Basic kits need to be playable as otherwise people will not enjoy the f2p style of kitpvp.
Archer is definitely fine the way it is in my opinion. In fact, I believe it to be one of the best kits to choose from currently (along side PvP, Viper, and Ninja). Power III literally packs a punch and at no punishment from the archer except for the armor. Yeah you take a lot of damage, but that’s kinda the point of an archer. It works rather as support or a class that keeps distance. So long as you are shooting the bow, you are a big threat to a lot of different kits. Also with unlimited (correction: 385) shots on your bow, you can easily spend 5 - 10 mins shooting people as much as you like. With that being said, there needs to be a cost to play archer which goes to the armor. This could make playing against ninjas, riders, and slingshots really hard. As you mentioned, it is really hard to get a shot off with a ninja, but that’s part of the reason it’s a kitpvp server… 1 single kit shouldn’t be able to take on all the kits on the list. Sometimes you gotta work extra hard for those kills! ^^
Also I would like to mention the main two free to play kits, meaning kits that always stay as free to play, regardless of the rotation are Archer and PvP. I don’t think these kits should have any abilities whatsoever. The idea of these two kits is that its the Vanilla PvP aspect of what MC PvP is. If you don’t like the abilities of kits or find that you are struggling with those kits, you can always revert to just playing vanilla PvP and still have fun. So adding an ability for archer seems wrong to me.
The feather falling idea, seems to be the best if we wanted to buff archer, but like I said, I think archer is one of the best kits to choose from right now as it deals with most of the kits on the list pretty efficiently, so long as you can aim.
One of the big problems that a lot of players think archer is so overrated is that the players themselves are playing the kit wrong. I’m not trying to be egocentric, but the idea of playing an archer would be to use the bow more often than your sword… That is why the sword will deal less damage over time than the bow. Most people see the Speed I and think this would be fine to melee as long as you get more combos. In the dream case that you get a 5 combo, I would agree, but that dream is not reality. The archer sword is there if you need to push them away quickly while dealing a few bits of damage. So many times have I seen archers trying to use the sword as much as possible, and end up over-extending themselves into their own demise.
Anyways -1, I really think Archer is fine the way it is currently.