As an offensive commander whose getting in touch what will HoT bring, ive noticed the massive disadvantage status the attackers who will go for towers/keep will be at:
The upgrades you can put on objectives are welcomed in my eyes but they tend to give a tremendous advantages to defenders if you combine what WvW has right now and what HoT will add.
Let me start off with the upgrade of choosing to make “gates will only take siege damage” or “cannons and mortars will only take siege damage” option- Both are considered strong choices but we all know that the best choice would be to choose “mortars and cannons will take siege damage only” instead of gates taking siege damage.
Why? Because you can spam siege disablers on the rams at gate and all you need is 1-2 players who can make up to 5 cannon shots on the rams and youre attacking attempt has been allready foiled.
Now you may arque that you can build a ballista very fast to take down those cannons before building rams but i will say that if there is 1 or even 2 defenders present, they can kill your ballista with ACs very fast and nothing will work out. They can even throw a disabler on that ballista before going on ACs and will have a guaranteed kill on that ballista of yours.
Also its not the cannons that are gona be the issue, the mortars can also kill everything you drop nearby the gate.
In fact, the mortars can even kill your catapults way too easily if you decide to attack walls instead. The only solution you have is to AC down the mortars with the risk of enemy defenders throwing disablers, ACing back, going suicide mode on your AC.
Now ofcourse at the moment im talking in a prospective where there are up to 5 defenders being present. Can you imageon how more impossible things will be if a 45+ man blob will appear?
Im not gona lie but there are many players in WvW who play it mostly for fights and they realy arent that much interested in flipping objectives. But in the current WvW you are often faced to downgrade towers/keeps if you want to pull out more fights where enemies dont hide behind walls. That being said and what i also said earlier, it will be a big discomfort for a large amount of players.
Also take into account the factors that not many WvW servers have their population and coverage balanced. This means that servers that dont have players playing late night or early morning up to afternoon, they will be forced to deal with more upgraded objectives once they come back to home from work.
As far as i see then once HoT hits, there will be a massive lack of balance between objective attackers and objective defenders. As in while the defenders have massive amount of possibilities to defend their objectives which come with huge advantages, the attackers will be left with close to nothing.
I see this as an massive issue that needs to be resolved as soon as possible. For now the only balance i can think of anet doing something with those siege disablers. Id be happy even if they would completely remove it but nobody cares about what a random joe like me thinks about it.