Durance can use ranged weapons. Pretty much everyone can use everything in the game, the only difference is if you get the passive talent for the weapon (knight/noble/ruffian) it gives +6 accuracy for those types of weapons.
Also I never played D&D, don't understand anything about dice rolls, but looking at the math (if you click on the attack in the status window it'll show the math including the dice roll), does accuracy not just mean hit chance but also mean damage? Like if you have way higher accuracy do you hit + do higher damage? If that's the case, the +6 accuracy would also add some to the damage with those weapons.
Gear progression is interesting, generally the base stats of any weapon/armor you're going to find from the start of the game until the end of the game isn't going to be much different. So a sword at the start might do 14-20 damage and a sword at the end of the game might do 14-20 damage. But the difference is the number and quality of the enchantments. You can add various "builds" of enchantment onto a weapon like "fine/exceptional/damage" which give it certain stat bonuses (and cost crafting items + money). These might be like damage +15% or accuracy + 10, then you can add base stat adds of +1 or +2 to any base stat to the weapon, then you can add on elemental damage of +25%. For armor you can add buffs towards the types of damage.
Now that's all self-enchanting weapons/armor. What happens is as you loot stuff/get drops you'll get weapons that are pre-enchanted and have a bunch of additional effects + other unique effects. Silver colored gear just has some extra enchant stats, gold are the rare weapons/armors/accessories and not only do they have additional enchant stats, but they include unique talents like single use spells or skills that activate on being critical hit, etc... so you'll get more and more rare weapons with the same base stat of 14-20, but with +30 damage, +15 accuracy +15% corrode damage, and +3 might on critical or something.
And then in the 2nd half of the game/expansions you start getting soul bound weapons. These are white colored and once you equip them on a player no other player can ever use them. They have really good stats and they level up after you meet specific requirements (ie, kill 300 enemies with this weapon to unlock tier 2 of stats/abilities) and so they get stronger and stronger and are pretty badass in the end.
Also lore-wise, the rare/spellbound equipment all have stories if you right-click them which is cool.
Oh and how armor works, all armor slows down your action speed. The more heavy the armor the more reduced your action speed is. Like heavy armor is -50%. Armor has DR damage reduction. When an enemy hits for 15 damage, if you have 12 DR, you only take 3 damage. Same applies for enemies, so if they have 20 DR and you are hitting for 19 DR, you won't do any damage. So for big or armored enemies you want to use either 2H weapons which are slow but high damage or more realistically you just have your mages debuff the enemy DR so you can do damage. Normal enemies don't have too much DR so with a 2H character it can make more sense to dual-wield where you alternate the single handed weapons at a faster action speed and do more DPS but lower damage hits than a single handed 2H weapon. Also, some classes have skills that reduce armor speed reductions like Fighters reduce it by 15 or 25% so you can wear heavier armor and still have decent speed. Dexterity also is the stat that effects speed of actions.
As you can see, the combat-side/character-build-side of the game has some good depth. I find it pretty fun!
