The only way to buff athletics without breaking the fragile melee balance would be to only increase its effect on the max running speed of your character, not the acceleration. This way once you're up to speed you can more easily catch those pesky archers. However, in order to avoid buffing kiting ranged there would definitely need to be some further tweaking done, like not letting them drop their heavy ammo or something. Really I think the best thing to do would just let people move faster when carrying a shield.
Only max speed I would buff is when holding block. You definitely don't want to buff athletics unless you want most of us to switch to a 15-27 or 15-30 build.wtf do u even still play
Making the throwing knives and shurikens 0 difficulty might help, but it could also cause a lot of grief to other melee players. I think it could work, but it would be risky knowing how spammy those things can be. (I'm thinking a group of 5-6 melee with these things).
Low cut/High ammunition/Low weight throwing/Zero Difficulty
Something that does low damage that you can throw at the archers when they are simply running away. It should be zero
difficulty so that you dont need to spend wpf to detract from your precious 2h builds. Or maybe 10 wpf? You're the item
balancers you figure it out. If this already exists buff it so more people use it.