You many know me, I'm an archer (I know, I know, I'm seeing a shrink about it). As much as I would get frustrated shooting tin cans 10 times with my strong bow and arrows to kill a tin can, it took real skill to do so. The decreased shoot speed of the bows allows for arrows to be more affected by the speed bonus' impact on damage based on the shoot speed even though the shoot speed is lower (talk to developers to figure out the exact mathematics, one of the reasons throwers did so much damage). Testing out the current patch, I am doing far more damage and 1-2 shotting almost everyone, even tincan strength builds only 3-4 arrows to kill with my CUT damaeg bow. I was shot by an archer I have been shot before using same CUT damage bow against my 56 body armor and it did 70% of my health instead of the usual 35%. And if you think its some archer complaining about doing worse, it's not, one of my first maps I went 16-3, killing people like balbaroth, dextaa, and cyranule with arrows doing massive damage.
My own persepctive -- this is a step in the wrong direction, archers were well-balanced and there were still plenty of them around. We don't need another bunch of 1-2 shotting throwers with slow shoot speeds. Most of these kills felt kind of cheap as there was so little skill involved with high accuracy and incredibly deadly arrows. Real skill usually means shooting the same guy more than a couple times and really differentiated archers, despite the developers' stating they did this to make it more skillful, instead the opposite is occcuring.
