I have never much liked changes that remove or directly harm preexisting playstyles, which both of the previous two archer mechanics changes have done. Whatever solution we choose, it has to be able to be done without WSE, which is a restriction my solution adheres to. While they may have slightly solved one problem, they have both negatively affected other play styles while leaving low pd archer builds useless, as well as not addressing the fact that getting athletics is worth more than anything else you could do with your left over points. Why limit the amount of effective builds needlessly? Why does a 3 PD build have to be utterly useless? Why can't specialization actually be rewarding?
How about, instead of penalizing archers for having athletics by stealing their wpf, we
reduce the PD wpf penalty they already get, for every point of athletics they have below their PD/WM(depending on whichever is highest)?
Something along the lines of this:
1. wpf penalty= 14*PD -(MAX(MAX(PD,WM) - athletics,0)*8
2. wpf penalty= (14*PD -1.4^PD) -(MAX(MAX(PD,WM) - athletics,0)*6
For those of you unaware, the two MAX() functions simply keep people from actually ending up with a penalty for having athletics as their highest skill. Option 2 is a combination of the current, which helps to keep high pd builds from being useless. Option 2 keeps the wpf disparity between 10 and 6 PD exactly the same as it currently is.
Here's what it looks like.
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BwUPthpt639-U0xsQktaS2J4dlUThere are a few problems that I see this causing. First, notice that the 3 PD archer has more effective wpf than what his base was? Bit of an issue, but can be fixed by further adjusting the formula. Second, everyone ends up with more wpf than before, which means weapon stats will need to be nerfed slightly for compensation(otherwise this is a massive archer buff for every single archer) or we can adjust the formula further. The point of this post, is to state that it's easily possible to get far better inner balance for archery and that if you want to kite, you should be able to kite, but know that you will not hit as hard/be as accurate as an archer who chose to have a
specialized build. Your kiting build won't end up nerfed like with the old athletics change. You aren't penalized at all for having athletics, only specialization has meaningful benefits now.
Alternatively, and to a global effect, change the wpf formula for everyone.
4 wpp per level, 20 wpp per point of WM, 2 wpp per point of Agi. 1-80 wpf costs 1 wpp, 81+ wpf costs 2 wpp. 100 wpf in one weapon type at level 30 or 60 in two, with zero Agi. 7WM is 194 wpf in one weapon type or 115 in two. 4 WM is 142 wpf in one type or 102 in two. Seems like a pretty good alternative to what we have now.
Edit: Fixed the URL requiring permission.
