Arrows just aren't as lethal as they used to be.

Jon Steinhauer examines the role of the archer in modern MMOGs in this second installment of his article "The Close Combat Archer."

When did the bow (or crossbow) become a close combat weapon? In the previous article, we began looking at this curious phenomenon and compared archer methodologies in several games with historical precedent. Though rather simplistic in nature, the debate becomes more severe when we realize that any poor fix could alienate as much as a third of the player base. Archers constitute one of the three major combat classes (melee, archer, and mage) and for this reason must be approached carefully.

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