TeckXKnight wrote:At near full meter, even with q20 arrows, it's pretty easy to 1 shot deer, badgers, foxes, mouflon, and aurchosen.
You sure? I have q30 bow and arrows, 91 perc with buffs and I'm pretty sure I couldn't oneshot aurochs at near full meter.
Back to more important matters - I would've been completely fine with damage nerf, but thing is that archery as a whole just feels very clumsy right now compared to melee combat. Successful use of marksmanship depends on so many things: bow quality, arrow quality, perception, MM skill (which is capped by bow quality) and even aim meter. And you could still miss your shot (even if you are portrait aiming a still target, if not than missing your target is pretty easy considering how funky hitboxes are). Meanwhile, Chop is 100% effective at just 1 MC (if not blocked), and it's damage depends just on your STR and weapon quality. Crafting melee weapons is also easier in terms of stats - STR and smithing for melee vs DEX, MM and carpentry (two of which do not affect archery in any other way and one of them is even requires FEPs, to make things worse). In terms of PvE, melee characters catch up to archers pretty fast and have their ways to abuse animals' AI (on horseback). Once you get your steel sword, plate set and some additional armor hunting as melee becomes trivial - you can tank anything up to a bear (which you can still abuse via horses). All of the above + lack of armor penetration simply means that there is no "endgame" for archery. As it is, marksmanship is most suitable for low-end hunting, hermits or as a support skill for crafting/foraging alts. With the introduction of new aggro mechanics, you could try using using ranged combat while your melee skills are getting ready, but I doubt that the results would be impressive. After all, what originally made archery OP in PvP wasn't the damage but lack of minimum draw time and 100% point blank accuracy, so instead of nerfing damage devs could really fix just that.
TL;DR: wartsmanship is clumsy and has weird progression. Honestly, I would love to hear jorbtar's thoughts on/future plans for archery. Hope they will notice this post.
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