Well, after playing this for a few days now it seems pretty obvious that the ladder removal was a good decision, the body/head damage change was not.
I am saying this as someone who has nothing to do with balancing at all and also as someone who never cared about getting shot/smashed/lanced whatever, also i play a high Str polearm build without a shield so i am pretty much exposed to any incoming ranged fire.
All ranged classes except for super fast spam bows are now almost useless.
Headshots are nothing you do like in a shooter where aiming is everything.
You need a good portion of luck and you get most tries at a decent range using a fast bow.
So instead of making stuff like the Longbow useful it got nerfed further to the point where it is basically useless as you don't have a long enough optimal accuracy window to actually be effective although it's the most expensive bow and supposed to be the best choice at least in some way.
Throwing lances... you get one ammo per slot and you need two even for light/medium armored people EXCEPT you do a headshot with those pin point accuracy lances at which point they will do enough damage to kill you twice.
Along with that, cav got an indirect buff as horses take 33% less body damage like players.
So now ranged has no roofs and need 1/3rd longer to take down everything except they get lucky and hit the head.
What needs to happen is a nerf for ranged spam and a buff for the accurate ranged players, making headshots count more and everything else less, this already was the case since native.
No need to change it from where it was to be even more significant.
Rather reduce the accuracy on fast bows and make long range shooting something for the longbow guys.
Same basically goes for X-Bows, Throwing never was that accurate but suffered most from the nerf as far as i can tell (respecced to polearms before the nerf hit).
Also we need anti cav spikes asap and a possible revert on the 33% less body damage on horses.
The other option would be a complete ranged revamp for this damage change but that seems out of question.
As i said, i don't really whine about getting ganked by ranged stuff and to be honest it never really happend to me before the patch, I think I died like 1 out of 10 times from ranged stuff.
Now i either die from a lucky headshot or kill the ranged dude even if he gets 10+ shots on me.
It's just sad =(
FREE RANGED!
Edit: Just fixed some typos and stuff.
