What about MUCH longer time to set up siege?

Kas · March 2015

EDIT: Removed the "30sec" thing from the title to prevent people getting stuck up on that. Still gonna say it here: Personally, I'm thinking of values like 30sec setup time.

Got your realism there, would finally be worth to swing around and take out / burn siege weapons.
And you wouldn't have to deal with those sad situations here you fight, say, open-field 2v2 between decent players (usually takes quite some time) and some adder sets up a siege from stealth and seals the deal instantly, or attackers that set up ballistas inside the enemy inner kepp in large, to turn the flags.

On the bright side, such siege weapons could still punish people stacking up like crazy, defend strategic positions, etc, etc.
Also there would be something really meaningful to do for groups of, say, ~4. Get through the fire into the enemy siege line and take them out. each burnt weapon would be a small victory. RIght now, it takes longer to butn that to set up a new one...

bloodenragedb14_ESO · March 2015

i agree with this, it takes precious little time to set up a siege. i like the damage buff they got, but the setup time is the only thing that needs balancing

Phoenix99 · March 2015

30+ seconds? what did you smoke? Do you know how much time that is?

I won't mind a 2s increase and adding a feature of no-autoload (so the siege equipment needs to be manned for the full reload), but 30+s is just ridiculous...

Kas · March 2015

Phoenix99 wrote: »

30+ seconds? what did you smoke? Do you know how much time that is?

I won't mind a 2s increase and adding a feature of no-autoload (so the siege equipment needs to be manned for the full reload), but 30+s is just ridiculous...

it's way more ridiculous that setting up a siege weapon in a 3v3 skirmish on an open field is a viable thing to do now. fine, i'm not sure about 30sec. But anyting below 10sec still means that taking out an enemy siege weapon is a meaningless thing to do.

Phoenix99 · March 2015

siege in an open field is a one trick pony, you can easily kite it. You see the big circle, unless you pay only the attention to the on screen spam that tells you which button to press...

Kas · March 2015

Phoenix99 wrote: »

siege in an open field is a one trick pony, you can easily kite it. You see the big circle, unless you pay only the attention to the on screen spam that tells you which button to press...

Say you there is a 2v2 fight between players of ARank 30+. Such a fight takes quite some time. If a couple of noobs decide to add from stealth and throw some lethal arrows this my be decisive but doens't have to be. After all, being in cambat provide from those ig hits from stealth for a reason.

But right now, one noob puts up a catapult/ballista from stealth (will be visible for almost no time until he fires) and probably ends the whole fight within seconds. Sure, you can dodge siege in principle. But if you#re in the middle of a fight and have to face siege on super short notice, that's jsut messed up and charing an enemy in the wrong moment, for example, will essentially kill you.

Maulkin · March 2015

I'm ok with the new siege damage, but I'm a bit concerned about ending up with ground oil pots 2.0, where people place them everywhere not just keep sieges.

In open field battles there should be a disincentive to place siege. That disincentive should be that a moving front-line can get out of your range (or be on top of you) faster than you can set up siege.

I don't think anything drastic is needed, but increasing the placing time by ~3s for ballistas and ~5s for trebs would probably help with that quite a bit.

It'd be a reasonable change too. Setting up siege almost as fast as you can cast Magicka Detonation does not make much sense to me.

Sublime · March 2015

I really like this idea, I'd probably not put it to 30s, but something around 10s-15s sounds right to me.

Etaniel · March 2015

Siege damage is a bit too much in my opinion (38k from a fire ballista, really?) but i can get used to it. The most ridiculous part is that they take 2 sec to put up. This should be brought up to 5-7 sec at least, make them burn faster as well.

ThyIronFist · March 2015

Hmm, maybe it should be something along the lines of this;

Flaming Oil - 5 seconds to put up
Ballista or Catapult - 8 seconds
Trebuchet- 12 seconds

I dunno, but 20 - 30 seconds seems a bit long, considering siege can degrade quite quickly.

Weberda · March 2015

The whole point of the siege damage increase was to help the defense of keeps. Any kind of delay in setting up siege goes against that idea since a highly trained group can actually burst down the front wall gate and inner keep gate in less than 3 minutes.

This "concern" over people using siege out in the field is silly. Try setting one up, aiming it, and actually hitting somebody. It's not easy especially is you're spotted. It's a new thing so people are doing silly things with it. It's not nearly as prevalent as people are making it out to be and will be even less so as time goes on.

Samadhi · March 2015

Kas wrote: »

...
Got your realism there, would finally be worth to swing around and take out / burn siege weapons.
...

It is already worth it, just no one coordinated is really doing it yet.
If it were more than 1-2 stray Nightblades sneaking kills at the back it would have more meaningful impact.

Sublime · March 2015

Weberda wrote: »

The whole point of the siege damage increase was to help the defense of keeps. Any kind of delay in setting up siege goes against that idea since a highly trained group can actually burst down the front wall gate and inner keep gate in less than 3 minutes.

The attackers are using the same siege equipment so they get affected by the setup time as well. If the Keep is being defended a player who's busy setting up siege for 10s is really easy to kill from above. The attackers however have a much harder time since they can't use single target spells from below the wall.
Even if the manage to get the walls down in 3 minutes, that's still plenty of time to set up siege engines, even if the ~10s to get ready.

Maulkin · March 2015

Weberda wrote: »

The whole point of the siege damage increase was to help the defense of keeps. Any kind of delay in setting up siege goes against that idea since a highly trained group can actually burst down the front wall gate and inner keep gate in less than 3 minutes.[/b]

There are keep HP increases on the way to address that as Brian has already said. Siege should still not be settable as fast as it is at the moment, because you can set it up as fast as you can fire some skills.

Weberda wrote: »

This "concern" over people using siege out in the field is silly. Try setting one up, aiming it, and actually hitting somebody. It's not easy especially is you're spotted. It's a new thing so people are doing silly things with it. It's not nearly as prevalent as people are making it out to be and will be even less so as time goes on.

I have tried and it works fantastically well, thank you very much. On every open field battle I attended yesterday where there was more than 15-20 people from each side, there was siege at the back, without fail. So your argument that it's not "as prevalent" is contrary to my experiences.

Even if you don't 1-shot enemies, you tag them with a lot of damage which means when they die you get a kill and XP. I'm fine with siege being great for keep sieges but it should not be as useful in open field as it currently is. Increasing the set-up time would be a good way to balance it out.

Kas · March 2015

Weberda wrote: »

The whole point of the siege damage increase was to help the defense of keeps. Any kind of delay in setting up siege goes against that idea since a highly trained group can actually burst down the front wall gate and inner keep gate in less than 3 minutes.

This "concern" over people using siege out in the field is silly. Try setting one up, aiming it, and actually hitting somebody. It's not easy especially is you're spotted. It's a new thing so people are doing silly things with it. It's not nearly as prevalent as people are making it out to be and will be even less so as time goes on.

For keep sieges, the setup time is kida negligible - unless siege lines are targetted and destroyed. It's easy to hit a lot in open BATTLES. Granted, If one faction roles over the other, it isn't. But if whatever fight takes some time. It's really easy to set up siege and hit a couple of people. Even if you hit only 2 or 3 of them, as long as you can 1 to 2 shot them, that's huge. Plus, the super fast setup times allows you to go unnoticed, especially in the heat of battle.

Helluin · March 2015

No lag issues yesterday, so this changement is more than welcome.
Some battles seemed even more "realistic" or at least they were a lot more fun.
Maybe better check one - two weeks with this changement and then decide what to do.

If a tweak is required, to change the building time of siege engines could be an interesting option.
Another one could be make the trebuchet usable by two players.
With one player timer would be longer or damage less.

Maulkin · March 2015

ThyIronFist wrote: »

Hmm, maybe it should be something along the lines of this;

Flaming Oil - 5 seconds to put up
Ballista or Catapult - 8 seconds
Trebuchet- 12 seconds

I dunno, but 20 - 30 seconds seems a bit long, considering siege can degrade quite quickly.

Yep, I like that.

james_vestbergb16_ESO · March 2015

What most ppl dont seem to understand when they say things like: Just avoid the red circle etc. Is how effective siege weapons are at suppressive fire, this mainly because there's no friendly fire.

Don't get me wrong here I do NOT want siege to do friendly fire, that would be horrendous. But I have massacred endless ppl since the patch went live from just staying behind my group and when they attack another group I just shoot at the area where my group is.
Effectively creating a far more dangerous area then negate ever did. It's as if my entire group had flames of Oblivion x100 up and running.

So enemies will very quickly have to either:
1.Try to bring the entire fight to me or send a scout, which can be damn far tbh
2.NOT attack my group and flee
3.Do the same thing I do.

Falling back out of range wont help much since I just move forward aswell with my 50 stack of ballistas setting up new ones on the move.

The same thing happens in keep sieges now, 1 train on the courtyard is all the defenders need, coupled with
1-2 siege off the inner keep walls raining ballista fire over that train, and no one stand much chance in taking on that train if the players are decent. The towers and its first and second floor wont even protect you because the damn siege weapons can hit every nook and crannie from the inner keep walls.

Try fighting a group that has a constant rain of ballista fire raining over them.

Weberda · March 2015

mike.gaziotisb16_ESO wrote: »

Weberda wrote: »

The whole point of the siege damage increase was to help the defense of keeps. Any kind of delay in setting up siege goes against that idea since a highly trained group can actually burst down the front wall gate and inner keep gate in less than 3 minutes.[/b]

There are keep HP increases on the way to address that as Brian has already said. Siege should still not be settable as fast as it is at the moment, because you can set it up as fast as you can fire some skills.

Weberda wrote: »

This "concern" over people using siege out in the field is silly. Try setting one up, aiming it, and actually hitting somebody. It's not easy especially is you're spotted. It's a new thing so people are doing silly things with it. It's not nearly as prevalent as people are making it out to be and will be even less so as time goes on.

I have tried and it works fantastically well, thank you very much. On every open field battle I attended yesterday where there was more than 15-20 people from each side, there was siege at the back, without fail. So your argument that it's not "as prevalent" is contrary to my experiences.

Even if you don't 1-shot enemies, you tag them with a lot of damage which means when they die you get a kill and XP. I'm fine with siege being great for keep sieges but it should not be as useful in open field as it currently is. Increasing the set-up time would be a good way to balance it out.

Last night I saw a number of attempts to set up siege in open field play and the resulting action was a quick death for the perpetrator. Now granted on Chillrend we don't have the number of open field conflicts like they do on Thorn so numbers and results will vary. And until they change wall HP there should be no change to set up time due to the reason I stated.

The thing to note is that players are adapting and tactics are changing. There are a lot of new approaches to the Alliance War that haven't even been tried yet because of this change. That's a good thing for the game.

Maulkin · March 2015

Weberda wrote: »

mike.gaziotisb16_ESO wrote: »

Weberda wrote: »

The whole point of the siege damage increase was to help the defense of keeps. Any kind of delay in setting up siege goes against that idea since a highly trained group can actually burst down the front wall gate and inner keep gate in less than 3 minutes.[/b]

There are keep HP increases on the way to address that as Brian has already said. Siege should still not be settable as fast as it is at the moment, because you can set it up as fast as you can fire some skills.

Weberda wrote: »

This "concern" over people using siege out in the field is silly. Try setting one up, aiming it, and actually hitting somebody. It's not easy especially is you're spotted. It's a new thing so people are doing silly things with it. It's not nearly as prevalent as people are making it out to be and will be even less so as time goes on.

I have tried and it works fantastically well, thank you very much. On every open field battle I attended yesterday where there was more than 15-20 people from each side, there was siege at the back, without fail. So your argument that it's not "as prevalent" is contrary to my experiences.

Even if you don't 1-shot enemies, you tag them with a lot of damage which means when they die you get a kill and XP. I'm fine with siege being great for keep sieges but it should not be as useful in open field as it currently is. Increasing the set-up time would be a good way to balance it out.

Last night I saw a number of attempts to set up siege in open field play and the resulting action was a quick death for the perpetrator. Now granted on Chillrend we don't have the number of open field conflicts like they do on Thorn so numbers and results will vary. And until they change wall HP there should be no change to set up time due to the reason I stated.

The thing to note is that players are adapting and tactics are changing. There are a lot of new approaches to the Alliance War that haven't even been tried yet because of this change. That's a good thing for the game.

If there's 1 person trying to put siege down protected by 3-4 people, you can easily get to him. If he's sitting behind a wall of 15-20 players like most open battles in Thorn, it's impossible to get to him.

I'm all for leaving it like this for a month to see how the game settles. Hell, we've had 0 cost vamp ulti for months and that was ridiculously unbalanced. However, my early experience is that placing time should be raised.