Basically, 1.8 is still too buggy. The fact that neither I nor NPCs can draw a weapon (60% of the time you just unsheath air and can't attack) is a deal breaker. Not sure if it's a mod issue or the patch bringing in more bugs than fixing them, but this only happened after 1.8 downloaded.. Anyway, how do I go about downgrading?

Replace the changed files with those from 1.7 from your own archived copies. Anything else is illegal.

I assume to have Archived files I need to have made them manually before the update? Or am I lucky and I have them hiding somewhere on my computer?

Yes; maybe. Depends on your settings for various Windows' services.

On a side note: it's most likely your mods as 1.8 is not known to break much, if anything.

Yeah, that thought crossed my mind too... Either way 1.8 is the cause of all my woes at the moment. I have a mod that changes the animation for holding 1h weapons, so if anything is causing issues with the weapons it's probably that. I'll unactivate it next time I start the game up, so hopefully that'll be the end of it until it updates. Thanks for the replies!

Since it's an animation mod, you'll need to uninstall it. Some of its files could override vanilla ones even with the plugin deactivated.

And no problem.