Sure there is. Remove it and just move everything to be demon-fire orb based. You want explosive arrows? 1 Demon-fire orb, 1 iron arrow, and 3 twine gets you an exploding arrow. You want a exploding jar? 12 demon-fire orbs, one jar, 5 tar.
It’s actually far easier to design and create balance that what it is right now.
I never considered that, but yeah, it could work. They weigh significantly more than DP so carrying a bunch will still weigh a lot. However, I’d like to suggest the usual 1:10 ratio for explosive arrows.
Note that I specifically mentioned TNT which was a fairly modern invention and far more effective than the old/unstable early gunpowders. That being the case as artillery improved, castles had to become more and expensive to have a hope of resisting. There is a reason castles stopped being built. As for castles being used in WW2 I’d argue that actual medieval castles (vs. more modern designs with thick concrete) would be fairly worthless against a focused attack (with arty) other than troops being able to setup machine gun nests, etc in the rubble of destroyed castles (Monte Cassino comes to mind).
The following has an interesting article on it:
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/071633.html
"Eventually, of course, gunpowder’s effect was dramatic. Tall vertical walls became targets instead of obstacles. During the expulsion of the English from France after 1450, heavy artillery could topple walls “in a matter of hours.”
That is a bit of simplification of history. I am not an expert on Conans lore nor history, but I think the period in Conan Exiles predates knights in shiny armour in XVI century. Plus, gun powder powered weapons, even though were powerful, they lacked a punch in early days. When we are talking about plate armour, again you are thinking about steel plate armour. Greeks, for example, had bronze and iron plate armour way earlier, before Chinese gun powder. But all this is a moo point as the problem is how powerful explosives are in Conan Exiles. And since you have hours at your leisure when you are offlining someone, it all comes to your will and nutrition.
Having messed around the devkit a bit, it would take 5 minutes to change this 
In the end it’s a game.
You are supposed to go and blow other dude up and get blown up yourself at some stage.
Gunpowder was present in middle ages, in Conan’s Hyboria various cultures are on different civilization level stages, some are comparable to medieval Europe, some to ancient times, while other people devolved and live like animals in packs and use cavemen technology. It’s a post-apo low fantasy world.
Gunpowder always had the punch but it lacked accuracy and reliability. It was hardly a useful weapon that required several minutes to clean and reload after each shot while some other dude was charging with a sabre towards you. Or little bit of rain of even dense fog and gunpowder got wet and become useless. It was the discovery of water resistant/metal cartridge case and automatic rifles that made the gunpowder rule the battlefield. But even during WW1 there still was a lot of cavalry use and melee combat in trenches. Cavalry was still live and kicking at the beginning of WW2 until infantry carrying trucks and heavy armoured vehicles made it obsolete.
I think the real problem is the ratios in game giving too much of everything. One trip for star metal and you’re set up for a month of gaming or more, same with crystals in Kurak’s dungeon and really everything in game.
I recently lowered harvest ratio to 0.1 on my server and I’m testing this setting. Everything goes just a little bit slower but still smooth, the x1.0 ratio was just ridiculous.
These high ratios affect the game in many ways, tier 2 structures can be entirely removed. Every player I have seen so far builds just small shed from tier 1 sandstone to hide his workshop and then immediately moves to constructing tier 3 castle.
Lowering harvest ratio would also slow down people from building these ridiculously huge bases that plague official servers and destroy their performance.
I find that x0.1 ratio slows down the game to reasonable speed, still allows to use and repair tier 3 weapons/armors without any problems and there is much less gunpowder spam and raiding.
On the other hand PvP servers are all about PvP so faster game = more fun.
PS.
Yes medieval Castles worked fine in WW2 and some of them took weeks or even months to be captured.
Here you go, an abbey built in AD 529, early medieval structure, it was under constant machine gun and artillery fire, it was bombed by aircrafts, and it took 4 months and horrible losses in men to capture it.
Actually Monte Cassino is the example I included in my reply. If you read the article the reason why Monte Cassino was such a hard fought battle was due to geography (the Germans had the high ground/arty observation and issues with rivers). Not to mention the ruins created places for the defenders to hide and dig in. It is not an example of castle walls being impregnable.
Fallschirmjäger forces occupied the area and established defensive positions amid the ruins.
Official PvP servers have a ×4 Harvest Rate, which I find extremely ridiculous… And when I brought it up as problematic, quite a few people said it is irrelevant because it’s just faster/slower 
I still think Harvest Rate is a huge issue on official PvP 
Maybe the question should be what is so ridiculous about a setting that doesn’t waste our time?
Gaming is wasting time regardless
×4 Harvest Rate is ridiculous because you can legitimately build T3 bases in a couple of hours, and farm enough Dragonpowder to demolish all of it in an extra hour.
Go ahead and bring this to ×16 if you like, you can now build in 30mn and demolish in 15mn, approximately of course.
→ The higher the Harvest Rate, the less time someone has to react to demolition.
Now even more specifically, on ×1 Harvest Rate you can still get a little bit more Blood Crystals than you spend creating a Stone Golem.
On ×4 Harvest Rate, you get a lot more of it → High Harvest Rate enables a good amount of resource exploits.
The solution to this would be that you can never harvest anything that you have created in any way, which I’m not sure makes sense for the game itself.
X4 is ridiculous.
At first I liked it, quick get up and go, could server hop and not have too much time wasted, yada yada
Then I realized it’s actually pretty dumb. Those who already have a hold on a server are adding to their dp stores and building mats with ridiculous speed. It has become a huge issue to take down longstanding clans especially those with exploitative builds.
Now there’s no incentive for new people or new to server players to stay in that regard.
There’s no strategy or planning.
And even if you’re a longstanding clan not taking advantage of what the game offers currently you can expect new players bombing you the same day they land.
No anticipation. No excitement. It’s real stupid honestly.
On my private server even with a setting x1.0 often when I returned from work in the evening I found a Death Star sized T3 base in the spot where there was nothing in the morning.
x0.1 setting works much better with the game, it makes many things relevant, like T2 buildings or even picking up resources from dead NPCs.
I heard that they punish for building huge bases? It’s like feeding a kid with sweets and fast food all the time and then punishing him because he got overweight.
You see you have the answer in your post. The is issue is still destruction takes a shorter time than construction no matter how well built (within server established (Funcom) rules) . Bombs simply put obsolete buildings as defense in their ridiculous amount of power combined with how they do damage (angles) and as said before at no risk.
Building comes at a risk and building bigger comes at an even bigger risk. Bombing comes at no risk and is very easy and placement is convenient as you can even levitate your jars above your head, no sorcery required folks!
Your buildings have a cost calculated in bombs or as some have come to do it in DP (dragon powder). Your base has a direct DP rating no matter how it is built and what is built out of. Bombs are also very simple to make and transport to location and use. Until this balance is addressed defense is an illusion in “pvp” when it comes to direct structure defense.
Direct structure defense is the main defense rating when it comes to offlining which is the go to “pvp” method. Thralls add very little if any defense and current traps might as well not exist for all the help they provide in a siege.
A clans or solos siege power is directly attached to their DP rating (how much they’ve farmed for the “fight”).
Fight being usually against an unconscious body and undefended base resulting from this (offlining).
There needs to be defense against offlining a base or make it very dangerous to do so (traps and other active defenses against attackers). Attacker advantage in this game removes defense almost entirely and if offlining a base removes the almost from the defense.
Need to rework how beds work, and I don’t mean the defender’s bed. 
1 DP produces 10 arrows. Why do people feel the need to have hundreds of dp on pve? literally a stack of tar, stack of BP, half a stack of crystal, and 10 demon blood takes up very little room. That is enough for almost 50 dp arrows, which is 5 star metal runs at minmum.
The need to hoard on pve should not be a reason to leave a mainly pvp item broken as it is now.
I actually agree… I’d be content with 100 and it would last a while. However, my issue is using so much steelfire. I’d rather use that towards other stuff. It takes a really long time to craft 50 steelfire just for one DP.
Could always require DP be at least partially crafted using high sorcery and add risks to its crafting. Black powder crafting and handling requires great care and dragon powder should be no different .
As it is now dragon power might as well be candle wax and bombs scented candles for all the risks they both carry. Imagine if you had to craft charcoal as well to craft DP that would add to the time and care for certain.
Honestly, every time I see someone light an explosive jar in the rain this game I laugh or shake my head.
I’d think that orbs would be quite a bit cheaper, and Cull Resources spell is even more so. Especially if you can get 3-4 nodes in the effect at once.
Orbs would be cheaper, yes, but they bounce off and are way heavier. They also are tougher to hit if the node is in an odd location like a cliff side. I use to do this prior arrows. Also, I don’t recommend the culling method. Finding meteors on EL is significantly tougher since they removed smoke and there’s no guarantee you’ll get enough in a radius. It may take a bit longer, but I can get way more star metal if I just use the old fashioned way.
Now the suggestion @erjoh made about using orbs in the creation of arrows could work. As I’ve said though, I’d prefer a 1:10, or even a 1:5 yield on them instead of 1:1.
Try using heavy attack (right click on PC). The orb detonates on impact.