Despite Sir_Agor and Tears' terrible arguments, ranged still is way too powerful and it's making the game all about how to figure out a way to not get slaughtered by archers. The main strategy involves hoping the auto-balance gives you more archers than the other team. Not fun.
I've offered a few very conservative suggestions on how to try to reel in archers to being balanced again without even touching their shot power.
1) Change the map rotation. It's full of villages on mountains, and mountains overlooking villages, and natural archer nests on the roofs of mountain villages. Notice a theme? Besides being boring, all these maps make everyone move in slow motion, which is very convenient for someone shooting arrows from their elevated perch. Even Battlefield 3 isn't as convenient for snipers as M&B is for archers... So add some tight city maps that offer no safe perches to sit in and snipe from, and makes it difficult to fire into flanks. Add some flat or rolling plains, without any perches that defeat the purpose. Obstacles, buildings, fences, and other things are fine. Just keep it on the ground. Archers will still be OP on other maps, but maybe it'll make some people think twice about their choice of builds.
2) Don't allow archers to draw the bow while moving. Require that they stand still to do the whole draw and shoot motion. (And you guys who like to bring up realism, when do you ever see archers running and drawing a bow at the same time? Even Legolas stands in place to draw and shoot.) Nothing good comes from allowing this movement. It gives kiting archers more opportunity to shoot at the infantry that chase them. It makes them able to strafe-dodge cavalry that attack them while still spamming shots off point blank into the horse (cavalry should at least be able to force a single archer into putting away his bow to fight). The idea here is to at least discourage archers from playing Rambo, going wherever they want, on the flanks without support, since they may now be harassed more effectively by cav and chasing infantry.
Plus this would finally give xbows something that bows wouldn't have, the ability to move and shoot.
3) Remove ladders. Nothing good comes from ladders. It just adds a perch to every map that doesn't already have a perch, except this one has the added benefit that it will be totally unreachable when the ladder is destroyed.
4)I think the idea to add weight to the bows is a good idea also. Yes, Rumblood, I would much rather see you add more power to your shots than to be able to run fast. I play with 7 athletics myself and can rarely keep up with any archer. If it's 2 archers, forget it, I'm dead already.
It's much more important to make archers counter-able than it is to make them less deadly. At least if they can be successfully caught (when they don't bother to stick with allies for protection), they will be forced to change tactics and be more bearable. If a shielder sees an archer off to the side alone, it should really mean that the archer will be caught unless he drops his archery equipment. As it is now, a shielder sees an archer off to the side and says, "dammit, I wish I could do something about that."
Also, someone mentioned that archers need to be a support class in order to be balanced. I think that's true. There's no reason that every class should be represented equally on the scoreboard. Archery is a middle-of-the-road class. The worst archer will be better than the worst infantry because they can just fire from a distance, often into a defenseless target, without the same risk . Likewise, the best archer shouldn't be better than the best infantry, because the archer has a limited rate of fire, limited accuracy (though I wonder about that...), limited damage output, while the infantry should be able to cleave through groups of enemies faster and with more power. Plus the weaker arrow hit should often help stun a target enough to allow an ally's strong melee attack to kill them.
Proper balance should be about what classes cause the game to be won or lost because of lack of a reasonable counter. Right now, archers are deciding the game.
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