They should not be able to then duel or groupfight on equal footing, end of.
There is no archer build with decent ranged damage possible right now that wont be vastly outperformed by a dedicated melee build in a melee fight. As a melee you will always be better at every single stat that matters in a melee fight, whether this means armour, attackspeed, damage, blockstun treshold, ironflesh, attack recovery time, weaponreach, forcing glances, and if the poor soul doesnt even have the time to drop bow and quivers it will also be movementspeed/footwork. Due to bow damage currently being incredibly low compared to what it has been during the last 8 years, your standard 10 PD meta archer will have 0 melee WPF. I do not even want to make this sound insulting but there simply is no way around saying it, if you get killed by an archer in melee you are just plain bad, no offense.
The fact is we have all been playing this game for at least 5 years now, most more than that. We have all reached peak performance and so should expect the skill level to be higher, but I do believe there is a solution. Either caps on how much prof you can put into weapon points or increase the cost as you put more points into a particular one. This would reduce complaints about movement speed for melee heroes, AND reduce accuracy of ranged.
That would achieve the exact opposite of what you propose. If everybody would have less WPF then everybody would attack slower and all around it would be more easy to block in melee fights. Not to mention that this change wouldnt affect archers nearly as bad as pure melee builds, since the latter obviously have invested in a lot more melee WPF.
Regarding a reduction of accuracy, obviously this is not suitable. Of all the stats we can alter, and I fully agree with Gurnisson here, accuracy is the only stat that does not give an outright buff to ranged unless the shooter is skilled enough to capitalize on it.
90% you get hit by ranged, it is because the shooter 1) successfully predicted your movements correctly ( or in other words you moved very predictably if it wasnt a short range shot ), 2) estimated the projectile travel time correctly until it reaches the predicted place you would end up at, and 3) judged the distance correctly to account for missile drop, whereas that last factor does not play as much of a role as the other two but can easily mean the difference between a headshot or a shoulder shot. If the shooter misjudges only one of these components he will miss anyway, doesnt matter then if the projectile missed you by one meter or by 85 centimeters. Because of that, Missile speed is hands down the main deciding factor in determining how easy a ranged weapon is to use. And guess what, this stat is also at an all time low compared to how it was back in the days, which I fully support by the way in order not to make ranged too easy.
I'm expecting the usual ignorant replies of "shield blah blah blah" , "I'm already inaccurate as fuck", "protect your own archers". So any comments in the like will be ignored.
I just want to have a conversation about potential fixes because this is what will kill the mod.
Well there is your problem then, if you will disregard all the tips you get that may actually work as "ignorant" and are still insisting on your problems conveniently getting nerfed away, I think I am not out of line when I ask you to reconsider if it is maybe not in fact you who is "ignorant".
I am certainly agreeing that unbalanced ranged / melee team compositions pose an issue but that cannot be addressed by nerfing bows or WPF.
