All I can say about bows in melee is that after using bows for years in LARP melee against people with swords, axes, hammers, spears and lots of other weapons, that getting hit doesn't interrupt my ability to get my next arrow off any more than getting hit interrupts my next sword attack if I am using a sword. Getting hit usually interferes with your ability to attack no matter what weapon you are using. Weapon knockback effects already limit my ability to get arrow attacks off quickly in the game. Interrupting arrow loading and bow bending with melee attacks will SERIOUSLY nerf archers. What nerfs archers realistically is my inability to recover arrows. If a nerf for archers were planned, the most realistic one would be to have arrows break or unrecoverable a percentage of the time. If that wasn't possible, then making arrows altogether unrecoverable would nerf archers more realistically than adding arrow loading and bow drawing interrupts.
I like the weapon cooldown. Just my opinion but its a good addition to the mod. I understand that for some its more fun if your able to put a bunch of enemies through a meat grinder but its not realistic. Again just my opinion but I do a lot of LARP and the cooldown feels about right.
Try reading this thread:
http://lotrminecraftmod.wikia.com/wiki/Thread:171229
the error message you are getting is the exact same one that you get if you create a custom waypoint. You get booted from the game and then when you try to log back in you get:
"A fatal error has eccured, this connection has terminated"
If you read this thread you will see Mevans already has a fix and is waiting to incorporate other bug fixes before the next release. No need for him to chase down a bug he has already fixed. If I'm wrong and you didn't create a custom waypoint then look at the file fml-client-latest.txt in your logs folder (in the .minecraft directory). Look for any text referring to an error.
I searched through my client log files and found this error after not being able to log in. I had just created a custom waypoint. I could play without using custom waypoints but it definitely means starting over once the player data has been erased.
[09:49:44] [Client thread/ERROR] [FML/]: There was a critical exception handling a packet on channel lotr.CWP
java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException
at java.nio.ByteBuffer.wrap(Unknown Source) ~[?:1.7.0_80]
at io.netty.buffer.UnpooledHeapByteBuf.nioBuffer(UnpooledHeapByteBuf.java:270) ~[UnpooledHeapByteBuf.class:?]
at io.netty.buffer.AbstractByteBuf.toString(AbstractByteBuf.java:953) ~[AbstractByteBuf.class:?]
at lotr.client.LOTRPacketHandlerClient.channelRead0(LOTRPacketHandlerClient.java:501) ~[LOTRPacketHandlerClient.class:?]
at lotr.client.LOTRPacketHandlerClient.channelRead0(LOTRPacketHandlerClient.java:43) ~[LOTRPacketHandlerClient.class:?]
at io.netty.channel.SimpleChannelInboundHandler.channelRead(SimpleChannelInboundHandler.java:98) ~[SimpleChannelInboundHandler.class:?]
at io.netty.channel.DefaultChannelHandlerContext.invokeChannelRead(DefaultChannelHandlerContext.java:337) ~[DefaultChannelHandlerContext.class:?]
at io.netty.channel.DefaultChannelHandlerContext.fireChannelRead(DefaultChannelHandlerContext.java:323) ~[DefaultChannelHandlerContext.class:?]
at io.netty.channel.DefaultChannelPipeline.fireChannelRead(DefaultChannelPipeline.java:785) ~[DefaultChannelPipeline.class:?]
at io.netty.channel.embedded.EmbeddedChannel.writeInbound(EmbeddedChannel.java:169) ~[EmbeddedChannel.class:?]
at cpw.mods.fml.common.network.internal.FMLProxyPacket.func_148833_a(FMLProxyPacket.java:77) [FMLProxyPacket.class:?]
at net.minecraft.network.NetworkManager.func_74428_b(NetworkManager.java:212) [ej.class:?]
at net.minecraft.client.multiplayer.GuiConnecting.func_73876_c(SourceFile:78) [bcx.class:?]
at net.minecraft.client.Minecraft.func_71407_l(Minecraft.java:1661) [bao.class:?]
at net.minecraft.client.Minecraft.func_71411_J(Minecraft.java:973) [bao.class:?]
at net.minecraft.client.Minecraft.func_99999_d(Minecraft.java:898) [bao.class:?]
at net.minecraft.client.main.Main.main(SourceFile:148) [Main.class:?]
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) ~[?:1.7.0_80]
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source) ~[?:1.7.0_80]
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source) ~[?:1.7.0_80]
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source) ~[?:1.7.0_80]
at net.minecraft.launchwrapper.Launch.launch(Launch.java:135) [launchwrapper-1.11.jar:?]
at net.minecraft.launchwrapper.Launch.main(Launch.java:28) [launchwrapper-1.11.jar:?]
[09:49:44] [Client thread/INFO] [FML/]: Unloading LOTR biome variants in MiddleEarth