and i not consider OP at all a 1hander+shield and a a medium crossbow who need an average of 3 bolts for kill someone in a medium armor, i can say that i have 0 wpf in crossbow and when there is a map with many cav i use one together with my steel pick and steel shield, and best i manage to do is kill cavalry with that. and reload is very low. no archer ever considered me a treath.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. This thread isn't about lowering xbows damage or making their shoot speed worse. It is a discussion about the ease of crossbowman hybrids, to which I proposed that crossbows should be two slots rather than imposing a wpf/pd requirement. It's a focus on the fact that several people hybrid with crossbows at 0 wpf adding to the unnecessarily high number of ranged that is going on.
I've noticed that it's worse at night when the server population drops below 30 people. Maybe because it's easier to notice when a polearm/crossbow hybrid kills four people on the opposite team then continues to poleaxe several more to death. Or maybe it's because simply getting one or two crossbow kills per round has a larger outcome on the overall battle when there are fewer people, thus it appears to become more efficient for individuals to bring a crossbow. It could be that in larger servers there are more people to soak up damage which allows dedicated melee(the ones who didn't bring a crossbow with their 0 wpf), to reach the ranged hideout.
Stop crying; xbows are fine the way they are.
As a pole/2h using xbow, you have to sacrifice your shield slot (counter to ranged), to get an inaccurate, low damage, short range counter to ranged.
Anything under a double heirloomed regular xbow has such a low shootspeed and damage as to have crap range and crap damage unless someone gets lucky and headshots (which is difficult at best with lag and such especially with low wpf in xbow).
So then if you think they're so bad, you use them because...? Your claim that they're terrible, isn't supported by the facts. In close & medium range they do decent damage, 20%- 30% to me when I have 9 IF and 80 armor in plate, isn't bad damage. That's more than many people do with melee swings. Considering how many throwers there used to be and how many there are now due to the throwing nerf, I think it's safe to conclude that people in the cRPG community tend to flock to what they think is effective. With the increase in crossbows, I can't imagine they're all doing it because they enjoy playing gimped classes.
I always thought my masterwork heavy crossbow had a nice shoot speed. Maybe the problem is that you're just not getting enough wpf, which kinda helps to point out my problem with crossbows.
Also, more ranged isn't the counter to ranged, especially when all I see is ranged shooting at infantry, not other ranged. Shields and flanking tactics are the counter to ranged.