I need some sort of irrefutable argument that would show agility's superiority over strength or 1s bow's superiority over 2s bows. You attempted this, but were unable to find an irrefutable argument. If I knew what exactly the argument would be that you could make, I'd have already made a proposal to rebalance archery. Unfortunately, what evidence there has been so far, isn't nearly good enough to justify a balance change.
I recently tested 24/18 and 30/12 on my STF though and I didn't find them to be lacking. Furthermore, I have not only thoroughly tested damages in game, I have also tested accuracy (and not just reticule size) as well. Again, the conclusion I have come to is that when you consider the potential that each build has, the actual potential is higher for str builds, but they're also more specialized, as one would expect under a perfectly balanced setting. As you specialize, you sacrifice, else you gain for free.
Ok, then lets go.
Horn bow is better than rus and long bow, for the following reason :
If the bow A, a powerful bow, got long loading time, bad accuracy, bad arrow trajectory, 2 slots (not able to take a decent side weapon), and high repair (not entering into the description of potential of the bow, simply saying that the worst bows (to me) are also the most expensive), it's enough to me to see that slightly higher damage is not sufficient to that. This bow A will do lets say 25 damage per shot.
Then, we got the bow B. The bow B, is a weapon with short loading time, pin point accuracy, huge missile speed, low price (lol), but got less damage per shot. It's doing 17 damage per shot.
Which bow is the best ? A or B ? better damage, or accuracy + speed + short loading time.
Note that in crpg, low damage can be compensated by headshots (easy to land with bow B, since if you miss, you can almost fire another instant arrow) or simply by taking tatar or bodkin arrows.
To conclude my biased as fuck text, bow B> bow A, which means that horn bow and other nomad bows are generally better than longbow and rus bow.
This time, let's go for builds.
A good ranged build is a build allying moving speed, shooting speed, accuracy, ability to fight in melee, damage with the bow. Lets take level 31 builds
Build A : 18/24 at 31, or 18/21 at level 30
Moving speed : check
Shooting speed : check
accuracy : check
arrow trajectory : unchecked, actually shit with high tier bows
ability to fight in melee (footwork, wpf and shit) : check
damage : depends of the bow, target armor, etc.
As you seen on my screen shots, the damage wasn't that different from high str builds, still shooting much faster than str builds, so, "DPS" is therefore higher.
Build B : 27/15 on level 31, 24/15 on level 30
Moving speed : unchecked (clearly shit, can't kite, if you want to escape from death by dropping your bow, you still get caught by anyone with 6 athletics.)
shooting speed : unchecked (you are slower than any archer to shoot)
accuracy : unchecked (simply terrible when you wear a bit more than the limit of weight before losing wpf)
arrow trajectory : checked (wow, the only thing you got when using a strength build).
ability to fight in melee : unchecked (you move too slowly to get enough speed bonus, plus you hit slowly and get spammed)
damage : checked (you do slightly more damage than agi builds), but what can you do when you miss your arrows half of the time, and have to wait 2.5 seconds to fire another one ? You got in fact lower "DPS" than agility archery builds.
I know, you will say it's biased as fuck, but what isn't in your way to balance the game ? ATM, strength archery is more like throwing on high distances, not a second way to play archery. You can't pretend to play archery if you don't even fill half of the requirements of a real archery build. People cried about that bug you fixed, it was only for my build something to not be completely fucked by agi archery builds. Once you removed it, builds like 18/24 got nerfed, but still, I barely got enough effective wpf to shoot with my build, and not enough to use the weapons of a strength archer, which are the high tier bows.
