Manhammer, I appreciate the comment. But frankly don't bother arguing with DaveUKR, no one has a bigger ego in the EU (I remember he was arrogant enough to kill teammates in Strategus all the time to get their xbow and bolts "because he could do better with them").
Frankly though by his argument xbows should lose 20 shoot speed because they would be buffed then as it would be more "skill-based". Quite honestly he would suck balls trying to shoot with that low a shoot speed as his main thing is to hide far away from combat take an insanely far shot with sniper rifle accuracy using the arbalest and then go hide some more. And i do think he is a good long range shot, but if his class was nerfed to crap he might reconsider his specialized focus.
By the way the xbows of the middle ages were like shotguns today, huge power but shitty accuracy. Bows had far more accuracy (part of that is there is a much smaller directing part of the mechanism leading the shot (i.e. the bolt travels a few inches before leaving the xbow, whereas the arrow slides along the bow shaft for its full length before releasing which helps direct it in a straight line). Bows like the longbow didn't arc like this in-game unless you were doing 400 meter shots (which should be inaccurate at that range), but within a 100 meters it should fire as levelly as any xbow if not more so. It certainly should have better accuracy.
Now, not only do arrows travel so slowly that supporting melee characters in combat is a recipe for disaster (used to be one of my favorite skills), but the damage of every cut bow using the lower shoot speed and the higher absorption speed of the new armor changes is clsoe to nothing. I can be shot by any cut bow archer at least 5 times before dying, often 8 or more times and I am wearing mid-tier armor (cavalry robe x3 and mail gauntlets x3). The only remotely effective archers left have exactly 1 build: 8 powerdraw, 150+ wpf, Masterwork longbow user. I have been a skirmisher archer since the beginning shooting into combat and now my entire class of archery is defunct. I can choose to switch to the slow longbow user and I have played around with it, but it still doesn't allow me to shoot as melee support, in general its purpose is rather limited to siege defense and only lightly damaging archer volleys behind siege shields (and you don't need low shoot speed to do archer volleys, they existed before in strategus).
The main reason I am almost certain to respec once the peasant phase of strategus battles passes, is that I owe it to my clan to actually be an effective player, which archery is the only class that this is no longer truly the case with its extremely limited role now.
