@Algarn
Some damage increase on bows is necessary (and I think Tydeus already posted something about a buff to some) to make bodkin arrows actually deal more damage than tatar arrows and to address their low effectiveness because of soak for lower PD builds, but I doubt we'll see the return of far range 6 PD archery dealing more damage than 10 PT close-range jarids/medium range throwing lances.
Given percentage increases in raw damage yield greater percentage increases in effective damage because of the way soak works, e.g. your longbow change would increase effective damage on 55+ armor by over 30%, despite being a ~22% increase in raw damage for +3 longbows.
It wouldn't be very fun getting randomly oneshotted with the heaviest helmet + ~65-70 hp, having all unarmored horses die in 2 body shots maximum (or one headshot), or having archers with tatar arrows deal more damage to shields than non-bonus vs. shield melee weapons.
One thing that puzzles me: Wouldn't something with vastly higher effective damage and random spread be better for killing random low-medium armor players that grouped up, instead of targeting specific players?
@Panuru
I'm pretty sure most of your post was just for poking fun at the current state of things, but:
Drop your bow to run/melee.
9/10 PD kills just fine, bows besides Short/Nomad/Tatar will probably get some damage added to them. A small increase in effectiveness for ranged in general may be possible once a rounding issue is fixed, currently the damage scripts just floors any float values, so an extra 1-3 effective damage is subtracted for some attacks depending on how many times the damage is converted to/from floating point for calculations. This is the most noticeable on ranged attacks with low effective damage (HA).
Projectile stuns still exist, flinching to interrupt swings/blocks is easy, it's just the flailing arms and stumbling backwards flinch that's more difficult to do. Locking people in place with piddly squat damage was removed though, but that was a feature that didn't make all that much sense in retrospect anyway.
Armor affects archery/throwing much less now even with the exponential penalties (unless you use crazy high >220 WPF builds with less than 4 PD/PT and full plate or something).
Less melee weapon choice is pretty much a given as a tradeoff. Falchion, Knobbed Mace, and Fighting Pick are fairly decent at resisting stuns for 0s. There are plenty of decently heavy 1s weapons.
All ranged/cavalry classes require some investment that reduces "effective level" vs. a pure melee player. Archery/Throwing get the benefit of PD/PT increasing accuracy. Archery gets the most benefit since the increase in WPF penalty gets smaller as you get closer to 10 PD, while throwing's penalty remains static for each additional PT point.
Crossbows rely exclusively on WPF which has the advantage of freeing up some skill points, but they have slow firing rates and slower missile speeds than bows, which makes accuracy more important. The WPF requirement for crossbows to become fully accurate is much higher than it is for bows right now though, and +3 arbalests with 186 effective WPF are still less accurate than a +3 Longbow with 10 PD, <30 effective WPF.
(WPF requirement to achieve maximum accuracy increases with heirlooming.)
Hunting crossbow 126-131
Light crossbow 134-139
Crossbow 147-152
Heavy Crossbow 166-171
Arbalest: 180-186
HA is kind of a flawed class in general for game modes like battle since there's no respawning, and the distribution of ranged/cavalry players tends to be lopsided fairly often between teams. I think San said that he removed the 15 damage cap for the next patch though, so they'll be able to harass cloth armored players or medium armored players with headshots pretty easily.
