What I've been too lazy to write for a while~

Read it if you must... my thoughts on endgame. You might think differently and that is good, post your ideas. If you decide to post a two sentence response with flimsy arguments I'll simply ignore them and assume you only know enough about this game to write two sentences. If I had to state my background for some absurd reason: I've played this game since November 2007 and have experienced pvp playing every class 90+ except for assassins and psychics. This is not an archer sucks endgame thread. This is me giving my personal opinion as to where we stand which is somewhere well above all the QQuseless posts and below the "we are average" posts.

In response to this thread: http://pwi-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=570101

As for archers sucking endgame, I can say it's starting to snowball. True this class is at a disadvantage at 100 - I'll explain later - but now it's getting overused and exaggerated. There are situations where it's clearly prevalent that the odds are stacked against us but a lot of it is now people thinking they are good and their class just sucks.

To further understand why archers are the target of so much QQ you need to not only understand how each class works in pvp but what their strengths and weaknesses are.

An archers strength comes from their high attack speed coupled with moderate damage and amplified by their high crit rate. We also are a very flexible class in terms of physical and magical attacks, a 3-4.5 second stun, an 8 second paralyse, a continuous high damage aoe and plenty more skills specific to certain situations. These are the reasons I picked an archer, I liked the flexibility we had at long range. Another thing that could be considered is an archers armor. On paper, armor that gives a balanced amount of physical and magical defense would be amazing - adding even more flexibility to this class. Archers seem like the perfect solo pvp class with enough skills to be of use in group pvp and tw. This point can be reinforced by the pvp rankings. Generally archers make up the majority of the rankings due to our flexibility. If you are flying around searching for kills one class you see is essentially just as easy as another class. This is very general but the reason why most pvper's are archers is their flexibility.

The above is borderline the experience I had when leveling back in 2008, which I predicted. Archers are easily the most face-roll-on-keyboard class from 60 (under 60 pvp is serious business) to 90. We are at our peak at 70, lose some ground at 77 with the invention of "hey melees', you can't miss now!" and the 70 axes also known as "wtf just happened?" All robes are still a joke, if they last longer than your 3 second stun they are cheating. Really, the only class you should be worried about are veno's with nixes (those didn't exist back in the day /rockingchair)

At 90 you not only lose all the ground you had but each class steamrolls past you, backs up, runs over you again and doesn't even call an ambulance. Remember my statement about how on paper armor with equally balanced defenses seemed good? Well at 90+ robes and their lackluster physical defense get a boost due to their ornaments being exclusively physical defense and lunar rings at 95, they also get a cape that gives 432 physical defense or 500. Mages get a 120%-150% physical defense buff and clerics still have plume shield. Not only does this bring robes physical defense above and beyond an archers, they have a ton of magic defense due to their armor and stat build. On the other end of the spectrum, heavy armor is the best armor in the game. A massive amount of physical defense, a decent amount of magical defense and the most hp per refine out of the three armors (why do you think venos restat heavy?). Since heavy armor gives such a high amount of physical defense most wear magical defense ornaments. Lunar rings give more magical defense and you can get 100 or 250 more magical defense from capes. Blademasters can reach 10k of each defense with magic sutra and werebeasts stack so much vit their magic defense receives a hefty boost. Now balanced armor doesn't seem so good. Since we can't increase our defenses with self buffs we will always be the class with the worst defenses. Hey, at least we got our trusty evasion.

Having balanced armor isn't all that bad. We still can achieve respectable defenses at endgame but that doesn't solve our problem. Somewhere between consecutive steamroller pass overs our damage decreased, no longer can we just simply bypass an opponents charm or one shot them. This can be attributed to us having terrible designed skills for endgame. With the high amount of physical defense robes have we can't bypass their charms with a simple take aim (crit, sharptooth and extreme poison can sometimes but lets remember mages have 10k physical defense and clerics a decent amount of defense and high hp) so spamming skills on them isn't your best bet. This is where demon steps up to the plate. Quickshot is an amazing skill and is one of the main reasons archers still leave safe zone, even if you have 10k pdef moderate damage shots hurt when they come at over 1 per second with a 40% chance to crit. Along with attacking zthuper fast if you sold your leg to this company you also have a chance to debuff the person guaranteeing an easy kill. Now to be able to attack fast enough to kill someone with normal attacks you need to stack -interval. This situation is bittersweet - to maximize -interval both HH99 heavy adorns are needed, this seems counterintuitive due to the fact you are stacking -interval to kill magic casters but are equipping physical defense adorns. With the event gears a respectable attack speed can be achieved without resorting to HH99 heavy adorns but a decently refined bow is recommended to make up for the decrease in speed. If you can't cash shop a pixel tomb for 100mil, an event cape for 60mil and a bow for 70mil (who doesn't tho nowadays?) you are recommended to wear the two HH99 heavy adorns - you don't have to but with a low refined bow you won't be killing many buffed robes.

For heavy armors we have little flexibility when dealing with them. Sharptooth is a must to decrease their high health or I recommend Blood Vow which decreases their hp by 18% and amplifies the damage they take making them more manageable. We have three metal attacks which prove my previously mentioned point that our skills were designed terribly for endgame. Not a single attack is weapon percentage based. Mages power comes from this percentage (ignoring opdine of course) and our magic skills are weak base damage + **** bonus. All we have is the metal debuff but that doesn't come close to percentage based magic attacks. Seeing as none of these skills hit hard bypassing a heavy armor's charm only happens under ideal situations. Resorting to out-dpsing their charm is also hard due to our long casting time and frequent need to kite from the overpowered melees. Again, blood vow is an amazing skill and stacked with extreme poison and a few timely crits a melee can go from 60% hp → charm tick with blood vow proc'd to dead.

One last point I would like to make is regarding one of our strengths. When developers created the classes they gave archers moderate (yet the highest) physical attack in the game. Over long periods of time we deal the second highest amount of damage making us the ideal DD class for bosses (sharptooth too of course). In pvp this means nothing, our damage is terrible for spiking charms and the way this was dealt with was giving archers an arguably class specific trait ----