If there is it's barely noticeable.
IGN had a 2 hour live stream and the character they were playing had already beaten the game (I think he said he was 36) and was in full plate, rolling around and sprinting like a madman. The producer they had as a guest mentioned something to the effect that they didn't want to penalize the player on such an important game aspects because of their armor choice.
Shards effectively have quality levels. Instead of adding more ingredients like Alchemy and Blacksmithing, increasing one's Sagecrafting skill allows for the use of more advanced shards.
Sagecraft by the Numbers
Three quality levels:
Seven shard types:
- Fire
- Ice
- Lightning
- Magic
- Physical
- Poison
- Protection
Four gem categories:
- Weapon
- Armor
- Utility
- Epic
Skill Progression
All characters can combine Cloudy Shards into gems innately. At level 2, you can combine Lambent Shards into gems. At level 6, you can use Pristine Shards.
Reaching level 3 in Sagecrafting lets you fuse identical shards into a higher tier, much like Diablo II's Horadric Cube, or Torchlight's Transmuter.
Reaching level 8 unlocks the epic gems recipe category.
Reaching Level 10 allows a master Sagecrafter to extract gems from equipment, with no harm to either gem or armament.
Every time you increase your Sagecrafting skill you also increase the chance of finding shards in the first place.
Gem Recipes
Like Alchemy, there are set combinations to create certain effects. Unlike Alchemy, you get a preview of the results of the transmutation before performing it, so you're never sagecrafting blindly.
There are 196 different combinations (7 shard types, 2 shards per gem, 4 categories), but there is some overlap; For instance, Fire + Protection and Ice + Protection both give + Physical Damage when used as a weapon gem.
Best Answer
You begin Kingdoms of Amalur: The Reckoning able to fire 5 arrows between reloads. After a short time without firing any arrows, regardless of how many shots you fired, your quiver will refill itself.
There is one tree of bow abilities consisting of 5 abilities. The general ability description say, "Increases the number of arrows that can be fired before reloading" and "Also increases the size of your quiver," but these only refer to the first point in each of those respective abilities as only the first level of those abilities bear the description, "Increases quiver size by 1." This means that you can at most fire 10 arrows between reloads with a minimum of one point in each bow ability. These abilities also grant you further arrow abilities such as increased damage, increased piercing damage, arrow storm, a bleed effect and a scattershot and further points will increase these effects.
Unbinding your destiny, thus removing the points in these abilities should decrease the number of arrows in your quiver, but because of a defect in the game, it does not. This happens to me as well. This could be used to minor advantage when trying out different destinies by increasing the size of your quiver, but will only matter if you use the bow and don't plan on investing those points in the bow skill tree anyways. Re-investing points in the bow skills will not increase your quiver beyond the maximum of 10 arrows.