Cirdan.1234

Fully agree. Tactics should have a meaningful effect on fights. They should help a small group of defenders hold out over a slightly superior force. But Dragon Banners in particular are too powerful, too accessible, and lack meaningful counterplay. We have established design and balance principles in this game that are supposed to control the power level of abilities. An ability can have hard CC or high damage, but not both - but Dragon Banner 3 has a huge power coefficient, a knockback, and does it even have a target cap? AoE abilities are allowed to deal lots of damage to a few players, or a little bit of damage to a lot of players - but Dragon Banner 5 has a great power coefficient, a target cap of 20, long duration, and great area denial, easily covering the entire width of a choke point like walls, bridges, or tunnels. These abilities need to be tuned to be more in line with the standards by which all other skills are balanced. Dragon Banner 3 seems to be intended as a CC skill, so its damage should be reduced. Dragon Banner 5 is an AoE damage skill, but needs a reduction in either damage or target cap. It's fine for these abilities to be a bit stronger than your average weapon skill - but they are way beyond that right now. The Dragon Banner tactic - available at tier 2 in every keep and tower, and with an uptime of 15 minutes out of every 20 - is also too readily accessible. One side can maintain 3 banners continuously without even holding anything outside their own corner of EBG. In fact, rather than being a powerful tool to help defenders hold out against a slightly larger force, they act as a "win more" mechanic, giving the side with more territory (probably the side with greater numbers) huge area effect DPS and CC advantages as well. Limiting the number of active banners, increasing the tactivator cooldown, or limiting how far they can be carried, would still allow them to be used to defend the structure where they are slotted, without allowing them to imbalance the entire map. Finally - we must return to the original design of the Dragon Banner disabling the wielder's utility skills. The CC bar was always intended to provide counterplay - CC the banner wielder to stun them, and get an opportunity to take them down. Instead, banner wielders use stunbreak and mobility skills - which the banner was never designed around - to unload skills 5 and 3 on an enemy group, and to easily retreat at the first sign of pressure. If it is possible to disable the utility skills while carrying a banner, then it is probably possible to balance the banner with smaller nerfs to power and accessibility - just fix the overtuned jack-of-all-trades skills. However, access to stunbreaks and mobility skills allows the banner wielder to easily escape enemy pressure, and while they have access to those extra abilities, I believe that a significant nerf either to power level (bringing it in line with a normal weapon set) or to accessibility (limiting it to one per map, or preventing them from being carried too far away from the structure where they were spawned) is required.

What is going on with the lag and disconnect issues that everyone is having? I've lost progress on the last two Drakkar/Storms meta events because my entire squad was D/Ced simultaneously, and we re-joined to a map where the event had already failed. It seems like the lag issues have also been worse than usual for the last few weeks, and oftentimes the entire map will have a lag spike at the same time.