It really seems when the archers are "responding" to things people say about their class type, they tend to just say: "It's not op", "archery is fine", "stop whining noobs" and "l2p". They don't actually come with any arguments. I have never said directly that archery is op, however I think archery needs a few fixes. These are:
I think archers have responded well to plenty of posts/threads in the past, but it gets tiring to have to constantly defend yourself from the army of whiners.
If you go from native to cRPG you'll see how many nerfs archers have endured in the past. Some of them were good, but it doesn't seem to matter how many times they get nerfed because some people seem to be unwilling to either learn or endure the fact that ranged will have the ability to kill non-shielded infantry at range. We just got out of the worst ranged patch ever (watch my videos to see the relative uselessness of archers in last version:
http://forum.c-rpg.net/index.php/topic,25190.msg363970.html#msg363970) and ranged has been reverted slightly, but still nerfed in damage from what it was before.
When you have people who are suggesting that archery damage doesn't stun opponents (..wut?) and people who will take 50-70% damage from one level 33 MW longbow MW bodkin user and come crying onto the forums with their 'proof' archery needs to be nerfed (ignoring or ignorant to the fact that they took negligible damage from 20 other arrows from different people in a map before that one high damage shot)... then what else can you say as an archer?
It's mostly people who refuse to change or adapt to the fact they can't run out into the open like heroes who want to see archery nerfed into nonexistence and who will never be happy until archery is removed or made so trivial it can effectively be ignored. I don't consider those people to have an educated opinion on how game balance works since their mindset is so one dimensional, so I (and I'm sure others) am/are not willing to waste their time arguing with them...thus the 'archery is fine' one liners.
Regarding your suggestions, archers kite because slot system & skill point demands force them to go full archer and wield a 0-1 slot weapon often with low PS and no wpf. They simply aren't going to be able to win many melee fights even if they have melee skills. I know kiting can be annoying but if it was more possible to have a successful hybrid I bet we'd see more archers willing to engage in melee. 15/21 build is the only good one I can come up with. Fun fact though - a 2 slot bow user will typically have no more than 6 athletics, and often the dedicated level 30 ones only have 3... that's hardly mega kiting ability.
Longbows used to be the only ones that could do pierce damage, but that was changed (imo for the better) to allow for some versatility. Forcing all the other bows to have cut will be another overall nerf to the majority of archers and effectively force many to switch to the 2 slot longbow.
