Nicely written essay, and the stuff about the first four facts is perfectly right. But the rest, concerning your conclusion, is not. At least not in my eyes, of course, as I am in no way the measure of all things.
And in general I'd like to point out that your thread is in no way discussing the root of all misery in cRPG. It's only discussion the old conflict between archer and infantry players.
Q: Can archers stop running away like little sissies already ?
A: Bitch please.
Admittedly kiting IS in fact a pain and leaves certain melee builds without the chance of defending themselves until they get into melee range, which is quite often impossible for a melee build. It is the same injustice that happens when a melee DOES get into melee range ( for unexpected reasons ) and chops the archer into peaces without much chance to counterattack. Allthough this sound much theoretic, we all know both of those examples do or at least did happen on quite a regular basis and the outcome of both of these examples are merely a matter of skill but rather build and equipment superiority. And THIS is not acceptable in a skill based, competitive multiplayer game in my humble opinion.
Archers kited because there was no other tool to an archers disposal other than kiting. The cure for this could only be: take away their kiting but give them a fair chance to be effective in return. Sadly however, this is not what has been done. The only viable playstyle of archers has been taken away while all the previous nerfs over nerfs still remain.
If an archer was constantly aware of his surroundings, and didn't allow himself to concentrate on a target until it is dead, it was close to impossible to reach him. Clever positioning, awareness and self discipline lowered the chances of infantry to reach archers drastically. And those traits are something I'd call a good part of what we call skill.
Another thing I'd like to point out is that you always do like the battle starts with an infantry player spawning close to an archer and immediately heading towards him. But that's not the case.
take away their kiting but give them a fair chance to be effective in return
The archer had his chance to be effective all the time UNTIL the point when the need to kite came up. Archers SHOULD get creamed in melee, that's the way the class balance should work. Though I have to admit that I think that archers are underpowered on the paper, concerning the values they are fighting which, like damage, missile speed, etc.. But the reason for this UP'ness is a completely different one. It has to do with the game mode an the developers trying to balance mechanics by tweaking effectivity. It has also to do with side effects which are not really part of the game itself, which in this case would be the popularity of the archer class and its special ability to exponentially gain effectivity with linearly growing numbers.
The question I have to ask at this point: What is the purpose of an archer now ? What is the point of playing a class that neither can handle to be confronted directly with enemies nor has the ability to avoid those confrontations ?
Of course the people who are looking for advantages instead of balance are happy now but,
why should I play as an archer if I can grab a 2h sword, simply walk to my enemy instead of shooting him and engaging him with a better overall performance? Why should I restrict myself to play as a crawling crashtest dummy when I can simply strap a crossbow/bag of javelins to the back of my armor and be effective in melee and ranged combat alike ? Or simply get a heavy horse and inflict more DPS with bumping everyone to death without any skill required ?
I havent seen many of the top tier archers around the last days and those who were there got spammed to death by people without the skill to actually justify it.
This is just another patch that unwarrantedly enables bad players to counter archers without trying. What is your intention devs ? Do you want to balance archery or do you want to remove it ? I am sure there are a lot of people who would be pleased to give actual constructive criticism if people would have the impression that you are listening to them. But as of now, no matter how much I like this game, I dare say you have not exactly done a good job about this matter.
Thank you for your attention.
I think you are asking a rather biased question at the beginning of that quote. Aren't those question the same that could be asked by a pikeman who is attacked by a hose archer? And why do you formulate your sentences in a way which tries to create the impression that archers do NOT have bows which allow them to attack any enemy they can see shortly after the battle has begun? Yes, you are screwed when melee starts, but you always try to ignore the entire ranged spam which took place BEFORE melee started.
You also complain that archers can't be good at melee if they want to be good at archery. But couldn't melee complain bout the same thing? You wrote that you need to invest quite some points into melee to be at least fairly effective. If you want to be really effective, there is no room left for any ranged capabilities, except of crossbows, perhaps, but in my eyes this is a problem which is related to te crossbow itself and with the upkeep system. Infantry HAS to have better chances of killing archers in melee than archers should have to kill infantry over range. If range has a 50% chance of killing infantry over range, infantry needs a full 100% chance to kill archers in melee to keep things fair!
Actually you can divide a fight into two phases: the ranged phase and the melee phase. We could argue a lot about the actual average chance values of archers killing infantry over range or infantry killing archers in melee, but there is one value we don't need to argue about: the infantry's chance of killing archers over range. For pure infantry (which is the vast majority of infantry and the kind of infantry we are talking about) this chance is 0%. They simply can't. Now if we keep the basic mechanics of balance in mind, if you change something on one side, you need to change the same thing on the other side.
If you claim that archers should become better at melee, the logic balancing reaction should be to make infantry better at ranged combat. But as this does not make any sense, the only option left would be to make archers worse in ranged combat. If we would go that far to increase the motivation to stay and fight infantry instead of running away to a reasonable value, archers should be at least almost as effective as infantry in melee. And as we already stated that we can't make infantry almost as effective at ranged combat as archers, the only option left would be to make archers almost as bad in ranged combat as infantry. As infantry has literaly zero effectivity in ranged combat, archer would be nerfed down to the effectivity of stone throwing peasants. I can't believe you would support actually removing an entire class form the game and replacing it by some kind of half-assed wannabe-hybrid.
"But we don't need to go that extreme, some slighter changes could do the job", one could answer. Yes, the changes could be slighter. (Archer becoming only slightly better at melee and slightly worse at archery), but I doubt it would help then. I even doubt that making archers almost as effective in melee as infantry would help a lot. Because I doubt that good melee character statistics would encourage most archers to enter melee. In my opinion many archers, if not even most, decided to become an archer to NOT have to fight in melee. They are intimidated by the skill requirement of manual blocking, they are suffering bad pings or are simply afraid of the average melee capabilities of most seasoned infantry players. And the final possibility will always be that players simply prefer archery over melee because they enjoy it more.
My final conclusion is, that the game mode needs to change from battle (round based team deatchmatch) to conquest. That way the need of kiting would suddenly disappear, because the need to hunt archers would disappear as well. With that change, there would be no need any more to "balance" the kiting capabilities of archers with high item weight and bad fighting stats. Seriously, you need to fix a mechanics problem by changing the mechanics, not by tweaking the effectivity. Both changing the movement speed of archers or changing their melee capabilities is tweaking the effectivity and will be equally useless in fixing the mechanics problem we have. The only other problem I see would be the popularity problem which I mentioned above. But there are also ways to fix this without the plain and rather sad solution of lowering the popularity by lowering the effectivity.
Edit: don't make jokes about the length of my former posts, or I will fall back into old patterns, as you see here ,|,,
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