I’d like to shed some light on our thinking with this AC change as well as tell you all what we are doing right now to balance it.
Firstly, when siege weapons were originally creatped, they had the intent of being really good at some things and not so good at others. The arrow cart is intended to be the anti-personal siege weapon. It is intended that arrow carts are all about controlling an area through damage. If you remain in the area that is being hit by the arrow cart, you will die. You can however, move out of the space and/or find a new way to attack the intended target. That being said, they are not intended to be so good against other siege weapons and we are in the process of addressing that right now. We are also addressing their range when upgraded to be more in line with the range of ballistas.
Secondly, this change is going to require new tactics and those tactics include things like using ballista and catapults to destroy arrow carts. With that in mind, we’ve been looking more closely at the numbers of all the siege weapons and there are definitely some changes that need to be made to bring them in line with their intent. We are going to take a holistic pass at siege weapons in the coming months and drop a rebalance of all of them to get them to more closely align with what they should be doing.
Finally, the feedback you all provide is a very useful part of this whole process. WvW is a living, breathing game type and any changes we make have numerous consequences that don’t become fully visible until everyone starts interacting with them and devising new strategies. Our goal is to provide a complex combat space that rewards skill, tactics, and ingenuity and while we haven’t fully achieved that goal yet, I like to think we are getting there.
In the coming months, meanwhile you most of your most noteworthy wvw guilds will be looking for a new game to play.
Anet has kittening lost their mind.
There aren’t a lot of games that came bring what WvW brings to the table for pvp oriented guilds. Even if they continue to break it by doing other stupid stuff like turning arrowcarts into godcarts.
That is about to change. Elder Scrolls Online is launching sometime this year, and is on the radar of most PvP guilds, big and small. By all accounts, WvW is its major endgame.
Before culling was fixed, our guild was talking about ESO a lot. But with no culling, we were back to having good times in GW2. The arrow cart buff is pushing us back into the “no-fun” zone and we are following the ESO news again.
ESO is still an unknown quantity, but it does have the potential to be a serious challenger.
(And there is also Planetside 2 out there, which is a 3 faction MMOFPS. Its audience does overlap with some GW2 PvP guilds).
Are you seriously considering to even compare ESO to GW2? Oh man!
I think GW2 will be far better than ESO in most aspects (except perhaps the storyline).
However, the WvW is such a major focus of ESO that it could turn out to have more to offer in terms of gameplay. They will, for example, have unique WvW character advancement at launch, and the map is by all accounts huge and well-designed. And in the end gameplay is the major decider for PvP guilds and players.
GW2 has probably 6 months to polish WvW and get it right. The improvements Anet have made since launch in balance and removing culling have been really great, in my opinion. I just hope they devote the resources it needs going forward.
gee, i hope ESO doesnt have anything like…seige or something….
oh wait…
LMAO that reminds me of Rush Limbaugh (gee why the hell is he stuck in my head so much this fine sunny Sunday morning?) saying that if “Obamacare” passed, he would move to Costa Rica…which has universal, socialized health care.
This is the same; “GW2 is the fail, I r moving to ESO cuz they dun have stooped castles and siege and…”.
Priceless I sez.
Stupidity is when you can’t help it;
Ignorance is when you choose not to understand.

and then he came back and did it again, took him a few attempts to get my ballista cos I kept point blank spreadshotting him. He was just one player. Had a few of them coordinated all our siege would have been gone on the first attempt. As it was he solod all the siege down with a few repeat attempts, whist the rest stopped us resuppying. Had we had more siege it certainly would have been more difficult for him, but not impposible. Incidentally thieves have been asking for a wvw role, tada there it is.