Kesh, you're not an archer anymore? This is a sad day
One of my alts is ana rcher, but I play it for what its worth. A joke class now where you annoy melee fighters so your allies can kill them. I made my main into 1H/polearm/shiedler/cav and my other main alt into 2h/thrower.
Two points:
1) Javelins are highly effective and 3 stacks is plenty especially on servers with fewer people. Unlike archery you dont need to put every available wpf into archery to stand any chance at being effective so easy to have 100 in throwing and 80 in 2h (more as i level up from 20) Similar build going for 24 str, 12 agi (2 converted points, 5 IF, 7 PS, 8 PT, 4 ATH, 4 WPMSTR). Unlike archery no real nerf for heavy armor so get a lot more health, armor, do more damage... basically just overall easier then archery now.
2) Will do my second heirloom of the khergit bow on my archer alt when retirement comes back, maybe even a third and another one for the second one for bodkin arrows (+2 damage), but archery will remain a clown class until chadz makes changes (but all his fellow programmers are tin cans anti-archers, so not likely). Hell, the only people that benefitted from switching from piercing to cutting is tincans... not noobs, not peasants, not agility builds, not shielders... tincans. Do we really need to buff tincans? Were they some kind of endangered class? Like the elephant and rhino riders?