Guild Wars 2

Alright, so at the moment, what we have is a bit of a mixed bag as far as siege goes. Between mastery abilities, free trading on the TP and unintended siege effects, whilst walls and doors have stayed the same, most things have ended up a lil’ bit overpowered and easily accessible for what they are.

Take trebuchets for example. Trebs as a piece of offensive siege are probably around the right mark, in terms of the damage they do compared to how often they can hit (bearing in mind that 95% of the time, they’re used from great range) and how much supply it takes to build one up. In contrast, however, as a piece of defensive siege, they’re one of the most powerful things in WvW. Being able to hit the other side of a gate with a regular shot or being able to supply drain the other side of a gate would be overpowered on their own, the former more than the latter. Combined, it verges on absurd. Putting catapults behind the door to kill siege was nerfed and I really think that trebs should go the same way. Even if the supply drain ability still works, there shouldn’t be that kind of pressure from a single siege weapon that makes it impossible to put anything on a gate.

Incidentally, it’s more situational for just certain keeps, but cannons and mortars probably should go the same way. For example, having the north cannon on the inner west gate of Hills able to destroy any siege on the other side of the outer north gate without anyone being able to touch the cannon from the outside is not particularly well balanced, bearing in mind the amount of damage it does.

Now, before anyone thinks I’d love to make it impossible to hold onto a keep, let’s talk golems. I play in T2. My world has mostly fluctuated between T1-4 in its history. I don’t claim to know how it is in every tier, especially lower tiers. What I do know, however, is that for every one Alpha I see these days, I’ve probably seen 50 Omegas. Barely anyone uses Alphas, except probably to make Omegas. One Omega on its own is not overpowered. Ten is another matter. I’ve seen T3 keeps with defenders drop inside of 3 minutes to an Omega rush. And thanks to blueprints being opened up to the TP, anyone can start their own lil’ Omega rush for very little outlay. I don’t know if this is anyone’s idea of balance, but if it is, I think you have an inner ear problem. To an extent, I’ll grant that some people avoid Alphas simply thanks to the aforementioned trebs. But if we take away that aspect of trebs and other siege being able to do an awful lot of damage from the other side of a gate, as suggested, Alphas actually become viable again. I couldn’t swear a 100% solution as far as Omegas themselves go, but I think starting off by doubling or tripling the outlay needed to make them (Alpha prints, etc.) would be a good start. It may need more tweaking and balancing, but I think Omegas really do have to be pushed back to being a relatively rare sight – something used as a powerful statement that can make all of the difference in a siege, but not with ten of them at a time every couple of hours.

Moving on, we have another dichotomy to consider, so let’s start off with flame rams. Rams and gates have been pretty constant since the start of the game and there hasn’t exactly been a great deal of tactical thought on the area. You put a ram and a gate together and see which one wins. Accordingly, I’d have previously said that regular and superior rams are about where they should be. In all honesty though, the introduction of Ram Mastery kinda threw a spanner in the works. It gave a nice little boost to regular rams, but it’s pushed superior rams into being too powerful. Not only do they take down gates quicker than ever – and certainly much quicker than any balanced defensive siege would do enough damage to kill them, but with the protection provided by Iron Hide, you have an extremely difficult time even just forcing the people manning rams off and buying some time. There are a number of different option you can look at to approach fixing this. 1) Raise the supply cost slightly for superior rams, e.g. to 60, meaning that less can be placed at once. 2) Reduce the supply, e.g. similarly to golems, by upping the number of regular ram blueprints required to make a superior. 3) Add in a particular defensive weakness to Iron Hide.

Which brings me onto that old favourite, arrow carts. Alas, I remember the day when they were buffed and everyone claimed that they would ruin the game. In a sense, they’re possibly actually in the right spot for the current state of the game, give or take 10% damage on superiors. I do particularly like the recent los change to them. What I would suggest, however, in light of the problem with rams, is dropping their damage to siege slightly and compensating for that by introducing either a negation on one of the skills (maybe the #3 to avoid it being constantly spammed like the #1, which does the most damage to siege anyway) against Iron Hide or replacing the #3 AC Mastery (because really, did we need longer durations on already lengthy conditions?) with a similar effect for some/all of the skills. Would at least provide a nice end to rammers sitting in AC fire like they haven’t got a care in the world, taking away any real skill/tactics to do with it, whilst not making it the sole answer to dealing with enemy siege. Again though, I would up the very low supply requirement of 40 for superiors, so it’s not as easy to just spam them all over the place.

So, time for a bit more of a complicated one. Ballista. There is unfortunately a reason why you can pick up a stack of regular ballistae for about half a gold. They’re not really that useful beyond trying to hold a choke or as a one-off to destroy some exposed siege. Players generally side-step the shots very easily and they love clipping into the slightest bump in front of you. Really, as it stands, compared to everything else, they’re just not that useful and I think it’d take a slight redesign to make them genuinely useful. Namely, changing some/all of their shots to fire at maybe up to a 45 degree angle. This one’s a lil’ more complicated so hear me out on this one. It probably would mean needing to change how they target, so you basically ground-target a small spot, with the targetting giving you a clear visual indication of what sort of arc it will do (and therefore whether it’d clip anything), which would probably depend on how far it’s firing. Restricting it to a particular angle would ensure that you can’t do anything stupid like hitting the other side of a wall/gate with an 85 degree arc, but giving it a variable angle would enable you to mix up your siege positioning and make it effective against mid-distance siege and players, without you being able to put ballistae in spots that can’t at all be countered. Additionally, with it being ground-targetted, it’d be potentially significantly more effective against players that would be unable to guess exactly where your shot is going to hit. With that in mind though, it would also have to be carefully checked that it couldn’t be used on the reverse side of a gate against siege, given that there is a small aoe involved on the shots themselves.

Complicated things aside, let’s talk catapults. Similar to ACs, I’d say that they were balanced until mastery came out for them. Where previously you had standard catas and superior catas that did 50% more damage, when you’re talking about someone who has full mastery operating a superior catapult, unless my maths is a bit off, they’re doing 217.5% of the damage that someone with no mastery on a standard cata would be doing to a wall. Even if you said that that person on the regular cata had mastery, that’s 145% to 217.5%. That’s a significant power up. When you then combine that with Siege Bubble, enabling players to cycle on and off one cata and keep it up permanently, yes, they’ve gone slightly overpowered. I’d give the standard advice on reducing the number of superior catapults in circulation, but to be honest with you, the masteries themselves need toning down. Realistically, we probably shouldn’t be getting more than about a 25% damage buff from them, if you also have something like Shield Bubble. Shield Bubble in itself though does strike me as needing somewhat of a rework. As I say, you can cycle it for permanent uptime and it even blocks treb shots. There isn’t really a realistic counter to that beyond having a larger group and going up and destroying the catas the old fashioned way. Either Shield Bubble itself needs toning down or there needs to be a corresponding counter for it (maybe Ballistae?). Either way, I would also mention Guild Catapults. Given how powerful catapults are in the first place, I’ve no idea why we’ve got really easily-accessible versions of superiors that only cost 25 supply to put up. They either need to be toned down (a la Guild Siege Golems) to regular power or the supply requirement put up.

Oil is fine. Well, maybe it could do with a 6th mastery that increases the range to 20,000. But other than that, it’s fine.

As a general concept, if it’s not been clear from everything said so far, superior siege used to be balanced, but between masteries and how easy it is to get a hold of and build, it’s generally gotten overpowered, especially considering that walls and doors haven’t exactly gotten any stronger. WvW has just tended towards being a question of whether the attacking side can burn through the gate/wall before they’re noticed and someone uses a treb on them or not, which isn’t really a particularly skillful thing and points towards why attacking/defending towers/keeps isn’t considered as fun a thing as it used to be.

As a further and final aside, I would actually say that slowing down the pace of sieges would even make it more viable to introduce other ideas that have been floated, e.g. blocking off being able to WP into contested keeps during the small gaps in events. Right now, being able to do that is unfair, but provides a level of balance to how quickly you can cap a keep. By slowing things down again and reducing the damage being put out, it becomes viable to be running from Citadel/Garri to a keep, rather than knowing it’ll be lost long before your main group can run that distance.

Anything you suggest is a buff to the zerg and manmoding. I am against any of it, if at all siege weapons need to be buffed, to upgrade and siege up a tower people spend a lot of gold and time, it should take an atleast equal amount of time and gold to take that tower, it is unfair that the dedicated efforts of one group over 30 min or so to upgrade and prepare a tower should be negated in 3-5 min by a ram and a couple of people stacking on the ram to split incoming damage.

…did you read the parts where I was talking rams and golems? I mean, I’ll admit, maybe there’s a strong argument to be made somewhere about whether or not players should be able to damage gates and, if so, how much, but it’s not really at all the main thrust of the idea. If I were to consider it, rationally, it probably isn’t a good feature as it presently stands and the damage should at least be reduced. I think you might be slightly confused about certain details though. It takes much longer than 30 minutes to fully upgrade a tower. Not to mention, two people standing on a ram won’t do anything. It doesn’t “split” damage, reducing the total output in any way. The only way it might do something is if you had more than 5 people on top of a ram, breaking the standard player aoe cap, but siege has an aoe cap of 50, making that a very easy and tempting target for a couple of ACs. The realistic problem with rams is that Iron Hide reduces damage to rammers by 50%, meaning that leisurely blasting a water field once in a while will keep them up even if you have multiple ACs on them, whilst you’re extremely unlikely to be doing enough damage to kill rams with anything except for a treb behind the door.

I have some ideas I had mulling around for siege. I like most of what you wrote. The changes below are what I want for certain siege.

Ballistas:
Ballistas need help. They need to be dangerous and they currently aren’t. The weapon already suffers by having to have a direct line of sight to its target. This should be the ultimate weapon for zerg busting. Here’s what I propose for it
- Increased range to 5000
(the next 2 are only one of each… Double damage or AOE, not both)
- Double damage for all default skills (the spray shot remains the same)
- All shots pierce targets and have a 350 range aoe hit when they land.

- Ballista shots now properly lead targets even beyond range.
- 15 target hit cap.
- increased supply cost to 50/60 (50 for regular, 60 for superior)
- minimum range 600
- removed bonus damage against gates and walls (hits like player against these)
-Ballistas cannot be deployed in lordroom areas in keeps.

Yes let’s make em dangerous. Ballistas need to be something that makes a commander pop protection skills to charge at and have a flanking force to take down. Nothing would break up a zerg as well as hitting an artillery line that actually does damage and doesn’t miss. To keep them from being over the top a few restrictions get added. The biggest ones are preventing them from being used within a lord room area of a keep. This especially counts for Hills.

Supply trap:
This trap is a little overpowered even though no one really uses it. I’d like to see more strategic play with this. Here’s how
- Players can now place up to 10 supply traps, traps do not despawn when their owner leaves the map.
- Trap effect range reduced from 1200 to 300
- Trap target effect cap is removed (unlimited targets hit by the trap when it goes off).
- Traps placed within 600 units of each other will chain react- that is they all trigger when one triggers.

Stealth trap:
Rework the trap to become a Mud trap. Traps do not despawn when their owner leaves the map.
- Trap applies 4 second immobilize on activate, 2 second ticking cripple.
- 1200 radius
- removes stealth and applies revealed
- players can place up to 10 mud traps.
- Traps chain react within 600 units.

New: Flare trap
Trap triggers when more than 20 enemy players cross it within a 5 second interval.
Trap announces orange swords on the map when it triggers.
- trap does not despawn when owner leaves the map
- Owner recieves message denoting nearest objective to the trap when it triggers.
- players can place up to 10 flare traps
- traps chain react within 1200 units of each other.

Hadn’t really considered traps, but I do like the idea of a Flare/Alarm Trap-style thing. I’d more suggest something along the lines of it popping orange swords for 10s if there are however many players (admittedly, I’d tend towards 10-15) within a certain radius when it triggers. It has a counter in that groups can play tactically and have one person running ahead like they do at the moment with supply traps and you couldn’t put it just anywhere as it’d get triggered by roamers, but could still be a massive tool for scouts to be able to use.

Trebbing and cannoning through doors is dumb and should go away the way catapulting through doors did.

Ballistae need a rework, ground targeting could work, as could a redesign that used the left/right turning mechanics of catapults and trebs. Whatever the design, I’d want it to be able to hit on top of walls with arcing shots when fired from sufficient distance, giving it the ability to clear siege – it also needs to be more obviously good at firing down choke points. Between the spread shots and the anti-siege ability it’s pretty clear what it’s supposed to be doing, it’s just not getting the job done.

In the end, the issue with people using trebs/catas on doors is entirely due to the fact that people can still AoE on top of walls. This makes it so you really can’t put any reliable siege on top of a gate for when people throw down ACs. All they have to do is throw down some AoE’s and the siege dies (not even talking about people getting pulled off the walls).

Until they make it so that you can actually reliably defend your gate with siege on the walls, the ONLY way to counter lots of rams going down reliably (especially if you’re slightly outmanned) is by using a door treb. It’s a sad fact, but its really the only sure counter against a blob laying down 5-6 rams. If you nerf trebs the same way as trebs, it will only encourage and benefit the zerging and blobbling mentality. Before you nerf the only real defense, make it so that the walls in a keep are actually semi-safe to place siege on for defense. There are a few places in some keeps where you can place them, but in the end, AoE’s can hit just about anything that is sitting on top of a wall.