Archery is not OP now in any circumstance. But in all honesty I don't think it needs a damage or accuracy buff. As an archer, what I would really love to see, is faster arrows again. Those things are painfully slow. I can let out a yawn as I watch my arrow fly across the map only to see the guy I shot at simply sidestep.
It makes archery duels pointless. If archers duel they are just wasting arrows because it is far to easy to side step the slow arrows unless you are 10m away from each other.
As an archer I will start archery duels becasue I remember how much fun they were pre-patch with an incredible test of skills based on quick aiming and then dodging in erratic fashion witht he best archers lasting for tens of seconds and the worst dying quickly, I remmeber dueling Nebun and Pululu for well over a minute until one of us ran out of arrows, but most people didn't know how to dodge in erratic manner or aim the reticule dead on the target with a slight adjustment for leading the shot and calculating their next movement all in a matter of split moments so this was the exception, not the rule. One of my favorite things along with strategus sieges. Now any idiot can dodge the other archers' arrows and with the incredibly slow animation everyone has plenty of time to center the target and aim dead on (of course it will be dodged easily if they are aware as like the xbows slow release trigger you just dodge 1 second before they release), but if you don't have enough wpf the random factor kicks in and the arrow will stray left and right at medium to long range by considerable angles so you often need 3-4 shots to hit an afk person just standing there. So it becomes a random potshot back and forth with little real skill involved and gets boring real fast. And you still need to hit people 3-5 times to kill them, more if they have good armor.
So most times I simply use my athletics easily dodge any arrows aimed at me, pull out my melee weapon and kill the opposing archer with 1-2 hits as this is so much quicker and I can move on to the next target. I have been playing archer less and less as it is comparatively hugely UP to other classes, especially melee. If I just roll any type of melee character I can rack up 2-3 times as many kills in the same amount of time easily, so I still do it for the occassional thrill of hitting enemy opponents while they are involved in melee so my teammates can kill them or shooting the unarmored horses down, but it really is a 100% support character now, no individuality where the only time I see archers really racking up kills is where you see a clan pack of them 5-6 together all shooting at same targets, and usually one happens to dominate with the final kill shot making people say oh look an archer topping or nearing the top of the charts, though the team probably could have done better with 5-6 melee guys instead or even better insta-kill throwers.
And cupid is right I can wear transitional heraldic armor with hornskull bascinet, miadao or bec de corbin with good gauntlets and boots and still make money consistently all the time.
Honestly, what I most want gotten rid of is the random factor as this should never have been implemented, just make the reticules larger and the draw speed slower with lower wpf, don't make arrows go in random directions. Also, would like to see you be able to hold shots for more then 2-3 seonds so you can track targets ratehr then have to worry about reticules going wide again and every arrow goingoff at 45 degree angle even with 150 wpf and powerdraw 2 above the bow requirement. This is a real life sort of thing too, archers can always hold their shots for more then a couple seconds unless they are at the absolute peak fo their strength capabilities on the draw, but if you are using a weaker bow you should be able to hold it for 5-10 seconds easily.
