I'm really glad to see that most agree with my core thesis. I didn't really expect much resistance, if anything I'm one of the 'optimized melee is sorta good sometimes' contrarians on this site.

But my more serious question is, what can be done to fix this? IMO good fixes are surgical. A few core rule changes that come up frequently so that everyone can remember them. Don't nerf, just ban. Don't buff, add something made completely of whole cloth. If you are going to change something, make it on the fringes of normal play such that people won't come to the table with an ingrained notion of how things "should" work. I listed a few ideas above, but I'm curious to see if we can reach a consensus on this point.

  • Sharpshooter needs to go. Period. Massive power attack damage at range is bad design. Removing partial-cover-based counterplay is also bad design. Massive range bonuses here are unnecessary and make kiting trivial. Nothing to be retained here.
  • Xbow expert needs to be eliminated as well. Letting crossbow users attack faster than longbow users or swordsmen is silly. Shooting in close range is, once again, just removing counterplay options.
  • Archery fighting style.... might be fine, but we'll come back to this. Alternately I'd give archers a fighting style that lowers movement of targets they hit, giving them the role of tying down speedy opponents.
  • Add 'Aggressive' fighting style: Once per turn you can move up to half your speed toward a hostile creature that you can see. (usable by paladins, rangers, and fighters)
  • Mounted Combat probably needs a rework anyway, and most people don't know how the rules work, so here we'll just make our own rules. I like Segev's take from the other thread: "While mounted on a controlled mount, you and your mount share a turn and a set of actions. You occupy your mount's space and you and your mount move using your mount's movement. You may use your action, bonus action, and reaction every round to take any actions available to you or to your mount. When your mount takes damage, you may choose to take any number of the hit points dealt, yourself, but all other effects of any source of damage still affect your mount, and not you."
  • Finally, if all this isn't enough (and I think it might not be) apply a simple scaling penalty to accuracy based on range. "Every 20' is -1" or something similar, a la fire emblem. Suddenly those numerous accuracy buffs don't matter as much and the DPR begins to drop off and archers have a clear incentive to approach.