Recently, I've branched out to some other classes and realized how bad Archer has it. He should be modernized. Having to weave in 2-3 abilities that do zero damage every 10 seconds is bad for high end spots. Archer is great in early game and capped spots because monsters die in 1-3 abilities. When you bring him to spots like Darkseekers or Golden Pig Cave, you feel the clunk. 

Archer has a lot of high damage skills, but they are so slow to get out, most mobs turn around by the time you finish the animation of the 2nd skill. If you just try to keep shooting, you are probably going to end up getting knocked down or take serious damage because half of our skills are unprotected. So repositioning is a must. This wastes valuable time of dpsing and hurts our trash numbers. 

Simply put, we need better attack speed and not to have 2 separate ap buffs on zero dps skills. 

Currently we have:

1. Light's Path (RMB), does actually zero damage since you animation cancel it. +10 AP.

It doesn't fit anywhere in a combo because it isn't a real ability and overlaps with Flow: Light's Trail keybind. It only exists to cause friction as a maintenance buff.

2. Glissade (Forward + RMB) does 1548 x 2, pretty much zero damage and forces you to waste a movement skill. +12 AP.

The least annoying, but still bad, like Succ Lahn's Left/Right + RMB. 

3. Gaping Darkness (Forward + E) does 1860 x 2, again nearly zero damage and extremely small. +30% crit chance.

The crit buff is only relevant for Earth Shatter/Sunfall because they have 0% base crit chance. Every other skill is at 50% or 100%. Just buff them to 50% and remove this crit buff. Why does this even exist?

What I would like to see:

1. Give us +20 AP when we proc Righteous Fire (Hitting an enemy with a Greatbow skill). Awakening Dosa gets +20 for existing, why do we have to use 2 terrible skills first?

2. Remove Light's Path. Just make it so Flow: Light's Trail can be used with RMB and give it Super Armor.

3. Give Earthshatter and Sunfall 50% base crit. 
4. Give Marked Bloom a 10 second 15% attack speed buff. We like pressing it. 

Another lost soul. PA hates archers so much. And for a long time. And that's not an exaggeration. Just forget about it. They will never fix him. As much as they love zerks, they hate archers so much. I say that as someone who has been playing him since its release.

And so you're right. I support you. Archer needs to be COMPLETELY reworked.

Archer isn't that doomed. I actually like most things about it other than a few hot key changes that could smooth out swapping. Mostly Earthshatter and Full Bloom sharing the same key and Kick skills being useless. Which all could be fixed with a few changes like making it use Low Sweep while Earth Kick is locked. Or Down + E not using Piercing Light from crossbow, while there is nothing that interferes with it. Just a quality of life pass would do wonders for the class.

We have some completely useless skills like Storm of Light, but we have enough actually cool skills to make the class work as is. Just some things need to be smoothed out.

I would probably be content with the class with a simplified prebuff and some attack speed, but one can dream for more. 

Just go as an archer in pvp. Im especially pleased with the reaction party in AoS. They roll their eyes when they see archers in their team with the words "oh god, another archer"

Yeah, I've done some AOS and I've heard that line before.

There are certainly huge issues with protection that makes PVP absolutely suck unless you are 100 miles away. The gaps between protected skills is very bad, lack of i-frames, etc. Not arguing that it isn't bad. I just meant that in response to "Archer needs to be COMPLETELY reworked." Makes me think you want them to go back to the drawing board and say "What is Archer?"

Some stuff should be revamped. The breath skills are just bad and the Full/Grand Bloom swap is kind of pointless now. The biggest PVE issue for me is the self buffing then protections getting buffed. FG/SA on Marked Bloom, Full Bloom, Light's Trail, and Spear of Slyvia, also the "only during charge" FG on Luthraghon's Call. Even adding 4 protections, we still would have more gaps than most classes lol. 

PA should apply some much of the stuff they had learned by the time they created Deadeye back to Archer. I played both, and Deadeye feels like a much more streamlined and much less outdated version of Archer, with a different focus. This is unfair for Archer because while both of them serve similar roles in being the only true ranged classes (arguably together with Ranger succ, but she's not as ranged), their core gameplay is quite different.

But Archer is just so much more bothersome to learn and to play! He has tons of skills that serve no competitive purpose at all, some of which he still needs to spam regulary in order to keep buffs up. Meanwhile with Deadeye, I find myself using almost every skill at least once during a match. She has relatively few skills with short cooldowns, but for each of them it is clear what it does and what it is good for. She does have some interseting combos, but you only need those to be good, not to be OK, while Archer needs to perform very weird and unintuitive combos to even stay alive. If Archer ever becomes more straight forward, I might give him another chance.

Every time there is a global lab update with class balance.