When archers get protected they are not underpowered as we've seen on the Strat battles. What makes the class hard to play is the terrible map rotation and retarded players on EU1. At the moment archers have no hard counters as cavalry is way too weak to effectively go against an archer stack. However now that the only effective builds for archers are 9PD and 10PD they are lacking the movement speed to run from or fight the infantry, forcing them to basically to run behind their infantry formation not shooting at all. At least that's my experience as an archer. If you do however get protection the class is still as strong as it ever was and way too accurate. Buffing archery would be a very bad idea, but we need to have an incentive to have lower PD builds as well.
Back to the topic though, I agree with the too high levels. It makes the game really hard for average or below average players and gives too good opportunities to go with a full hybrid thrower, xbow or cavalry. Setting the level "cap" lower (25-31) would force cavalry for example to be either good on horseback and shit on foot, or bad at both. Same for shielders that need both agi and str, the patch basically brought back the indestructible shields of boredom which is one of the reasons I haven't really played this game for the last few weeks.
