[LE] How do I make a bow that shoots like a staff?

[PanOptic101]

I'm trying to make an odd sort of weapon here. I want to make a bow that shoots 'chain lightning' (or some other 'non-concentration' spell I make) like a staff does, but with the bow animation. The purpose is to have a bow that benefits from your destruction and archery skills/perks. I ideally would like to use magika instead of arrows as your ammunition resource.

 

I thought I came up with maybe a neat solution to this by duplicating the 'chain lightning' staff and swapping the model/animation with that of a bow. Unfortunately when I did that it got rid of my 'StaffEnchChainLightning' option in favor of conventional weapon enchantment options. I figured maybe that was because the .nif was a bow and maybe I'd need to edit the string data in Nifskope to add a 'WeaponStaff' tag. Didn't work. So went back into Creation Kit and added 'WeapTypeStaff' and 'WeapTypeBow' tags to the keywords in the weapon's menu. Didn't work. The skill is set to 'destruction' in the weapon menu. The only time I can get the 'StaffEnchChainLightning' option to show up again is when I set the template in the weapon menu to 'StaffChainLightning' which then resets my animations and model to that of the chain lighting staff.

 

What super obvious thing am I be missing or is this more complicated than it seems? I'm suuuuper new to modding. I've only made a few texture mods, so this is new territory for me.

[NexusComa]

You should be able to google that as I've seen this question a few times over the years.

[PanOptic101]

I'll look into it. Thanks for the response NexusComa!