I understand nerfing xbows due to the fact they can harass a player/possibly kill a melee player but, at the same time this last patch was excessive. Arbs players had to play hide and seek for any viability yet now the crossbow is at the speed of the old arbs. For the higher str characters in heavy armor and arbs shot would deal about 1/4th of someones life from what I've been told by players I've hit and now its going to take the time to reload a crossbow that an arbs reloaded at. Perhaps instead of just crushing xbows we can focus on instead making more defined classes in the game. For example make 2 branches of xbows one thats highly accurate thats barely effected by drop with high damage but absolutely terrible to reload to favor a sniper feeling while making another branch of xbows that favors faster reload times but does less damage and is greatly effected by drop with less accuracy to favor shotgun supporting. The heavy sniper play style should be highly limited by weight in the xbow itself to force the player to wear light armor and to be unable to kite but in favor of having even higher damage than the old arbs for the cost of the weight of the world (lets say about 20 weight). If we also made bows have a high weight penalty and perhaps got rid of the ability to drop them in Na1 we could also solve the issue with archers just kiting and playing pong with melee with their range buddies. It would also help if we greatly increased drop on archery to encourage them to get closer to combat instead of staying at spawn or hiding on the top of a hill but, theoretically faster flags would also help unencourage teams from all moving uphill. Meanwhile however, I am going to hope for loom exchanging on gear though as the crossbows been dropped to 40% speed and 80% damage meaning it has only 33% of its old dps now.
