Shub: If you're being shot at by multiple ranged on different angles, its no different than being attacked in melee from multiple angles. A shield doesn't save you from either unless you're quick and accurate with your shield aiming and timing. If the attacks are synced up, it won't save you anyway. There's nothing stopping most melee players from picking up a crossbow, with no skill point or wpf investment, and firing back at archers. It's about the same as archers picking up a weapon and trying to melee.
Kafein: Hiding behind cover isn't being useless, it's avoidance of being made useless by getting lit up. Staying there the whole round is useless sure, but so is any other form of risking nothing and doing nothing.
Archers can't protect themselves from ranged or melee attacks with a bow out. At least you can cancel an attack straight into a block in melee. As it is if you get caught in melee with your bow out and you didn't see it coming, you're pretty well auto-boned. Making archers better at melee won't change the time it takes to get a weapon out when already being melee'd to death.
Good judgments come from making appropriate choices, options don't have to be less than plainly evident for different ones to make more or less sense in different situations.
Wanting archers to fight back with decent melee abilities, is still wanting them to fight back with melee. In every class the individual should have the choice of being dedicated or hybridized. You would say it's more interesting to play a feasible hybrid archer. Good for you, I would also, but what's interesting for some is not by any necessity for others. If someone want's to max their athletics and one weapon type then that's their choice. There's no such thing as a correct build.
Running is choosing where to place yourself. There are indeed tradeoffs from running, such as becoming isolated from your team and losing the protection of friendly melee. And arrows aren't infinite. Melee attacks are. It's not hard to type, "you go the other way while I chase the my old friendcher into you," in team chat. Slowing down archers across the board will make it harder for the archers that do stick with melee groups to keep up, especially if they're high str builds.
Battle also has motf, which makes running away fairly obsolete. Once it pops up. Motf coming up quicker, or being the focus of battle from the get go, would negate the problem of endless kiting. I think it'd be a far fairer solution than forcing all archers to play a melee-ready archer.
A delayer is a delayer. But a group of archers if they're all that's left at the end of the round, shouldn't be penalized into having to melee to make it easier on melee. Anyway I've said my bit. Hopefully a good solution comes about to the kind of kiting you're talking about. But I don't think changing all archers, yet again, is the solution.
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