Guild Wars 2

-Catapults deal the same damage with no charge as they did before.

-Catapult full charge time is 3 seconds.

-Catapults deal roughly 100% more damage when fully charged.

-The CD for throwing a rock is 5 seconds.

-Fully charging every shot results in a 25% dps increase.
——-

Those of you who are into math may have noticed that the new way to get maximum DPS out of a catapult is to charge it to full. The effect is as if you fired 2 shots in 8 seconds. Compare to tapping it twice, which takes 10 seconds. In an 80 second period, this means that full charge will deal 20 shots of damage whereas tapping will deal only 16 shots of damage.

What this means is that catapults have been flat-out buffed. You can still place them snugly against a wall for maximum defensive positioning and will enjoy higher DPS than before. You can also place them further away and enjoy the same or higher DPS as the old proxy catas.

Why did Anet make this change? I don’t know, though I’d love to find out. They already reduced wall health/toughness (on DBL and EBG only) in an earlier update. Perhaps they wanted to further increase the rate at which walls fall? It used to take about 2 minutes (123 seconds) to break into Hills inner assuming a 20-man zerg with 400 sup. Now it will take about 100s. Likewise, it used to take 4 minutes (258 seconds) to break into a side keep inner on DBL. Now, it will take 3 minutes (205 seconds).

If they meant to give players an incentive to assault from range instead of proxy, they screwed up. Players can retain all of the benefits of proxy catas with even higher DPS. On the other hand, since charging will always result in a DPS boost, assaulting from any range now results in faster wall destruction than the previous best case.

What I expected they were going to do with this change was decrease the tap dps and increase the charge dps and charge time. This would allow players to use proxy catas, but would keep their dps the same. It would be as simple as keeping their current damage formula and increasing the charge time to 5 seconds. At that point, catas would do the same damage as old proxy catas from all distances. It would still be a damage buff, but it would only buff the situations that players never bothered with.

The current implementation will result in the same, stale gameplay with even more heavily skewed risk/reward.

I’ve been proposing a tap DPS decrease forever to promote rams and skilled play and we get this lol.

If this patch overall in terms of WvW + professions doesn’t say that ANet doesn’t play their own game or even understand it for that matter, I don’t know what does.

I believe they wanted more dmg for far shot but too bad, you can place it near. They have to rework how the cata works if they really want more damage for far shot.

Add distance damage to catapults. Simple as that. The closer you are to a wall the less damage you’ll do if further away.

This OP is EXACTLY how I feel. Surprised since one of ur other posts responding to a thread about this topic made me feel u were on the opposite side of things.

I’ll add that far shot doesn’t need more damage AT ALL. The advantage of far shot was the protection it provided ur zerg from getting jumped, and allowed you faster reaction time to incoming defensive projectiles, as well as the ability to setup cats/gens/treb without interference.
WE have to remember that this assumes balanced matchups though. Of course in unbalanced matchups its better to proxy zerg and pull whoever is in their to their deaths.
But balancing should start at the ceiling, not the floor….was something someone wrote on the forums a while ago, poetic no?

tl:dr I read too many forum postings.

phokus.8934:

Add distance damage to catapults. Simple as that. The closer you are to a wall the less damage you’ll do if further away.

anet: but coding and skwipting is hawwwwwwwwwwwwwwd
in their defense they prolly only got 1 guy working 1 day a week on it though. Halfday mbe

I’m sure the idea is to encourage players to use catas from further away, without nerfing cata too much and upsetting people.

I need more time to evaluate the changes from my point of view, but I notice the discussion so far centres around zergs and multiple catas. While it’s true that this is valid for some of the time in game, it’s also true that off peak there tends to be fewer players around, and often smaller groups.

Two players can carry enough supply to build one guild cata. If I place it further from the wall I’m more likely to be seen and a defender will simply build a bali and take the cata out (bali shot is faster CD than cata shield). So the obvious thing is to “hide” the cata as best as possible, and this tends to be right up against the wall so the defenders actually have to look over the top. In a big group several catas can be used to provide shield cover, or a shield gen or two.

If the short range damage for catapults is reduced too much it would become harder to take towers and keeps with small groups – especially now defenders have the mobility of gliding.

It’s interesting, and I think a good thing, that Anet have tried to adjust catapults in a way that takes both small and large group play into account.

In some ways, one tweak might include catas being able to damage Friendly kitteno, if a Catania placed against the wall, it’s own splash damage would damage the cats itself..

Not that this would lead to heavy trolling….

It would prevent the catas against the wall, encourage people to pull back.

A positive for defenders? The longer charging makes it longer before someone bubbles..,

Sadly this feels like just another reward for big blob servers (which I won’t name but you know who you are.) I would be somewhat okay with it if they reduced the buff the closer the catapult was to the objective wall.

If Anet wanted to boost catapult DPS, then this change isn’t a total loss.

If they meant to increase damage from afar without boosting catapult DPS in every situation, then they could either increase the charge time, decrease the bonus damage, or decrease the base damage.

I’m not asking for a nerf to catapult’s previous damage. Rather, I’m wondering why they were buffed and if the buff was actually intended.

Sviel.7493:

-Catapults deal the same damage with no charge as they did before.

-Catapult full charge time is 3 seconds.

-Catapults deal roughly 100% more damage when fully charged.

-The CD for throwing a rock is 5 seconds.

-Fully charging every shot results in a 25% dps increase.
——-

Are you absolutely certain that catapult full charge time is 3 seconds?

It could be 2.75 or 3.25 seconds, but I really doubt that. It’s certainly far less than 5 seconds.

Did some testing and would say that its more likely either 5 or 4 point something. Far from 3 anyways.

Went in game to test it again. It could be 3.5 seconds for the bar to fully fill. I’m using the tick timer, so it’s hard to pin down fractions of a second. You must remember to account for the delay of the shot animation—it’s ~5 seconds until the rock hits a wall right in front of it, but not that long until the bar fills and it starts firing. Since the CD starts when the button is released or the bar is filled, that animation delay doesn’t affect dps.

For reference, it would have to be exactly 5 seconds to leave maximum catapult dps unchanged. Less than 5 seconds will increase it and more than 5 seconds will decrease it—assuming the damage multiplier remains constant at +100%.

Most pointless change ever. Well, I can almost get killed from 1 cata shot lol

Why do you keep buffing siege?

ArchonWing.9480:

Why do you keep buffing siege?

Maybe because noone asks for it and we’ve all been mysteriously teleported to bizzaro world
O.O
BrB rejecting every attractive woman I know

Sorry, but just tapping siege is really not realistic to the fight. Having it launching stronger is way more realistic. I would love to see more of sieges where catas are out of range of the wall defenders.

Hehe so there is a benefit to keeping that coin stuck on the keyboard after all :P

If the goal is to get us to put catapults further from walls, then I suggest that they have the splash damage from the shots hit both wall and catapult. If they think this is too severe they could have the knock back from the shot effect all who are near it.

Sviel.7493:

Went in game to test it again. It could be 3.5 seconds for the bar to fully fill. I’m using the tick timer, so it’s hard to pin down fractions of a second. You must remember to account for the delay of the shot animation—it’s ~5 seconds until the rock hits a wall right in front of it, but not that long until the bar fills and it starts firing. Since the CD starts when the button is released or the bar is filled, that animation delay doesn’t affect dps.

For reference, it would have to be exactly 5 seconds to leave maximum catapult dps unchanged. Less than 5 seconds will increase it and more than 5 seconds will decrease it—assuming the damage multiplier remains constant at +100%.

GW2 wiki says the charging is 4.25 seconds, but the page has out of date information category on it.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Catapult

I have noticed the charge bar fills at faster rate when there is server lag. This makes it hard to aim from a distance.

DemonSeed.3528:

Hehe so there is a benefit to keeping that coin stuck on the keyboard after all :P

“Active and engaging game play” :P

If the charge time varies with server lag, it would certainly explain the discrepancies. I tested 20 shots to come up with the 3 second time so I was very surprised when the retest suggested it was 3.5.

I’ll try and retest when there’s noticeable lag…perhaps I’ll have to visit SMC.

Korgov.7645:

I have noticed the charge bar fills at faster rate when there is server lag. This makes it hard to aim from a distance.

When I have lag I tend to miss because the charge bar looks like it’s doing nothing and I let go early, or I have to press it again because it doesn’t register. This of course has nothing to do with the current changes, just lag in general when using siege.

Seems it’s not entirely a quick shot vs full charged shot either.

From what I’ve seen the cats now give extra damage for holding the charge past the quick fire alone.

Firebaall.5127:

Seems it’s not entirely a quick shot vs full charged shot either.

From what I’ve seen the cats now give extra damage for holding the charge past the quick fire alone.

Correct, damage rises the longer you hold the charge, reaching the max damage at max charge.

Makes it a bit more intuitive when dealing with different wall ‘s. Basically if you always hold the shot you’ll end up with 13 on a paper wall or something. so you need 2 shots remaining since a charge does about 11-12%. TO maximize the time, you can use 2 half charges. Or you can just use a fulll charge and get it to 3%…then just finish with a tap charge (but that’s not the most efficient option since ur doing more than 3%). But then again you can argue that the cooldowns and animations make anyhting other than full charges, up to the very last shot, inefficient.

Tl:dr we will all need guides on how to maximize our catapult efficiency against different tiered walls. (i.e full charge x many shots, half/1/4 charge x many shots, tap x many shots)

Haaaaaahahaaahahahahaaaaa!!

When I read the patch notes, I was like, “huh, ok. That makes sense. Good change, too. Get rid of the point blank catas, and use them like they’re meant to be used. If you want to be point blank, fine, you just have to charge them up.”

I was under the impression, like so many others, that the low charge damage would be very small, and full charge would equal what it used to be.

What a joke.

They could always make it so siege can damage itself with it’s own blast. Catas at point blank range would kill themselves.

We did a 2 man test and it appears that the DPS is the same (exactly 5 seconds on a charge) but a full charge cata will down the wall first as long as you don’t full charge the last shot as there is less than 9% HP left on the wall.

Those are very curious test results.

You say there is exactly 5 seconds on a charge, but unless something has changed in the past week, this cannot possibly be true. Not only did all previous tests yield 3-4 seconds to charge, but the official charge time is listed at 4.25 seconds. Did you count the time to fill the charge bar or the time from first button press to fire? These are not the same number. The latter is about 5 seconds since it includes the firing animation, but since the animation happens after the CD starts, it does not affect DPS.

5 seconds is full charge plus the wind up before the shot actually leaves the cata, so that might be where the confusion is.

The test was a cata for each wall starting at the same time and other than the mentioned quick shot at the end for the full charge cata the walls appeared to be going down at the same rate.

The CD starts before the rock leaves the Cata. The point at which the CD starts (the end of the charge) is the significant number for calculating DPS.

Old system was X damage every 5 seconds.

New system is 2X damage every 5 + ChargeTime seconds.

If ChargeTime is 4 seconds, that means that over a period of 5 charged shots (45 seconds), the new system deals 10X damage. In the same time period, the old system would deal 9X damage. That’s an ~11% DPS increase.

My initial calculations used a 3s ChargeTime but that appears to have been brought on by server lag.

Given the uneven staggering of the shots, that 11% DPS increase would be rather difficult to eyeball in the field if there’s only 1 cata in play on each wall. It’s not going to make a huge difference there, but it will be devastating when a zerg drops 6-8 catas on a keep.