Unless I have misunderstood some things, the reason for increasing the weight of ranged equipment and decreasing the speed of horse archers is that people shouldn't be able to pick their targets over distance and at the same time outrun others, because that would make them essentially invincible unless they make major player-skill-dependent mistakes.
If this is legitimate reasoning, how comes that the melee class with the highest effective weapon reach is the one who moves the fastest? The only situation where polearm and onehand attacks outrange the twohanded stab or even a Miaodao leftswing is because of terrible footwork of the twohanded user. Yet shielders have additional weight from the shield and polearms are usually heavier than twohanders.
When you play a balanced or strength-based onehanded build, there isn't much you can do against the 18/30 twohanded meta. They have the longer weapon, which means they can hit you while you can't hit back, and they have more athletics than you, which means that they can determine the distance between the two of you, putting the full potential of their longer weapon into practice. It forces onehanders to skill at least 3 more agility than the average twohander and wear lighter armor, but this again means they have 3 less STR and tend to glance against heavy armors and need much more hits to kill the enemy, who can easily afford heaving less STR because the nominal damage on twohanded weapons is higher than on onehanded weapons. The only way for onehanders to compensate their disadvantage is additional focus on hitting vital zones (which is exclusively the head in Warband). The onehanders who pull that off and manage to compensate their weak position in the meta by being better players sometimes encounter surprised reactions of twohanders who sincerely wonder how only four headshots from a paramerion could kill them despite their heavy armor.
The same is true for polearm in comparison to twohand, with the exception that polearms also have high nominal damage and thus don't suffer that much from picking AGI over STR.
It's a waste to blame one side for using the S key and the other side for using the W key, it's just the natural concept of the game. But the illustration given above shows that in order to be able to counter S with W, you need to have more AGI than the S user, which means have less power strike, which hurts onehanders more than other classes. The past has shown that a nerf of backpedaling speed will never happen, but how about making movement speed more dependent on melee weapon length than it currently is?
This would possibly make Timmy come back.
