesn't do the kind of damage it should.

There are several mods that address the issue, this one;

http://www.nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/20944/?

Is the original which doubles the damage for all arrows, I found the second one which quadruples damage to be a little beyond what I consider a good balance.

But I started thinking about what's really wrong with archery in this game? In the era of Agincourt an experienced archer could loose 12 full draw aimed arrows per minute, testing in game with a marksman skill of 25 I can easily double that. So what's the problem then? Range, mainly, not for the arrow but for the enemy. The 3D virtual world is just different from the real world, even with visibility and actor fade cranked to max the initial engagement outdoors is usually so close that after getting in the first hit the guy is on top of you before you get a chance to shoot a second arrow, even if he's encumbered with 100 pounds of heavy armor. Inside it's a lot closer, shoot one arrow and switch to sword because he's right there.

With that in mind I experimented with increasing the speed of the bow itself - double or triple the draw speed, anything beyond triple just looks like a silly medieval version of the Gatling gun. And doesn't work because the arrows fall short. Unless you hold at full draw for the same amount of time that it would take a normal speed bow to come to full draw, that is.

After doing some googling I found that fArrowBowTimerBase affects the speed of arrows which have been released before full draw (25% which explains the drop short of the target) and fArrowBowTimerMult affects the speed of the draw itself. 0.400 is a multiplier in a complicated formula;

DrawMult = fArrowBowTimerBase + fArrowBowTimerMult * DrawTime  ,  or 1.0 (whichever is less)

But I found that changing 0.4 to 2.0 made for a much quicker full draw.

Question is, is that really what I'm looking for? Slowing down the approach of the enemy rather than speeding up the rate of fire would be more realistic, problem there is the limits of what's available - iPerkMarksmanKnockDownChance and iPerkMarksmanParalyzeChance seem to be the only variables that can be edited, the first requires Expert and the second requires Master at the skill for a 5% chance of either. What would be better is a variable scale according to skill which, instead of increasing the chance of a knockdown, increased the amount and duration. For example an apprentice might stagger the target for 1 second, with a percent chance of knocking him down for 2 seconds. Journeyman would knock him back and stagger him with a recovery time of 3 to 5 seconds with a percent chance of a knockdown for 10 seconds. Something like that anyway.

I suspect it may be possible to do that with OBSE and/or scripts, or possibly increasing the speed or mass of the arrows, the general idea is to make it take longer for the target to recover from an arrow hit without creating a magic bullet that kills all targets with a single shot. Floor is open, all silly ideas welcome.