I'm not even fighting a wall of archers. I'm fighting. One. One. One. One is not a wall of archers.
Wait, you can't avoid getting hit by *one* archer?
As a lightly armoured character you should be able to run circles around them.
Hell, I don't even care that in some instances, as a light armor user, I can be OHKO'd by 2h bandits. That's fine, because they're melee weapons. They are slow, predictable and have low range. Archers on the other hand, can OHKO you with unavoidable arrows at mid range.
Except bows are slow to draw and arrows don't home in on target. If you aren't standing still or running in straight line they are almost doomed to miss as long as you don't get into point blank range before they release.
Actually my own experience was completely opposite to yours - arrows are scary but they are fairly easy to avoid (they still make a good deterrent against doing stupid shit), while melee attacks just kill you dead.
Except you *can* effectively block, counter, interrupt or dodge melee attacks as well so instead of bitching I just practiced my melee skills and unlearned some habits that were getting me killed.
Not OHKO's. That's literally all I want. Christ, you think any RPG that has instant-death enemies is well-designed? It's a cheap way of making the game artificially difficult
Only in games where you can't do anything about instakills.
Not really an issue with game that's controlled like an FPS - in regular FPS games one hit killing attacks are commonplace and no one bitches about them.
all it really does is punish people who want to use melee weapons exclusively and reduce the number of viable combat specializations.
Except it does not.
Lightly armoured melee builds will outpace and outflurry pretty much everything they encounter and do a good job dodging arrows provided they don't engage in lengthy frontal charges.
They can be also easily spiced up with some stealth, ranged combat or even magic IF you want that.
You can also get a follower compatible with your playstyle, either complementing it (for example ranged support, offensive magic or summons if you want to charge in unpincushioned) or lending a hand (two melee combatants side by side are about ten times more effective than one in Requiem) - unless you're a compulsive sneak, followers are pretty much essential for success in Requiem - and when you get access to Thu'um you will gain a potent equalizer - Fus in the face is a great way to break concentration of someone about to give you third nostril.
Finally, get a habit of not dual-wielding against archers - bashing is useful, especially if they have better material bows or if you set bows to unbreakable.
An arrow taking 50% of my life is plenty.
No, because it means that an archer you're running at will need to draw, aim and release twice - if they can't, they are meat.
Also no, because *you* will need twice as much arrows and time to kill enemies, nerfing archer builds right into uselessness due to lack of stopping power. Unlike bandits *you* won't have a whole bunch of friends with bows to help kill off a band of enemies charging your ass.
Did you just say anything about reducing number of viable combat specializations?
