This shall be a similar topic where I hope to encourage discussion about the Archer theme within FF, and god willing, Splits. I wish to preface this post with the following: Archers are my theme, I play them to near exclusion of anything else post-revamp and played them heavily pre-revamp. Now that's out of the way let me get to the meat of the matter: Yes, archers got weaker in the revamp, yes, individually most archers have less damage and more restrictive range post-revamp. This however meants absolutely nothing because Archers are one of the best themes in today's meta and indeed I would argue they are too good. I don't mean to compare them to Treefolk/Beasts because they are so far beyond "Too" good to be countable, but beyond that Archers are one of the best theme's in today's meta for several reasons: A) The hard-counters to range which were so prevalent in yesteryears meta and which kept Archers as a truly competitive force have been reduced to a huge degree, with just a quick search of Poxbox we can see that where once we had 8/78/14/28/5 instances of Elusive/Evasive/Paralyctic Feedback/Absorb/Arroweater available to champions we now have 5/21/9/17/5 instances, or in more succint terms, over 50% of anti-range abilities in the game have been stripped from champions. B) Despite Archers and other ranged units losing damage on the whole Archers still possess: (i) Numerous damage boosts (Command: X. Motivate, Banner, Improve: X) (ii) An incredibly powerful thematic spell in the form of Fire for Effect which for those who don't know provides a permanent Burn 5 effect on all Archers in play as well as granting as a small ap bump for the same. This ensures that with Archers high range and generally high speed due to the KF bonus you have a force of mobile champions who can inflict base damage+5 Fire with a single shot. +5 Dmg ignoring defense globally is rather a large deal, even without it ticking again for +4 Dmg at the end of the enemies turn. C) Without going into the multitude of arguments as to why Ranged is superior to Melee it is suffice to say that Archers dominate the ranged fight and with the problems mentioned above within A), find it much easier to push through the reduced number of soft range-counters in the form of evasive, this is further exacerbated with the the large percentage of archers who possess some form of Precision, further reducing what counters are available. In summary I love the Archer theme, particularly the brutal IS/KF Archer BG i'm running, but I honestly believe that, in the post-revamp meta, despite the slight nerfs thrown out among the theme it still truly trumps most others beyond the most blatantly over the top and that some work is indeed needed to bring them into line with the main culprits being: A) Fire for Effect being too efficient for what it provides B) The depopulation of range-counters and the inbuilt counters to said counters within Archers. Let me know what you think.
All props to Poxbox for being so damn lovely to find the statistics above and apologies if I'm off by one or two instances of abilities.
People are really QQing about how broken KF is cuz it is the only faction that still has decent ranged champs. Elves SHOULD be the best archers in the world, and that holds true in nearly every fantasy setting I can think of. Try not to dominate with them too much guys...The way things are going, it seems like whatever is good for a few days gets whined about and then nerfed. See elven ancestor...which is a very flavorful and unique rune for us...and also pretty good. Bet they nerf it soon...because somebody lost a game to it so it must be OP.
Archers are strong right now, i feel, mostly because of the range hate that they have available in combination with thier own range, not just the amount of range they themselves have.
