In the last patch, Archer got a lot of changes in his skills, for PvE Archer has become a great class, but sadly this changes not only have not been unsuccessful for PvP but also killed the class.
Quick TL;DR: Archer got some protection or better protection in some skills but in exchange half of the CC were removed, lost a bit of range, they nerfed the damage on key skills while buffing non important ones(they still don't do dmg) and made Archer unable to recover stamina during fights.

As you can imagine, the cons heavily outweight the pros here, and I even if I think is common sense, I'm going to say that reducing the capability of the Archer to recover stamina while he is kiting when the Archer is a class that gets focused a lot in the 1st place, is not the greatest idea when It was already a weakling for small scale fights. This being said, Archer's large scale also got negatively affected, so not only the class got nerfed on their weaker aspect but also on their strong side, making the class bad for every kind of PvP content the game has to offer.

Skill changes:

-Glissade: this skill used to be our main stamina recovery tool with 3 hits in FG, 1st one pushed you forward, 2nd and 3rd backwards. Is a skill we had to use continiously in order to keep ourselves active in the fight. The last hit of the skill was a KD that even if it wasn't a good CC it was a nice bait for some classes that were trying to take your back or even grab in a braindead way without any notion of timing. Right now, the skill has just 1 hit with KD, SA, and it uses stamina. This skill was also a Ranged AP buff, granting 12 Ranged AP when the skill was used. That changed to 20 total AP, what is nice, the issue comes when you realize you can't use the skill as a kiting tool now, and is not good for CC fishing either since it pushes you towards the enemy(speaking mainly from a small scale standpoint) what makes you even more vulnerable to damage and grabs one the squishiest class of the game. Additionally about the AP buff change, It's also a nerf to the damage during Qbuff, since Qbuff also gives 20 AP, it overwrites the one from the skill.

-Gaping Darkness: Another skill that was used for a small stam recovery during the fight. They changed it from FG to SA during the skill, keeping the CC and adding stam usage on the skill. If the skill mentioned previously is an example of an unsuccessful rework of a skill, this one is an example of an unsuccessful balance of a skill. Instead of adding stamina cost to the skill, they should have removed the CC. With the change on Glissade, you are forced to use the skill during a fight, making ur stamina usage even heavier, without any tool to make up for it.

-Zephyr Leap: another unsuccessful rework, one of our main kiting skills and one of our CC fishing skills, changing the CC for a slow is one of the worst decisions you can make, losing the CC pressure on this skill allows enemies to literally hold W and smash their keyboards to trade damage without any risk of getting CCed in the process, also fixing the camera movement during the attack makes it hard to hit vs enemies with faster movement what makes the slow on the skill a bit useless in certain scenarios, not like it was super useful anyway. And voicing up my opinion, the protection change from SA into FG to full SA makes the skill slightly weaker, since the FG part would come in the end preventing incoming damage once we distanced ourselves from the enemy. Since the FG was at the end of the skill it was hard to punish by most of the classes, but again, this last is just my own opinon.

-Verdure Clout: the only issue with this skill was the 2nd hit of the skill, that felt like an unprotected and unnecessary flow that could be triggered accidentally specially your animation got speeded up when struck. The only thing we asked for was to remove the 2nd hit from the skill. They removed the CC, removed the FG linger from the 1st hit that was super important and they added FG to the 2nd hit. The skill had 2 important functions, following up some melee CC catches, and recovering stamina while in FG. They made the skill useless for the 1st option, and they also heavily nerfed the 2nd one.

-Steady breath/Exhale: a failed attempt to compensate for the stamina issues the class has right now. The input change on the skill is also one of the worst they could choose, or the interaction with the C swap at least. I'm of the opinion that the old input was perfectly fine and that the skill needed no changes, but opinions aside, the input makes C swapping by mistake really easy and in a fight that means you are getting CCed and killed. If they wanted to change the input they should have made it so C swap doesn't work when you press A or D, because, as of now, if you were to misstime even for a single milisecond the skill or if you would missclick one of the 2 directional keys, you will C swap mid fight, and being honest the D+C input feels completely unnatural. Sharing the CD with exhale is also kind of a nonsense, they shouldn't have made that change, 500HP recovery is not even that big to start with. Another issue with the skill is that you can't lock exhale to not use it on accident(so you can always have ur iframe up) because when you lock it, it doesn't let you use Steady breath.

-Righteous Smite: changing the protection on the skill from SA to FG on such slow skill is a bad decision overall. Also the damage changes on the skill makes one of our few damage trading skills even more worse. If the change is aimed to the mass PvP, they should have increased the split damage on the skill instead, right now is way too easy to punish and doesn't have any crazy damage either to make up for it. 

-Earth Shatter: controversial change, some preferred the CC, some the FG, I'm on the CC side, it was a nice quick knockback on demand for melee catches that weren't in rage for Verdure Clout, and since it was a fast skill it could be used between skills to poke the enemies a bit, and with the correct timing, hard to get CCed while using it. The FG on the other side, can make trading damage safer and for certain scenarios you could argue that is a better option than the other one. Either way, losing the CC is noticiable since Glissade is now the only alternative for those catches and is not remotely as good on that job.

-Damage Nerfs: If the nerfs were aimed to large scale, as I said before, they should have increased and/or added more split damage to the skills, not only archer is not as oppressive anymore due to the tanky main raid comps but the combo damage and the poking potential from the archer got severely affected as well, since the same skills used in large scale are used in small scale as the main damage source. I think is the conscecuence of a poorly thought out change, but I'm afraid this applies to most of the changes.

-Piercing Cry: what I thought it was a bug from glab was introduced in retail as well. The skill doesn't follow the camera movement after using Meteor Dive, Gaping Darkness or other skills, this isn't something mentioned in the patch notes so I understand it's a bug, but it messes a lot with the Archer's movement affecting it negatively.

All the other changes, including both, some buffs and some nerfs like the AoE and range nerfs on some skills I think are fair and good to maintain a healthy enviroment during PvP(besides Storm of Light, a skill they tried making it useful multiple times and still no one is gonna use it. Oh and Shadebound Beam, why the 1min 30s CD on the stealth skill?????)

In conclusion, Archer needs to be updated once again to fix the issues caused with the last update, as of now the class can't compete at any scale. It lacks CC fishing and damage to poke in small scale, doesn't have stamina to keep up with the fight and unironically after "improving" it's protections, it's more exposed than before due to the range nerf and protection change in righteous smite. If they don't address this issues, people are going to start rerolling from the class as many already stated.

I completely agree with this. The recent changes to Archer feel like a net negative, especially for PvP. While the added protections in some skills seemed promising, the removal of CC, range nerfs, and stamina issues have made the class significantly weaker. Archer was already fragile, and now with limited stamina recovery and fewer tools for CC fishing, it struggles in both small and large-scale fights. The way key damage skills were nerfed while buffing irrelevant ones also doesn't make sense.

Yeah.. I wish you luck for the ranger as well, class also getting cooked

Archer is one of those classes that they just can't help but make worse with each change.

My Archer has been afk fishing ever since they ruined Spear of Sylvia and Gaping Darkness (used to be RMB: very handy).....

Now grinding with him is a chore and I haven't for the past year an a half.

Too bad PA keeps making him worse.

My condolances, Archer mains.  Stay strong!

These changes eliminated any strenght that the class had before. I wish "staying strong" would be an option. When you know that even people who main other classes agree with you on how much they killed Archer, that's clearly a sign that our feedback is pointless and not listened by the team responsible with class "balance". There are numerous forum posts + other forms of feedback that were provided which, with one click, could've been seen by PA if they would've considered them. 

I guess we're at the end of the road since there were no other positive changes in the most recent Global Lab patch, and we (me and probably the other 5~ remaining archers) will have to wait for another 2 years for a healthy rework.

Even if there's a very small player base on a certain class, nerfing it to the ground is also bad for business and it affects the whole game overall, because not everyone wants to reroll to whatever is a meta class these days. And I know that not only Archer is in this sad position.

I feel like we're out of options. Either stick to the class and struggle to make it work somehow while wasting stamina in less than 20s when pressured and being a punching bag on one of the squishiest classes in the game, reroll to a stronger class or just quit the game. I expected (even asked for, me and other archers) large scale nerfs and that's fine, hopefully with some adjustments for small scale, but I never expected to get such a hit which makes the class weaker in all PvP aspects of the game when it was already one of the weakest in small scale, AoS and Guild League. Unbelieveable...

Totally agree with this post and all the others on the same topic... If you don't know what to do with the class, please just roll back to 19 march, it will be ok.

PA should also change the way they balance classes in the game. Having to wait for 2 years to have a change on almost every skills on the kit is terrible (and not only for archers but for most of the classes).

Please do some small changes more frequently. Don't let us think that our class can be reworked randomly and that we can be forced to reroll...

Yeah, I'm on a semi retirement arc now because of this. I have zero motivation to learn another class after all this time. 
"Just reroll" should never be a solution to issues like this. I had a lot to say when these changes first came to Global Labs, but clearly PA isn't listening to feedback that they don't want to already hear.
It's obvious in the way they nerf and buff classes.
I would like to know WHO they talked to for these changes, because it's heavily obvious it wasn't an ACTUAL Archer player.

Agreed 100% that "just reroll" shouldn't even remotely be the solution.