I think this has all been geared towards playing together in groups, in which case, it work work

it work work

Huh?

Sounds to me like you are not using your weapons correctly.

I'll blame most of that on the nonparty system obsidian's been encouraging for awhile, but let me outline this scenario for you.

You have two characters, a ranger and a warrior.

Which one do you think will live longer vs mr. skeleton king?

The ranger.

Now, admittedly, both won't live very long period.

Now imagine if they both worked together, the warrior drawing the skeleton king's hits and distraction, while the ranger wails on him for damage.

That works pretty well. Such group activities is hopefully going to be encouraged now that, as you've found, dungeons are a little more treacherous, especially to imbalanced groups, such as all melee chars or all mages.

The same could be applied to pvp. One use i haven't seen of archery in a long long time is for team pvp battles. The warriors fight the mages, the bowmens job is to fizzle them, so even if they get away from the warriors they still run the risk of not casting all the time.

I do not see archery becomming a "useless and unused skill" just because every warrior won't have it. In fact i see it becomming more properly used, as a support skill by some characters. Especially not with the alterations to fletching. Not much, just bringing it more in line with the other weapon crafting skills and reimplementing some of it's basic perks.


As for echo's concerns, lets start from the top:

Warrior class is not able to use bows. This was covered already in many topics/discussions, so really no point going into it here.

Mage/WarMage/Necromancers can't gm healing. This is on purpose.
Healing was never supposed to be a magic users crutch. Especially, as most of you should have noticed already, that having magery skill at all increases your healing delay. Magic using classes have a magic heal to balance this out.


And yes, i agree that bulking up classes would be ince, and giving them all the ability to do everything, but again, that brings us back to the original issue. We are NOT overpowering or rebalancing the game to class/race characters. The game is supposed to be balanced to the 680 human.
The only way we're giving people everything without limitation that is by dropping everyone back to 680 skillcap and gm everything. and numerous players have already said they don't want that.