Changes to siege

Nermy

@ZOS_BrianWheeler said they were changing ballistas damage because they were being used against players and they were always meant for counter sieging other siege, what about lightning ballistas? Are they being changed too?

Another thread is talking about zerg busters and fire ballistas were pretty good for this, along with meatbag and oil catapults. I guess I'm finding it hard to get my head around these changes.

Beardimus

I like the changes, bringing clarity to uses and catapults for area denial, HOWEVER I think you are right.

Re defining what is uses for what. And making it clear in game.

Right now folks buy Rams, Pact Ballistas, Stone Trebs and that's kinda in on average.

Making it mean more is key.

Making resource levels mean more to wall strength etc is key.

Else its all very samey

Anazasi

I tested all the siege on PTS. Lightning ballista and ice trebs are rather useless. There is no good situations where these are beneficial in the current play styles.

On the other hand now that catapults have a solid 8 second persistent ground effect that covers 100% of doors, 70% of large wall and 100% of small wall areas, players will have to be more careful on where they attack. You will not FD a defended keep with the expectation of taking it easily. The fact that it takes 4-6 seconds for a catapult to reload will make it extremely difficult to pass through any defended breach. What players must remember though is catapults are not enough to defend a breach alone. There must be cold fire trebs and ballista used in conjunction with them. Oil is and will continue to be the best siege type used on breaches. With the changes to defense siege having 30 slots means there is absolutely no excuse for not defending with the appropriate mix of siege.

My advice to everyone is learn where you can and can not place siege of all types. It's also extremely advantageous to remember that once an enemy gets inside the outer wall, they are essentially inside a very big box. Siege used in a box focused or concentrated in an area will do as much damage to the enemy as a group standing on the wall shooting arrows at them. As update 18 approaches I can with confidence predict that the way players see and use siege will dramatically change. I can also predict that these changes will have the biggest effect on the NON CP campaigns. If you have not learned the skill efficient purge or cleanse I strongly recommend that you do so.

Another interesting side-note to the changes in PVP are the changes to the stam sorc and mag sorc support builds. The stam sorc with the change to Hiricines set only gains a small increase to stam recovery when changing the jewelry trait to infused. On the other hand though the mag support sorc gains almost an additional 700 magic recovery. I am extremely pleased to see the performance gap shrink between these two support builds. It's incredibly important to utilize purge/cleanse and with the way the game is transitioning, group support roles are even more important in update 18. Please note that I only modified my support builds as they are currently on live as they were copied to PTS. So the increases that I noticed are not applicable to everyone's specific builds. Some will find better results while others do not.

JamilaRaj

Regular ballista I think once did more damage to siege engines than other types of ballista, but all do 12,000 at the moment, therefore there is no reason to prefer regular over fire/lightning, rather the opposite. Given that fire/lightning ballistas have clearly antipersonnel effetcs, unless Wheeler was talking strictly about changing regular ballista, not fire/lightning, what he said, that players use anti-siege weapons as antipersonnel weapons (even so, what would be wrong with that? makes the game suck or what?), is bullshit, because they are in fact using antipersonnel weapons as antipersonnel weapons.

I wonder how will new catapults play out. Persistent ground effect sound good, but catapults have a few issues that will remain, i.e. a) minimum range, b) large diameter reducing number of spots (not defense slots; these usually do not matter) and also preventing making up for low damage by deploying multiple engines (compare with ballistas) and, which is critical, c) they have horrible camera position/angle, which makes them remarkably difficult to position so that one both can see where they want to fire at and can actually hit that (again, compare with ballistas). So I suspect catapults will sooner become more usable through ballistas becoming less usable, than becoming more usable on their own.

EDIT: also, the idea of breaking siege by sieging sieges is a bit bizarre. Not that it will not or can not work. It can, I know that, because when regular ballistas did more damage, it was possible to make attackers abort siege for lack of siege engines. But it is kinda anticlimactic and, what is worse, may further promote already prevalent ping pong between two unlit keeps.

Anazasi

@JamilaRaj Some very good points. I can remember all the way back to launch when rarwsodar would scream in zone chat "shoot the siege not the players". It's been a long time since those days but in essence that would seem where ZOS is trying to go back to. Granted the key element here isn't the siege or even the type of siege it's the wall and door health. There is literally a sweet spot that ZOS is trying to reach. Number of siege vs number of players vs health of wall = amount of time all of which has to be balanced against number x time = lag. This patch is probably the first patch where we have seen ZOS demonstrate confidence in slowing down a fight by introducing siege changes specifically designed to decrease the time it takes to capture a keep. I am extremely curious to see how this plays out on live.

usmguy1234

Most smart groups have already started to evolve. They attack from the corners of the keep walls at side doors. You are really limited to the amount of damage you can do to them from the inner especially if they attack from the back corners. You are even more limited when they break the doors down because you can't stack very much oil above the doorways.

Dreyloch

ZoS needs to make siege interact together. Oil pot exploded on the ground, fire ballista to light it for a HUGE wall of very damaging flame. Maybe a little less damage than walking thru lava.

Ice and lightning working together to make a nasty steam cloud for awhile. Things like this add dimension to the game.

Talcyndl

The fact that people use regular ballistas against players shows how underpowered the DoTs from fire ballistas are against groups that continually purge.

dotme

IMHO, destroying opponent siege with fire or coldfire ballistas is a waste of time. Most players carry so many they just pull out another one. Point is, it's nearly impossible to stop an attack on a keep by destroying offensive siege weapons. You have to destroy the players operating them. I suspect these changes just made that a lot harder, so I'm not in favor.

I'm sorry, but if you get hit in the face by a coldfire ballista, the DOTs should melt you unless you jump off your siege quickly and purge. With these changes, that just became even weaker against players and if your counter siege destroys mine, I'll just whip out another one. I can carry 20+ regular ballistas for banging on keep walls and doors.

Nermy

dotme wrote: »

IMHO, destroying opponent siege with fire or coldfire ballistas is a waste of time. Most players carry so many they just pull out another one. Point is, it's nearly impossible to stop an attack on a keep by destroying offensive siege weapons. You have to destroy the players operating them. I suspect these changes just made that a lot harder, so I'm not in favor.

I'm sorry, but if you get hit in the face by a coldfire ballista, the DOTs should melt you unless you jump off your siege quickly and purge. With these changes, that just became even weaker against players and if your counter siege destroys mine, I'll just whip out another one. I can carry 20+ regular ballistas for banging on keep walls and doors.

We used to have co-ordinated anti siege where our whole raid would hit one sieger at a time. They were soon destroyed and the sieger couldn't stand having fire and cold-fire; along with ordinary ballistas.

They soon moved...

patents

@ZOS_BrianWheeler

They shouldn’t have nerf ballista player damage, they are forcing weak scrubs to go out and get themselves farmed

Changes to the game should always be to plug the gap

What they are doing basically make the weak weaker, wrong decision, who cares abt siege damage lmao?

Sigh

Nermy

patents wrote: »

@ZOS_BrianWheeler

They shouldn’t have nerf ballista player damage, they are forcing weak scrubs to go out and get themselves farmed

Changes to the game should always be to plug the gap

What they are doing basically make the weak weaker, wrong decision, who cares abt siege damage lmao?

Sigh

It seems that that is what Zos wants us to do now...

TheBonesXXX

Dreyloch wrote: »

ZoS needs to make siege interact together. Oil pot exploded on the ground, fire ballista to light it for a HUGE wall of very damaging flame. Maybe a little less damage than walking thru lava.

Ice and lightning working together to make a nasty steam cloud for awhile. Things like this add dimension to the game.

I never understood why a fire ballista never lit an oil field on fire anyway. Was a tactic directly from Sun Tzu.

Anazasi

With the changes to catapults the expectation of use of denial on breaches is the driving factor for the reduction of ballista damage on players. The expectation is players will have a harder time taking a defended keep when done correctly. The counter siege against a siege line had to be adjusted or the fights would be short lived making defended keeps un-takable (don't get me wrong here defended keeps should not be takable by a small groups).

I should add that this change will catapult a rush of threads accusing everyone of ZERGING to take AND PVDooring for pts. Those salt farmers and popcorn eaters should be stocking up right about now....