Soarin' wrote: »

Got a nasty surprise yesterday being 1 shotted by a ballista yesterday ( I had not read the patch notes).

This I have no problem with, it actually makes these weapons viable in terms of game balance. The zerg has a viable counter now and it works really well from what I saw after a few hours of sieging. Groups are spacing themselves out, siege shields are going up and glass cannon builds are feeling the pain of min/maxing.

Sieging has become more diverse and I applaud ZoS for this change. However as with all content updates I feel a little tweaking is in order:

• Setup time of siege engines is too quick
• Rate of fire of siege engines is too high
• Siege engine cost/ap gain is now too high

My reasoning for these 3 points are mainly to do with balance and counter balance issues, pvp should always be a rock paper scissors game with a tool for every job and none that can fit all situations.

In their current state siege engines are helping to reduce lag in Cyrodiil (I didn't notice this untill a friend mentioned it on TS yesterday), this is in no doubt due to the reduction in zerg sizes and density (fewer AoE calculations between players makes for happy server hamsters). Zerging has a hard counter now, 2 ballista bolts on target will flatten groups of players.

However, it must be stated that siege engines are now being adopted as go too DPS machines in more situations than simply breaking up zergs in battles of attrition, we are seeing people drop these everywhere and utilizing them as regular combat tools. The two reason for this I feel is the setup time coupled with the sustainable DPS output of siege engines, you can pop one up at a moments notice giving the opponents very little warning and once deployed provides steady long range DPS capable of killing most players outright.

My thoughts are that siege engine setup time should be increased to make these tools only viable in attrition battles and not skirmishes, by increasing the setup time the user becomes more vulnerable to being killed in an exposed position or gives the opponents time to back off.

The reload rate of siege needs to be increased, these weapons can nail zergs in single shots, by lowering their fire rate coordinating fire with a few siege weapons team play becomes a necessity as they shift from steady DPS machines into spike damage zerg busters. I have seen siege engines used as AOE tools used for area control by constantly spamming their fire onto choke points.

Any thoughts?