[Soapy]

This is fine. They're ranged, and as the name says, it's their only power.

14 tiles of range for the price of 1 tile of reduced hit. Sure sounds real harsh, considering Arbalests get three knockbacks and are based around using subweapons and have another class to pack in escapes/more knockbacks/melee capability.

It's a Spirit Bow, not a Bow of the Green Forest.

This has nothing to do with the topic at hand, which is that bows have too much range, the only downside of having too much range is the farshot penalty, and the farshot penalty is negated by Guile, which obviously has synergy with Guile scaling bows.

Battle maps are not reduced in size in PvP

I haven't played much in the last few months, so I guess I was wrong about that. My bad.

your back was turned against your opponent so they gained even more hit from the flanking bonus and when I was watching that fight you didn't have any of your dodge buffs up. (at least to my knowledge)

I don't think farshot penalty or bows are the issue here, I think it was just feasibly impossible for you to dodge because dodging with no dodge buffs is hard as all hell.

Spoilering since offtopic:

I didn't have any dodge buffs up because I was being hit before I had a turn, but this character doesn't have enough evade to trump basic attack builds with buffs anyway.

It's not about being hit. If I somehow had 600 Evade, bows having this much range would still not be okay to me.

That and gust arrows longdraw has a lot of range in general, that's up for another discussion.

You seem to be under the impression that this is about bow Hit. The last part of the post is just to preemptively answer the 'lol farshot penalty = -1273% hit doe' argument.