For the HA maybe... If you're a lamer who wants your class to be totally immune to 2/3 of the playerbase
Going dragoon style to me at least seems more reasonable. You still have the HUGE advantage over foot archers of being able to run away from all infantry without effort, but the style at least requires you to have some basic situational awareness. And from my point of view regular HA's were kind of fine balance-wise before the "nerf" (because, as said if you go dragoon style with a more agi-orientated build, you can get closer to your target than any footarcher and score headshots) but 1. they were too annoying and 2. loomed ha's were not fine (I got 3/4-shotted by fricking HA's on several occations, not balanced).
Nononononono. NO.
Why do people think that warband should be some R>P>S bullshit?
"Looks like you picked the wrong class, sorry but you're completely fucked now"
NO!
2/3 of the playerbase how? You're more susceptible to cav, because you're in the cav fight at speed, more susceptible to infantry because moving at speed means corrections are a lot harder to make quickly if inf appears and you have to ride close to actually hit them. Yes archers have a hard time hitting you, but it's still perfectly doable as you have to come in close to kill them.
Dragoon style to me just seems to ruin the class. Who wants to play an HA dragoon style when you should be doing it like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPKgSC7JPIk .
Or even faster:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ralvcO6bAoEIn my opinion going dragoon style needs far less situational awareness. You are moving slowly or not at all, don't overly have many threats as you can just move slightly out of the way of anything all the time. Riding at speed provides more opportunity for screwing up, people to catch you off guard ect and that's part of the fun.
2h, pikes, archers, hoplites...they are all annoying in their own situation. HA has been nerfed already and in no way was it OP. Not even loomed HA were. Those HA's were evidently using bodkins. But most can't because it's crippling for upkeep with the horse ect on top. If they were using barbs or even tartars it would have taken more. Which is why the nerf for horse archery was not needed in anyway though we seem to agree on that in part at least. It's a class that was already screwed over a while back and tbh was in about as good a place as it could be for balance.
It's still very situational, skill based, prepartion based, environmental based. There's always a chance for the 2h. But you're delusional if you think everything can be balanced for everything else to have a fair chance. It's pretty much impossible to do so due to the sheer number of builds. Now if you throw a good vs average ect ect then things can mix it up. But the archer in that situation should have the advantage and should be able to, on paper, kill the 2h. Doesn't mean it's going to happen though.
But that's part of the issue...if people think that everything should be able to fight everything fairly, it would explain why everthing gets nerfed constantly. It's a hopeless dream.