"Projectile's speed will be lowered by 31%. Longbow arrows has 55 projectile speed, will have 38 after patch."
"The problem is none of you has an idea what those numbers mean ingame.
Aww, whatever. Longbow will have a "real" shoot speed with minimum PD(6) of 60 m/s. A destrier with riding 4 has a "real" top speed of 9 to 10 m/s. Those are both pretty realistic values compared to the real world."
First off, the destrier is the wrong horse to compare it to, as 90% of cav use courser or arabians and usually minimum 5 riding (would be like using the nomad bow's shoot speed for comparison, not the fastest shoot speed of all bows - longbow), so that would be closer to 20 m/s in your example, which is not realistic that ahorse moves 1/3rd the speed of a longbow arrow. Secondly, a developer trying to use "real world" examples in a game balance discussion is a really bad sign as the real world is never balanced, but games are fun because they are balanced.
Archers are still one of the weakest classes out there with all their nerfs. They die really easily, most archers' arrows are really easy to dodge, and they take 10-12 arrows (half a quiver) to kill these tincan strength builds that are proliferating unless they use the very slow longbow, which makes them easy to kill before they redraw their bow back. The only time I ever see archers being effective at all is if they are the best archers out there, very good at melee and so they get a bunch of kills in melee, or run in a large pack of other archers (who can all be easily killed by just 4-5 lancers in 10 seconds with a bunch of 1 shot kills if the cav is organized like the archers are. I know plenty of fast shielders and lancers who love how easy it is to rack up kills by going after archers, because they are so easy to kill. I know I find them the easiest to go after when I fight just as a 2hander as the current already lowered shoot speed makes arrows really easy to dodge if youa re aware of who is shooting at you.
End result of such a change: More tincan strength spammers in mob melee and cav lancers - both classes that can 1-shot people fairly easily. Archers' arrows will be dodgable by all but the most stupid tincan and even they hit they do 1/50th of your health unless theya re within 20 feet of you, which means 1 arrows hit before they get 1-hit killed. Still don't get how strong bow and warbow users can at all seem overpowered, though I do see a lot of tin can pure strength builds complaining because longbow fianlly allows some weapon to actually hurt and kill them other than cav lancers and other tincan bec users (usually a good half-dozen or more on any given server at any given time, and thats just the bec users, not talking about danish greatsword users).
