Shotgun-style Legolas shot instead of Rapid-fire

I agree with kedram, we either need alpha archers OR beta archers, we can't have both. And about the shotgun "legolas shot", I think it would only work and replace the current legolas shot if the other 2 arrows were launched at an angle so that all 3 would make contact with a target at the stun range. Because the first arrow is taking a straight line to the knight, it would drop his guard, and the other 2 would hit the knight. Also, I think the legolas shot is misnamed, because I cannot recall any time in the lord of the rings where Legolas fires arrows that fast.

 

If an archer is good at timing it, they can shoot a knight while he is charging up a slash to attack someone on the field. So really, an archer is a support class, and shouldn't be able to take on everyone as a one-man army. They require teamwork between knights and themselves. Also, if there are enough archers spamming arrows, knights can't lower their shields otherwise they take what seems like 50 arrows to the face.

 

We wont be bringing back ranged shield-dropping ability, and such a discussion is a massive derail of the topic at hand anyway.

We're also unlikely to be making a shotgun release, because it will exacerbate bandwidth bursting problems, and as JLordo tried to point out, if the arrows stayed as separate objects, as they should, they'd hit at different times and basically give the archer an instant 2 damage reliable melee through shield. We'd have to rework the shield logic and incur a performance and code simplicity penalty to "fix" that, which would probably require a more maintenance and introduce more hard-to-track bugs.

I'm not ruling it out entirely, in that if someone makes an infallible case in favour of it I'll still consider that, but at the moment I'm not even going to prototype this, it's got too many immediately visible flaws.