Give respec for athletic only so I can put those points in riding.
You'd want some horse archery as well however.
Really sad seeing all the whining on the forums for a month and knowing the next thing the dev's are gonna nerf. Not because the whiners have a valid reason for their whine, it's just to appease the masses and put some grease on that squeaky wheel.
Give players the ability to work together as teammates (maybe a different game mode is needed), and all the previous whine about archers goes away. Maybe some popups when you join a server that say "press P to join a battalion, press and hold F1 to move the flag for the battalion". Maybe include "teamwork is encouraged to overcome obstacles in this game, not every class you encounter will be easily defeated. They have strengths and weaknesses with their class, just as you do with yours, keep this in mind when fighting with your teammates".
Or here's a genius solution, fix your team balance to do a better job balancing classes evenly to each team.
Sure it's annoying to die to someone before you even have a chance to fight them, but that's part of the game. Their strength just dominated your weakness. Every class and playstyle has strengths and weaknesses. If you minimize exposing your weaknesses to an enemies' strengths, you should be alright.
There was nothing wrong with archery pre-patch that required making athletics lower their WPF in archery. And if you really felt it was justified in making that change, you should allow people a free respec because you fucked over people who use archery and athletics, who now can't properly use their bow.
Good job, that was very well thought out. And I still contend that pre-patch, nothing was so ridiculous or overpowered that it required a nerf to tame it. Nothing. Bring your arguments to me and I'll shut them down every time with what to do tactically in that situation. Generally the right answer boils down to "fight with teammates who compliment your weaknesses". If someone is whining about archers, then they should have done a better job protecting their own ranged classes who can reach out and touch the enemy archers.
The classes were very well balanced pre-patch. I'm sure there were many people in the middle ages who felt it was "overpowered" to be able to hit someone from a distance before they can hit you. You know what smart armies did? They brought their own archers, or they brought shields, or they stopped standing around on the open field without any terrain to protect them. They overcame the solution without whining about how "OP" something was, which is exactly what players need to do in game, but the dev's keep babying them instead of some harsh reality checks.
