Archers shouldn't be forced to fight in melee. It's not their purpose. That's like suggesting an HA should also be a 1h shield cav. It makes no sense and you shouldn't force dedicated range builds to have to fight in melee in order to be effective.
sorry, just could not resist to post this and comment by this: funny it comes from archer, i remember most, if not ALL archers bitching on 2hers to "just take a shield then" when we were trying to point out that oneshotting heavy armored people from ONE hit was total bullshit (yeah, played back when "old" archery was on place)
edit: finished reading the whole thing, to me it seems most of people fighting here keep forgetting one simple thing, which makes the biggest difference: you do not get better dmg with xbow no matter your lvl (i can use xbow at lvl like dunno 10 or so, with enuff converts, and i will deal same dmg as i would on lvl 30, overpowered? no), on the contrary, more PD makes you hit harder, so yeah, high lvl archer vs high lvl xbowman, who has the upper hand?
I do agree that the speed reduction on missiles might have been little over the top, it IS easier to dodge arrows now, but for sure it is not granted you can dodge all. I see more and more archers just following the main bobble and shooting from short-mid range. I can not understand anyone bitching about dmg of the archers, that is just big cup of bleh. I mean, cmon, with new soak values it takes me like 3-4 hits on somewhat normally geared guy with my 7PS (had 8 last gen, was pretty much the same).
Anyways, some of my clan guys rolled/respecced archers, and are performing quite well, so really cannot see the reason for bitching. Even i was able to score kills with nomad bow on my lvl 18archer or whatnot.
Just adapt. I had to adapt when changes came. Yeah, i bitched on them, but afterall i just kept playing and learned how to deal with it. Same should go for all you whiners. (just to keep on my habit of mentioning this: fucking revert back to old 2her animations, these are totally retarded, harder to feint and shit
).
Also, before anyone trying to bring this up. I played archer before the patch for 2 gens, i did after the patch on alt, so i have comparision. Same goes for Xbow.
Oh, one more point, to all them smartasses going: the selected part for the statistic is bullshit cause not all are lvl 30, do not take into consideration how many ppl played it and such, fuckoff, it does not have ANYTHING to do with the topic. We are not talking about comparative bullshit in ideal conditions, but we are discussing the current state on servers, so you have to go with the data we got, cause that shows what is happening ON THE DAMN SERVERS.
Also, statistics can be easily fooled, 87% of people already found out.