Make crossbows less accurate but do more damage to require more wpf investment, buffing pure xbowers while nerfing hybrid melee/xbow.
Little late to this thread due to a forum mute, but I think one of the main problems with this patch is that it traded accuracy for damage in a bad way. Before the update you had to invest at least 130, better if 150, WPF in xbows to get really good accuracy with Heavy and Arb. The damage was pretty extreme, and the reload time made the rate of fire somewhat faster than perhaps it should be. That combined with the low difficulty made it easy to hybrid melee-xbow and be decent at both.
Now you only need 80-120 wpf to get really good accuracy, but the damage is much worse and the reload time is insane. It may seem like you have to reduce the amount of wpf needed because the strength requirement was increased, but in fact it should be slightly different. Leaving the damage where it was pre-patch (not hotfix), increasing the str requirement, increasing the reload animation a little bit, and decreasing the accuracy would have made crossbows something you need to invest quite a bit of skill in. You'd need to take more str to use the thing, and just as much agi to get the wpf. Leaving you with very little for melee skills. This would make them similar to bows in regards to building for max heavy or arb damage, and to differentiate them they would have much slower rate of fire with better accuracy than bows.
The main complaint, that I always heard, was not that crossbows we're incredibly good ranged, but that they were decent ranged without any harsh melee drawbacks.
Basically this mod has spent the last 3 years steadily reducing the effectiveness of ranged/melee hybrids. In order to really get the most out of melee you need to not put any stats in PD or PT, in order to get the most out of bows or throwing you need to do the same in reverse. The black sheep was always crossbows. This patch has made it slightly more necessary to not hybrid melee and crossbows, though it is still possible, but it has also totally gutted the crossbows effectiveness.
Alternatively you could simply make crossbows require PD and you'd put them in the same place as bows in regards to possible builds (having heavy at 6 PD, arb at 7 ect. ) without really needing to nerf the rest of their stats to much at all. maybe a bit less damage and a tiny bit more accuracy, just to make them feel different from bows. Apparently some idiot turk hard-coded xbows to not take PD.
Also my build pre-patch was:
Strength:18
Agility:24
One Handed:115
Crossbow:152
Weapon Master:8
Athletics:8
Iron Flesh:5
Power Strike:6
Edit: In regards to the bow changes I'm actually quite happy. They really got a buff due to the lazer like missile speed and draw speed. That said the new names are just garbage. Only two of the named longbows are actually longbows, and the composite bows are too similar in appearance and name to tell easily which is which. I get that you were probably trying to standardize the naming system for organizational purposes, but it really really sounds dumb.
Post edit edit: Fuck I have a lot of useless shit to say. The one final thing for this thread however is that perhaps in the future you should consider if something really needs a major stat re-balance before investing all this time in it.
When I play melee I despise range, but when I play range I miss most of my shots. Basically ranged was already in a pretty good way (except for the hybrid ability of the xbow), and I can't help but feel like the balancers time could have been better spent getting armor and melee weapons stats in order. For instance the lombardic sword versus the swedish sword
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