After some thorough testing over the last couple of nights, it is my belief that siege is once again becoming far too strong as of this recent PTS cycle. We have been down this road before and each time it's been walked back for reasons that I'll get into later. For now, though, let's look at the state of siege on the PTS.

One thing that's changed, and I actually feel is a really good and interesting change, is the new differentiation between ballista and catapults. Ballista now do more damage to siege engines but less to players, while catapults offer area denial options by putting a DoT down on the ground for a few seconds. Again, this is a cool direction to take things. Ballista were too general-purpose before and now the tradeoff for defenders is better range and accuracy compared to catapults, but less damage against players themselves. Catapults, which were previously all but useless, now have a more pronounced anti-personnel niche to fill... with the glaring downside that they're doing it way too well.

In particular, catapults have the following problems :

• The DoTs deal a huge amount of damage. The DoT from a single shot does enough damage to kill most builds. Obviously you can do some healing to outpace it, but that's a bit more intense than I was expecting from this rebalancing.
• The DoTs are enormous. The area they cover is huge. I'm pretty sure that if you have one of these hitting a flag then anyone trying to flip it would have to stand in the DoT just to be in range of the flag.
• The DoTs last a very long time. This is bad enough on its own, but it also leads to one larger problem I'll get into shortly.
• The DoTs from multiple types stack. I mean duh, obviously, but it's now trivial to set up an area of 3 ticks of massive damage, plus slow, plus healing reduction, plus bonus damage taken.
• The DoTs from multiple of the same siege type stack. Again, probably a bit duh, but also a bit duh-YAM, son! This means the ONLY limit on the siege damage you can put over an area is the limit on space for putting down siege.
• The DoTs from literally the exact same siege engine stack. Yeah, this one threw me for a loop and is inconsistent with all other damage sources that I can think of. You can fire a catapult twice and set two DoTs in the same area before the first one dissipates because the DoT just lasts that long.
• Catapults defending a keep can place their dots on any area, including walls, but catapults attacking a keep can only place their dots on non-damageable structures. This gives defenders an enormous advantage.

All of that combined is going to severely affect how we play in Cyrodiil, and not necessarily for the better. Only a couple of catapults are required to make an area uninhabitable, even with a lot of heals going out. Siege shield only seems to reduce the damage on the initial hit of the projectile, but not the subsequent DoT. And while ballista might be specialized in taking out the physical siege engines themselves, with a catapult you can just make the opponent take too much damage to stick to their siege long enough to fire it, and you can affect a larger area to this end than a ballista. These features combined mean that sieging keeps will go back to being an absolute chore against even a lightly-defended keep. The longer it takes for an attacking force to make a play at the flags, the longer reinforcements from both sides have to show up to lag the server out, and the less fun we tend to have.

Now maybe it will be different this time. Maybe people will love being point-and-click heroes, setting up siege in the middle of field fights, etc! But I really doubt it, since that never took off before and has been consistently walked back every time it's tried.

I would instead recommend taking a hard look at what you want siege to do. Obviously first and foremost we need options to take down walls and doors. We have that, it's been wonderfully consistent, no change needed. You also seem to want countersiege to be a thing, which is fine, but ask yourself if you want countersiege to be able to fully stop a keep attempt on its own, or if you want it to be about delaying an overwhelming force in time for some defensive reinforcements to show up. I like the second option if it's not overdone, I loath the first option. And either way I really think you should look at what siege is doing in this build and see if the way ballista and catapults work is conducive to your design direction. Finally, you seem to want siege to have some kind of anti-personnel niche, but what's your actual goal with it? Do you really want a battle to be won with just siege, or do you want siege to force certain gameplay choices among organized groups?

I really hope you want the second one, because again, I find the point-and-click hero meta completely repugnant. I don't mind having to make a choice between slotting a DPS skill for more damage or rapids to help handle the oil slow. I don't mind having to coordinate people running purge skills to get rid of the meatbag healing debuff versus some other viable skill they might want there. I wouldn't mind needing to make a hard choice about slotting siege shield to help protect against countersiege while trying to take a keep. I don't even mind the idea of some point-and-click nubmunsters having fun and feeling like they're contributing by hitting us with siege and keeping us on our toes. But none of that is what I'm seeing with this PTS build. I am seeing overwhelming, long-lasting, unmitigated damage numbers, I'm seeing them spread over an enormous area, and I'm seeing them generated by a single person running three catapults on cooldown while the rest of their group piles in with destros, negates, and time stops.

As a reminder, these siege-heavy metas greatly favor defending forces and greatly favor larger groups in a manner that far exceeds the typical large group advantage. Specifically, a group that is even slightly larger than their opponent ends up being able to take the siege placement advantage early and irrevocably. Since siege takes up space there's a limited number of places you can set it up on a given field of engagement. A larger group can (and in ESO, historcally has), give chase with equal numbers while getting a small handful to begin setting down siege. The smaller group, if they are disorganized, will fall shortly afterwards, but an organized group needs to run all the more cohesively to outheal the pursuing faction, meaning they are less able to set up siege of their own to even the odds. This becomes untenable and forces the organized groups to drag fights on and on, running and running and rarely able to engage. It will be even worse with these DoTs because you can't just purge what's on you like before and run around a rock to reposition, that DoT is sticking around and forcing you to go to a whole new battlefield. It's not a good time, probably not even for the larger group who's "winning". It's just a pain in the ass and it makes the actual combat less meaningful.

There's a lot you can do to try and rebalance this, though I realize it's a bit late in the testing cycle to make any immediate changes. I request you address this ASAP, however, because after we've all played some of the new Summerset content and had our fun we're going to be going back to PvP and living with these changes. Since we've lived through similar issues before, I don't anticipate them to be well-received, even if the spirit of the changes has been in the right direction. While any adjustments towards less-powerful anti-personnel siege would be appreciated, in particular I'd like the size of the DoTs to be smaller, the damage substantially lower, and the time they stay active on the ground to be shorter. Area denial from siege shouldn't be a better option than the presence of players using their abilities, it should just be something you have to build around and account for. A supplement to player skill, not a replacement for it.

Please to consider, many thank.

Edit : @Biro123 @Mayrael , and @ anyone else asking about CP or no-CP.
We only have one campaign on PTS and it is a CP campaign, so all Cyrodiil testing should be viewed through the lens of CP-enabled combat.