Well that didn’t change anything except being sniped when standing afk.
Bows still 3-shot people 
https://streamable.com/zck2cx
And that’s only 1 archer. Imagine 3 of them or more, haha.
So my suggestion here would be to increase the charge up time of the heavy shot, so one archer can not kill you within 3 seconds.
Are you asking Funcom to make archery unplayable again? Because this is how you make archery unplayable.
Just because a player is good at shooting you while you’re moving doesn’t mean it’s “too op.” It just means you don’t prioritize taking out the archer. Come on, man… smh… players are meant to be better than npcs at fighting. If you ignore the NPC archers, sure, whatever… but if you’re ignoring a player actively trying to kill you, that’s on you. Strategize better. They’re not doing one shots anymore. What more do you want?
Bro, you get killed in 3 hits without risking to grt into melee/trading
I know you like abusing the meta to compensate your lack of skill but you cant defend this.
And I main archer.
If I’m not mistaken, a heavy shot takes 4 or 5 seconds, no?
This is all based on a combo of perks, mostly agility. Make rolling thrust and backstab melee only and that will help.
I don’t abuse anything since I don’t actually play pvp… However, I do know that, more often than not, PvP players come here and complain about something, then request a nerf. That’s how the majority of the nerfs have come about, making so many new metas or useless perks or weapons or builds. Some aren’t happy until nothing works. And I know you’re thinking, “you’re PvE, why do you care?” Because as many pve players can attest, the nerfs don’t just affect PvP. We feel it on the other side since the nerfs are blanket nerfs… not just nerfs to pvp. Much of the PvP issues people bring up are simply because they can’t learn to combat the “metas” and end up complaining about them instead (I understand there are legit requests for nerfs or modifications… this is not directed at those).
One of my pet peeves in balance discussions is when a very small subset of the PVP population (usually one’s who spend much of their time on a dueling server in prebuilt arenas, and doing recordings with fish eye views set to bad music), tries to scapegoat PVE and then try to gaslight others into thinking they aren’t good at PVP when they don’t play like them.
They want PVP to be adapted to them, and not have themselves adapt to PVP as it is. And one of the biggest hurdles PVP and Archery has had in all honesty is the fact that Archery has always been in the background. A bow is used to pull things, a bow is used to remotely set off a bomb, a bow is used to tick someone who has a heal running, and so forth. A bow in their eyes was never meant as a main form of damage. The PVP archer is a anathema to how they play.
When I made my first mod nearly 6 years ago, this was a problem I ran into when I wanted to make archery a bit more balanced to Melee and tried to get feedback. My intent at the time was to make every point spent into Accuracy worth as much as every point spent into Strength. I thought that would be fair and that it would be balanced. I ran into hurdles with feedback on people testing it because they believed that Archery shouldn’t be equal to melee. They admittedly thought archery at the time was useless and wanted a little variety to spice it up. But they never wanted a situation where an archer would be equal to a melee.
Mind you when we say equal, we mean effective here. I didn’t take archery and one to one Damage Per Second to a similar 2 handed weapon. I did factor in that range was a bonus worth considering, so that the TTK (time to kill) on a bow was still quite a bit lower than an equal tier melee weapon. But I still got flak on it and had to make compromises in order to get the mod loaded onto a server that was a 70/70 for testing. I did get the TTK that I wanted through manipulating values that most people at the time didn’t really understand. And it did make some NPC archers a bit spicy to deal with if you didn’t wear armor. But overall everyone enjoyed the crap out of it. On that server and another heavily populated server. Only reason I didn’t continue it was because Funcom did a patch to fix up archery and I felt the mod was deprecated at that point.
But what exactly do these melee favorables don’t like? It forces them to avoid hits from further away (which can be a little hard when your view is fisheyed). It also forces them to avoid hits coming from above, and watching above is something universally is disliked in combined arms type games (aircraft for example are always OP if they pose any sort of threat).
The intent here is never to balance archery combat here. But to have it utterly made pointless in most situations and in specific situations they wish to play in. Prebuilt arenas using spears to see who can poke and roll the best.
Archery has always been a tad lackluster in PVE due to the weight of arrows, their stack size, and many other factors such as lower armor piercing compared to some weapons. And the slow nature of power shots to make the most of each arrow. Making some of the tougher bosses a slog to go through. TTK on bosses with archery has usually been quite low. So getting a nerf to the weapon itself would be really bad.
And the thing is, any issue in PVP causing Archery to seem overtuned, is also causing problems in melee too. Rolling thrust for example is causing issues on bow or spear. But why is the focus on the bow in this thread?
Well look at the video. Everyone’s using spears. Spears (and many melee weapons) are also OP with rolling thrust. But everyone loves the spear, it can never be bad. And in this case it isn’t. But by going after the weapon instead of the perk, they don’t actually want balance. They want their playstyle to be unchallenged.
I want to see the people in that video try something. Have everyone use spears as normal, no bows or other weapons. I want one side to use their normal SAV build. And I want the other to use a 20/19/20 with that extra point going to Grit or whatever. And lets see what happens. It won’t be an even fight.
Bows do not need downward adjustment. They are already absurdly underpowered in PvE modes. But then if we consider how touchy and imprecise the aiming of them is on consoles, I am in firm opposition to any nerfs to Bow damage.
I’ve had long and annoying discussions about this topic here on the forums in the past.
Forget it, you get c-blocked and Funcom does not care.
Even though your suggestion is different than mine were and it kinda points towards an exploit regarding bows that no one seems to notice here on the Forums.
And my suggestion is:
Get an armour with armour on it
When you fight an archer, don’t run away from them but toward them and hit them with your melee weapon. They can’t shoot when they are staggered.
Due to the combination of agility perks and bow+arrow armor pen stacking medium and heavy armors don’t provide considerable protection against BiS or near BiS archers.
Q lock also makes it extremely easy to spam in medium and even close-distance combat.
It’s even funnier when you try to use a shield and an archer just walks straight into your face and spam staggers you because arrows spawn behind the shield block area.
Yeah, the only way is to play on a private server with server mod adjustments.
Even now, with this boring infinite stamina no brain combat, and nerfed-into-the-ground bosses some people find it too hard.
Anyone who at least somewhat understands the system can see where’s Funcom going right now. Recent changes starting from building hammer and now combat and q-lock buff/rework were made for console users.
Funcom actively tries to dumb down every mechanic in the game so some Bob can just buy it, launch it, smash his head against a controller a few times, get his instant gratification, and maybe buy some DLC or a bazaar pack.
This!
Granted I don’t PvP anymore, but they’ve already been nerfed into oblivion and it takes a few seconds to power shoot as it is.
It’s a vehement no from me. 
Please don’t put the blame on console users. This is an argument that won’t win you any points with anyone and only makes you sound like an ass. Besides, the game is made on consoles and should work for a controller. If it doesn’t, it should have never been made for consoles in the first place. Take your PC/keyboard loving elitism elsewhere.
@Taemien put it really succinctly when he said that the issue wasn’t specific to archery, but rather one that applies to other weapons as well. PvP damage in general is extremely overtuned and the result is a profoundly boring meta where you either spear-spam, dagger-spam (on servers with lock-on), or bow-spam.
Low-risk, low-effort weapons have completely dominated the PvP scene due to hyper armor nerfs and lock-on. If we want a more robust meta, we need to return to AoS levels of damage and stamina. Being able to run away/roll infinitely strips archery of its weaknesses, and makes spear poke spam ridiculously annoying to counter without leaning into the same skill-less bullshit.
There’s a perk that actually makes it so that arrows do MORE damage the further they travel. The problem is that the minimum trigger distance for that scaling effect is way too low.
Yeah I think it’s 6 foundations and I’m like 'really? That’s still point blank for pistol ’
Don’t forget the 2h axe spam in high ping environments.
There’s no meaningful counterplay to archery right now, save for more archery. Ranged damage shouldn’t be as high as melee damage in an environment where you can run away forever. Granted, melee damage shouldn’t be this high either.
It reminds me of the early Elden Ring PvP meta where people were either two-shot strength builds or runaway mages.
There isn’t a healthy back-and-forth anymore, it’s just rolling and running and jousting ad infinitum.
I’m not outright blaming console users.
I blame Funcom.
They chose to turn CE into low effort easy to pick up few hours long “survival-lite” game. We can either live with it or leave.