Siege and Supply Changes in Context

[Sviel.7493]

World vs. World: January 31 Update Preview – GuildWars2.com

 

I'm not going to sugarcoat it.  Most of these changes are not to my liking.  However, rather than simply flaming the devs, I want to explain in detail what they actually mean for the game mode and how we players can expect our experience to change.  Despite everything, I think it's best to assume that devs know what they are doing.  Based on their changes, we can try to figure out their intentions.  It's more likely that they intended to do a certain thing that no one likes than that they just screwed up and accidentally did the opposite of what they were trying to do.

 

What Defense Should Be

Generally speaking, the purpose of defense in WvW is to buy time.  Sometimes you're stalling for allied reinforcements to show up--other times you're just trying to increase how long it takes enemies to flip an objective so that allies elsewhere can accomplish some other goal.  It is not and should not be possible to defend indefinitely.

 

In order to facilitate defense, it must be possible for a relatively small number of players to interact meaningfully with a larger amount of players.  This is why the siege system exists.  It funnels PvP interaction into a form that is less dominated by sheer numbers than direct combat.  Major objective fights in WvW begin with siege where number differences are less critical and end with direct PvP where relatively even numbers are a must.  The purpose of the siege is to allow the defending team to amass numbers and move to the direct PvP portion.

 

This does not mean that sieges should never be rebuffed.  In an evenly populated map, a good defending crew should be able to delay some assaults significantly by destroying the enemy's siege.  If the enemy builds all of their siege in range of a single AoE, for example, it should be possible to punish that.  When this happens, there is still major damage done to structures that must be repaired which means that the assaulters have still made progress on their goal--but the defenders have now bought enough time that allies elsewhere have an opportunity to capture a different objective.

 

Flame Ram Changes

Gates in WvW have less health than walls but also have built-in, dedicated defenses.  They're meant to be a higher risk/higher reward assault point.  In reality, there's no risk to attacking a keep with a zerg because the built-in defenses are simply not effective enough.  It's also extremely difficult to use them while being blasted by dozens of enemy players.  Thus, zergs tend to favor attacking gates as they are rewarded with faster entry but do not suffer from substantially increased risk.

 

Flame Rams were previously sturdy enough to destroy gates even if under constant fire from enemy Arrow Carts.  They could also survive being hit with Cannons and Burning Oil many times.  The exact numbers vary depending on how many Rams were dropped, but even two Rams were enough to reliably open the gate before they could be killed.  Now that Ram HP is being buffed, the few cases where assaults were rebuffed will become even rarer.  It was already not really worthwhile to try to destroy them, but now it is basically pointless.  Combined with the change to make it harder to disrupt enemies on Rams and thus increase the gate's lifespan, even the most desperate defense attempts will amount to nothing--no siege destruction and no delay.  Since players have no way to contribute to defense against larger groups, the only way to defend is for an allied zerg to show up in the ~90 seconds that it takes to reach the lord room from first siege damage.

 

Ballista Changes

Ballistae are Anet's balancing lever of choice for siege battles.  Some years ago, after accidentally buffing siege TTK across the board, they gave Ballista bonus damage on one skill to "make up for it."  Today, the Ram changes are meant to be balanced with another buff to one Ballista skill.  In the past, the Ballista change did not matter.  There's even less reason to expect it will matter this time around as it is specifically meant to defend gates and Ballistae are basically unable to hit Rams in the first place.

 

Ballistae require a clear path to their target and the player must be able to click on it.  This means that in order for a Ballista to hit a Ram, it must be on the absolute edge of a wall overlooking the gate.  Just like cannons, this means that the Ballista will be under constant, heavy fire from the enemy zerg that is using the Rams.  It is unlikely that a player will get a single shot off even if they, by some miracle, are able to build a Ballista in the first place.  They and the Ballista will die in seconds while a single Ram would take about 30 seconds to kill depending on the magnitude of their recent HP buff.  Even if we presumed that the player and Ballista were granted invulnerability by the gods, you would still need to outnumber the enemy Rams with allied Ballistae to kill them all before the gate went down.

 

Thus, the Ballista changes will not temper the Ram changes whatsoever.  In fact, the wording of the post suggests that the true intent was for offensive Ballista use.  The increased range will be useful in allowing Ballistae to destroy cannons, oil and player-built siege on objectives to clear the way for a point-blank assault by a group too small to enjoy the inevitability of a zerg.  Presumably, once they clear enemy siege, they can destroy the gate with no further defensive interactions unless they are outnumbered.

 

Warclaw Changes

The skill was bad and is still bad.  The only time it's better than building a ram is when you're alone, the gate has been patched shut and it is not currently being defended.  Don't expect this change to have any impact on the game whatsoever.  Honestly, if you're on a Warclaw, you should just jump over the gate without worrying about damaging it.

 

Keep Supply Reduction Change

Anet states that these changes are intended to reduce the time it takes for assaulters to drain defender's resources.  This a direct nerf to defender's resources so we can expect these to work out as intended.  The reduction is offset by increased Supply from Yak deliveries which MAY mean that an objective that is successfully defended can still be repaired if supply lines are kept open.  We weren't given any numbers so it's impossible to say.  This should encourage players to take a more active role in defending camps.  Assuming a reality where players are able to defend objectives and sieges are actually a matter of chipping away at Supply reserves, this is actually a good change in that it rewards players for engaging directly and indirectly with other players.  Unfortunately, the other changes in this update seem to cement sieges as one-sided blow-outs so it's more likely that Anet just wants a repeat zerg assault to have a better success rate if a defending zerg pushes them out the first time.

 

Increasing the health of Dolyaks is a curious change.  They already get a 90% damage reduction buff when near an ally so their survival depends on whether or not they are escorted instead of their HP pool.  This probably won't have much impact as an unescorted Dolyak is still going to die every time.

 

Camp Supply Change

Increasing the maximum amount of Supply and regeneration rate in camps means that zergs can resupply more quickly.  Your group has to have at least 6 people for this change to matter at all.  Technically, it may slightly help havoc groups, but they aren't going to live or die based on having a bit more supply.  Anet states that these changes were to compensate for the Keep Supply reduction which suggests they think that players are going to run to the camp and ferry Supply back to Keeps even though they removed the participation this gave some time back so...?  Even in that case, it only makes a difference if enough players were running Supply to drain the camp.

 

In reality, this is just going to increase the amount of Supply that zergs have at their disposal.  This means more offensive siege for even faster assaults while defenders now have less ability to counter assaults and fewer resources to repair and rebuild siege.  While this is not the stated purpose, it is consistent with the rest of this 'QoL' update so I am inclined to believe it is intended.

 

Overall Thoughts

I really, really, appreciate that Anet decided to communicate some of their reasoning to us with these changes.  That part of this is encouraging.  However, given that they have never given a clear idea of what they consider a healthy siege meta-game, it's difficult to assess what their goal is.  On the face of it, it seems like they are nerfing defense (again) and making it easier to K-Train while steamrolling opponents.  Maybe K-Training is what they want.  If so, that's fine--it's their game, after all.  But that impression comes from looking at the changes in the context of the game that currently exists.  If Anet is instead trying to balance for a game where populations are even and players are fighting in smaller skirmishes rather than zergs, these changes could be seen as beneficial.

 

In their post, they note that gate catapults (a WvW fixture for a literal decade) are a bug and also a key part of the WvW meta.  They don't seem to acknowledge that it became a key part because of the futility of other forms of defense.  In fact, they go on to say that they want to improve the success of gate assaults even when said gates are heavily defended.  The dynamic of gates, in my estimation, is that they are a quicker entry point that are difficult to breach when heavily defended.  The reality on the field seems to be that gates are a quicker entry point regardless of defenders.  Anet's statements and actions suggest that gates should be even quicker entry points regardless of defense.  What I want to hear is why they feel this way.  What are they seeing that suggests to them that gate assaults need a higher success rate?

 

When I heard QoL update, I did not expect across the board buffs to the current dominant WvW strategy.  Perhaps I was foolish.

 

Update:
We have more details on the changes now: 

 

Anet says the purpose of these changes is "to encourage direct player vs. player conflict in fights over objectives while taking care to not take the fun (or the teeth) out of objective defense."

 

While not mentioned in the preview, they say they have fixed certain CC skills knocking players off of Burning Oil despite having the WvW mastery that is supposed to prevent that.  Being able to stay on the Oil may make it possible to live long enough to get a few shots off before it's destroyed.  Previously, you would get feared off and lose your damage reduction which would mean a quick death.  On the other hand, rams have had their health increased by 100% and now an additional 25% since Burning Oil was made.  Not surprisingly, this means that Oil damage is far too low to actually kill Rams in time to save the gate.  I'd love to test the exact time at some point, though I'm not sure how.

Per the Supply changes, they did not actually increase the amount delivered from Yaks to anywhere except SMC unless that change was left out of the patch notes. They shaved off 100 (20%) of the maximum base Supply and 300 (33%) of the upgraded Supply for Keeps.  This is pretty huge, but currently Supply doesn't have much impact on defense because you can't actually use it to stop your enemies.  It is key for repairs and that's probably what they're targeting.

 

Camps now hold enough Supply to build 1 additional piece of Superior siege.  We'll likely see even more obnoxious siege drops in the future though this may be offset somewhat if zergs were draining allied Keeps to 0 to fund the war effort.

 

They increased the damage of side Keep lord on DBL, but this is after they drastically increased the cooldowns on their actually "dangerous" skills.  They're still much weaker than they started out but I guess it's...something?  Middle Keep lord now can't be permanently CCd, but he isn't exactly a threat so I don't think this is going to change much.  Still, it's a great bug fix.

 

---

 

Overall, I think this patch is a mixed bag.  Perhaps my standards are very low, but it seems like they're at least trying to do something and that's kind of encouraging.  I don't think that promoting one-push objective caps is going to lead to "direct player vs. player conflict" nor do I think it's wise to go this route in a 24/7 game mode with inevitably uneven team sizes for much of the match.

 

Mostly, I just don't really understand why they feel that actively defended Towers and Keeps need to breached more easily.  Perhaps the phrase "actively defended" means "defended with numbers equal to the attackers?"  If their goal is to have direct PvP fights in situations where direct PvP is actually possible, they would be better served by increasing the incentive to fight in the field as opposed to letting enemies breach before combat.  They sort of hit on this by making repairs harder to do via Supply reduction but making it easier to just throw your entire server at the gate means that breaching Keeps isn't going to be a matter of draining resources first and thus there is little incentive to minimize the need for repairs. 

 

Their desired play pattern seems to be that you easily breach the Keep and, ideally, have a fight at the lord.  If you wipe, it's now harder for your foes to repair everything quickly.  This works in a server vs. server situation with perpetually equal numbers, but what do they expect to happen if one side has an extra 10 people?  Do they just get to roll the whole map?  Does Anet expect their opponents to rally rather than log off?  And what happens when the third server easily breaches the gates somewhere else at the same time?

 

A better approach would be to give defense more teeth but also double down on reducing the ability to repair siege damage.  Rather than making every assault end in the lord's room, give assaulters the ability to create meaningful results without fully flipping the objective.  It's frustrating to attack something and see it instantly repaired by the responding enemy zerg.  That promotes a mindset that if you didn't flip it, you failed and accomplished nothing.  Thus, despite being the person who does the repairs, I agree that the ability of an objective to recover after a hit could be toned down.

 

Anyway, they also fixed a bunch of decade-old bugs so we are officially in a new era.  There is a lot of work that remains to be done.  Somehow, the removal of miniatures gives me hope that they may actually do it.

Edited February 1, 2023 by Sviel.7493
More information released.

[Infusion.7149]

Overall solid analysis.

I would like to point out that rams are not used because guild siege golems exist. So long as you can build them on the spot there is no reason to use flame rams. That is on top of being able to hit two walls with one cata on Alpine BL. It's way less efficient to ram and far more counterable by oil and cannons. There is no alternate plan once you set them down whereas you can always port out golems out of combat if your assault fails miserably.

Guild Siege Golem is 50 supply which is the exact same amount as a Superior Flame Ram and only 10 more than a Guild Flame Ram which costs 40 supply.

[Xenesis.6389]

Just simply, another buff for the boon ball to get in and cap in one shot.

Another step towards EOTM merrigoround gameplay, or reset night 24/7 I guess is the aim.

I mean defending is getting another nerf, defense events seems to be bugged in some maps, you get nothing for trying to kill a group much larger than you, having a much more difficult time of doing this because numbers and boon spam is always better, nothing of worth from outnumbered buff.

Simply put, why defend? why not just backcap in 5mins and everyone gets their lord bag. We're not playing for points, servers tank on purpose. Just weird to even be targeting ram upgrades out of everything else that is a priority for players, or fixes that are needed, hello exploits. Meh.

[Gotejjeken.1267]

1 hour ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

Just simply, another buff for the boon ball to get in and cap in one shot.

Another step towards EOTM merrigoround gameplay, or reset night 24/7 I guess is the aim.

I mean defending is getting another nerf, defense events seems to be bugged in some maps, you get nothing for trying to kill a group much larger than you, having a much more difficult time of doing this because numbers and boon spam is always better, nothing of worth from outnumbered buff.

Simply put, why defend? why not just backcap in 5mins and everyone gets their lord bag. We're not playing for points, servers tank on purpose. Just weird to even be targeting ram upgrades out of everything else that is a priority for players, or fixes that are needed, hello exploits. Meh.

 

Basically this, but I'm even more confused at some of it.  

Like, if they are buffing attacking so that essentially structures are meaningless, why say they will buff rewards around fighting in structures? The idea here seems to be to create a literal large scale PvP mode but inevitably fail miserably and create a mode devoid of life where k-training is the only thing that matters.

So yeah, EoTM.  Because that worked so well the first time.

Due to all the exploits and sheer speed which even a small group can take a keep, I question why have gates or walls anymore? Why not buff the lord to stall and then just make EWP always available? No need for siege, and permanent fights.

As not even the math to this works out.  If you reduce keep siege but buff yak health, you accomplish nothing as you aren't speeding them up and some of them have a LONG way to run.  This rewards slapping yaks far more than defending, because they also take FOREVER to respawn once killed.  

Logical change here would be to double yak speed so they are harder to hit.  I know why they didn't though because yak escorting is bugged so you need to stand next to them for a long, long time.  If they run faster, you won't get escort credit. 

Finally, the balliste range change is going to be hilarious (in a bad way) for griefing.  

Edited January 28, 2023 by Gotejjeken.1267

[Dawdler.8521]

The context is that people are lazy kittens at scouting and will now happily blaim objective nerfs for their own inability to intercept enemy threats in time and defend objectives because they are too busy picking their navels in spawn waiting for EBG queue.

[Xenesis.6389]

36 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

too busy picking their navels in spawn waiting for EBG queue.

 

Not in this tier!

🤭

[Chaba.5410]

Getting knocked off siege while you have stab was always a bug.  I don't understand why you want to criticize a long term bug finally getting fixed. It didn't only affect rams. It also affected the oil mastery and catas and trebs too. So you enjoyed exploiting a bug.

Edited January 28, 2023 by Chaba.5410

[Tavin.7450]

good contribution 🙂 I'm curious how it will change the WVW

[Gorani.7205]

Rams being stronger and the removal of the stability bug would only make sense if countering the rams would be betters well. A better Ballista doesn't cut it, because of LoS issues and Burning Oil still is a death trap. Gates will be attacked more often, response time for defenders goes down, towers and keeps will flip faster. Increasing the effect will be less supply for defenders to repair and to build counter siege.

@Sviel.7493 is on point with his predictions I guess.
I would say "lets try this" with very little grumpiness, if ANet also added changes to the "geometry" of Ballistae (so they are on a higher "tripod" for decreasing LoS issues or of they added "siege mounts" on towers and keeps that are a possiblity to placs counter siege to shoot at rams. K-Train feeding is what this patch will be and that can't be good for improving the WvW experience.

[the krytan assassin.9235]

2 hours ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Getting knocked off siege while you have stab was always a bug.  I don't understand why you want to criticize a long term bug finally getting fixed. It didn't only affect rams. It also affected the oil mastery and catas and trebs too. So you enjoyed exploiting a bug.

People aren't really criticizing the fixing of an old exploited bug. People do complain though because Rams were already a very powerful siege weapon even though they had that inherent weakness. With this patch they are removing a weakness of the ram and increasing its health at the same time. Reducing the health pool of Rams would make alot more sense to compensate for the nerf to defensive cata/treb. The buffs to balli will also nerf the catalyst abit, so Rams will become relatively even stronger. 

Edited January 28, 2023 by the krytan assassin.9235

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

I'll explain what these changes mean for those who are unfamilar..

 

Back in the old days, walls were always paper, even when upgraded. This had several effects, the main one being that small groups could take objectives easier (you're not going to stop a zerg with any amount of defense), and also that enemy servers couldn't cap all your objectives and make them T3 and sit on them with siege.

 

It also meant that most battles happened inside of open objectives during the capture process, not outside the walls, with some battles lasting hours especially in the case of objectives like Stonemist Castle.

 

During Heart of Thorns, the game was made alot more defensive with Shield Generators and many other changes.

 

As hard as this is to explain to players who joined later, stronger walls, higher supply caps and more powerful defensive siege only made it harder for the outmatched servers, because they could no longer take upgraded objectives especially with how much more difficult it is for a smaller group to set up superior siege instead of just basic, and ultimately this lead to the "flip back" meta as the only viable method of resisting a stronger enemy server. It didn't make defending easier, it only made offensive movements impossible.

 

The changes the devs are making are trying to undo this somewhat, although they're a bit misguided.

Edited January 28, 2023 by Mariyuuna.6508

[Sviel.7493]

1 hour ago, Mariyuuna.6508 said:

I'll explain what these changes mean for those who are unfamilar..

 

Back in the old days, walls were always paper, even when upgraded. This had several effects, the main one being that small groups could take objectives easier (you're not going to stop a zerg with any amount of defense), and also that enemy servers couldn't cap all your objectives and make them T3 and sit on them with siege.

 

It also meant that most battles happened inside of open objectives during the capture process, not outside the walls, with some battles lasting hours especially in the case of objectives like Stonemist Castle.

 

During Heart of Thorns, the game was made alot more defensive with Shield Generators and many other changes.

 

As hard as this is to explain to players who joined later, stronger walls, higher supply caps and more powerful defensive siege only made it harder for the outmatched servers, because they could no longer take upgraded objectives especially with how much more difficult it is for a smaller group to set up superior siege instead of just basic, and ultimately this lead to the "flip back" meta as the only viable method of resisting a stronger enemy server. It didn't make defending easier, it only made offensive movements impossible.

 

The changes the devs are making are trying to undo this somewhat, although they're a bit misguided.

 

I assume you meant that upgraded gates were always paper?  Even before HoT, upgraded walls were reinforced and fortified.

But even then, you mention stronger walls despite walls being weaker than ever before.  You talk about higher Supply caps despite them already being nerfed in the HoT update due to Supply no longer being needed for upgrades--they never got higher.  You also talk about more powerful defensive siege despite all siege health being doubled which rendered everything but shield generators pretty useless.  I guess we can agree that shield generators are useful on defense even though they're much more useful on offense.

 

Anyway, your point seems to be that paper gates led to intra-objective fights and you enjoyed that. This works out well enough if there are two big servers and one dead server, but it falls apart in any other situation.  If you are fighting for several hours inside of a keep, the third team should cap everything else on the map.  Still, I'm not saying we shouldn't have intra-objective fights.  I'm saying that if that's the first effective line of defense then we're doomed to have a circle of K-Trains.

 

Besides, what facilitated those long battles was the waypoint bug that let you teleport back into the keep every 2.5 minutes and a very different combat balance environment with more rallies, rezzes on lords, etc.  Even if we made gates paper again, we wouldn't see hourlong battles return as a normal thing.  It would just lead to whatever server had the blob K-Training the whole border just like in the old days.

 

5 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

The context is that people are lazy kittens at scouting and will now happily blaim objective nerfs for their own inability to intercept enemy threats in time and defend objectives because they are too busy picking their navels in spawn waiting for EBG queue.

I agree that scouting in WvW is in a bad place right now, but the issue I'm talking about here is what options are available  after the enemies are scouted.  What can players do after finding the enemies and before allied forces arrive.

[Dawdler.8521]

1 hour ago, Sviel.7493 said:

I agree that scouting in WvW is in a bad place right now, but the issue I'm talking about here is what options are available  after the enemies are scouted.  What can players do after finding the enemies and before allied forces arrive.

Distract, delay, disable siege, counter siege, harass, disrupt any supply lines to nearest camp, report progress, etc. There are lots of things defenders can do when it's not 15 people standing on/behind the wall doing next to nothing while 1 or 2 go outside to try to pull out enemies only to end up focused by 5 people that could easily be handled if just more had the guts to go outside and knew how to cloud.

Are there situations where there is literally nothing you can do? Sure there is. Sometimes allies never come because you need a zerg and there is none. But then the objective is lost regardless.

[Gorani.7205]

1 hour ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Distract, delay, disable siege, counter siege, harass, disrupt any supply lines to nearest camp, report progress, etc. There are lots of things defenders can do when it's not 15 people standing on/behind the wall doing next to nothing while 1 or 2 go outside to try to pull out enemies only to end up focused by 5 people that could easily be handled if just more had the guts to go outside and knew how to cloud.

The problem with those "scouting activities" is that they don't keep you participation up and drain your personal resources.
Distract without killing someone of the attackers, no participation
Disable siege is reducing you personal your items, your supply and because of reflects & bubbles has a small chance of success against a reasonable sized group at the gate.
Counter siege you need to spend your own resource on, drain supply from the structure to be defended and still no participation unless you can kill a player or enemy siege with that (good luck with those feeble ACs and LoS problems with Ballistae)
Go outside and cap camps & kill dollies?  Yep, those can provide participation but the enemy siege most likely is already up and once you are outside, it is very difficult to get inside again (especially on Alpine towers with a single portal).
The upcoming patch does nothing to encourage scouting & calling out for re-enforcements. It just pushes more of those still doing that to abandon the structure and prepare for a recap in a few minutes & more waiting at safe spots to get back to "a spawn camp or veteran kill".

Edited January 28, 2023 by Gorani.7205

[Chaba.5410]

5 hours ago, the krytan assassin.9235 said:

People aren't really criticizing the fixing of an old exploited bug. People do complain though because Rams were already a very powerful siege weapon even though they had that inherent weakness. With this patch they are removing a weakness of the ram and increasing its health at the same time. Reducing the health pool of Rams would make alot more sense to compensate for the nerf to defensive cata/treb. The buffs to balli will also nerf the catalyst abit, so Rams will become relatively even stronger. 

Mincing words about whether a complaint is a form of criticism or not doesn't take away from the fact that it's a bugfix being talked about in the negative.  You call it a nerf to defensive cata/treb.  So if someone uses their mount to exploit-jump into a tower and ANet fixes that, would that be a nerf to mounts?  Why is exploiting the bug with siege stability any different?  I don't know yet how siege balance is really going to change with this bug fix; defenders on oil with the stability mastery are getting buffed too, I just think a more objective discussion can be had about it.  It isn't all one-sided for attackers.

I know it wasn't clear in the post because it focused on rams as an example.  This doesn't say only rams: "We’re fixing a long-standing issue that caused players to be kicked off siege weapons when hit by certain crowd-control abilities, even when under the effects of stability."

And they're not buffing ram HP to compensate for fixing this bug.  They're buffing the mastery skill Iron Will: "to help relieve pressure on assaulters".  I'd have to double-check, but I don't think that buff applies to the ram itself.

[Chaba.5410]

The general way I read Sviel's introduction on what defense should be, the purpose of siege and his response to Mariyuma about "other situations", it's just some personal opinions that I don't buy into.

Like, no, man.  Offense/defense of objectives should never be balanced around anything but equal player numbers just like skill balance.  Not "other situations".  Each piece of siege is designed for a specific purpose and each has their counters.  Siege isn't meant to "facilitate smaller numbers interacting with larger numbers".  It's there for everyone to use, from small to large.

These changes seem like Anet is lowering the time-to-take an objective when attackers and defenders are at equal strength (maximum is map queue v. map queue).  They don't seem to change anything with regards to the 2-to-1 player advantage that objectives are supposed to give.  It changes nothing for the guild aura.  It doesn't change wall or gate HP.  It's only the supply amounts changed which directly influence time-to-take in the supply attrition game.   Defense isn't just buying time.  It's also what happens after that time is bought.  Attackers buy time too by tying up defenders and distracting them from somewhere else.  Put some EWPs in those towers if you want fast responses.  Quit making your servermates have to run all over a map they don't like.
 

Edited January 28, 2023 by Chaba.5410

[Jski.6180]

Well doors should be a week point more so then an wall they are even better choke points of the over all def of an objective for the most part. The game should favor rams over cata/trebs that can be used from an ranged and from more then one point on an objective.

We need more counter sieges  ballistic are what we have we NEED places able mortar.

Its better to have supply in objectives that are harder to def its always was an issues being able to carry supply from map to map for the balancing of that objectives maps.

I was realty hoping for wvw legendarily weapons not for the skins but for the ability to free up space for wvw only players for more then one build. It would of been an nice QOL update and more content for the wvw player base.

[Gorani.7205]

35 minutes ago, Jski.6180 said:

Well doors should be a week point more so then an wall they are even better choke points of the over all def of an objective for the most part. The game should favor rams over cata/trebs that can be used from an ranged and from more then one point on an objective.

We need more counter sieges  ballistic are what we have we NEED places able mortar.

The current mortars are not able reach gates with their normal shots most of the times, canons on towers might be able to reach the gates (those on DBL more than those on Alpine), but they are death traps - and don't get me started on Burning Oil.
If Burning Oil could be activated via a "chain pull" (like you can set off traps in Obsidian sactum) next to the gate on ground level, it would help a lot to defend the gate... even if the recharge of the skills would be increased. A person pulling the chain could still be feared off, blown back by the ram impact without stability (and not being in a position to see what is going on outside as a hindrance)

[Chaba.5410]

5 minutes ago, Gorani.7205 said:

A person pulling the chain could still be feared off, blown back by the ram impact without stability (and not being in a position to see what is going on outside as a hindrance)

Untrue.  The upcoming patch fixes that for those with oil mastery or stability.

Edited January 28, 2023 by Chaba.5410

[Balsa.3951]

Anet may want ppl split up into smaller groups more. 

[Jski.6180]

6 minutes ago, Gorani.7205 said:

The current mortars are not able reach gates with their normal shots most of the times, canons on towers might be able to reach the gates (those on DBL more than those on Alpine), but they are death traps - and don't get me started on Burning Oil.
If Burning Oil could be activated via a "chain pull" (like you can set off traps in Obsidian sactum) next to the gate on ground level, it would help a lot to defend the gate... even if the recharge of the skills would be increased. A person pulling the chain could still be feared off, blown back by the ram impact without stability (and not being in a position to see what is going on outside as a hindrance)

That would be the use of an mortars to def an gate vs rams or even use mortars to counter endless AC (or even mortars hehe!) Ballistic sadly cant deal with a lot of that.

[Sviel.7493]

8 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Distract, delay, disable siege, counter siege, harass, disrupt any supply lines to nearest camp, report progress, etc. There are lots of things defenders can do when it's not 15 people standing on/behind the wall doing next to nothing while 1 or 2 go outside to try to pull out enemies only to end up focused by 5 people that could easily be handled if just more had the guts to go outside and knew how to cloud.

Are there situations where there is literally nothing you can do? Sure there is. Sometimes allies never come because you need a zerg and there is none. But then the objective is lost regardless.

 

You can't distract a zerg...these are human beings, not dogs.

 

Delaying them would be nice; the issue is how?  Siege disablers are always a key tool but we all know how much projectile hate there is in the game.  If a zerg doesn't want their siege disabled, they can easily maintain 100% reflect/block uptime on it.

 

Counter siege is mostly useless because gates die faster than enemy siege.  Catapults helped to delay but that's no longer going to be the case.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by harass...?  Do you think that killing a bit of their tail will matter?

 

Disrupting supply lines should be key but does nothing if you can't destroy or prevent their initial siege.

 

Reporting progress is a good idea but does not buy any time.

 

I'm not sure what scenario you're envisioning, but these don't seem like serious suggestions.  My point was that the changes in this patch remove or make harder the impactful things that defenders could do.  You come here and talk as if I'm saying that people should stop attacking if I yell at them or something.

 

6 hours ago, Balsa.3951 said:

Anet may want ppl split up into smaller groups more. 

 

If that's what they want, they are not making the right changes.  Increasing the inevitability of zergs will increase the incentive to zerg.

[Xenesis.6389]

Everyone just needs to use more supply traps now is all. 🤭🍿

[Sviel.7493]

5 hours ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

Everyone just needs to use more supply traps now is all. 🤭🍿

The thing about that is even if I land multiple traps, they only need to build 2 rams to take a keep.

 

It seems kind of toxic, but my current strategy is to drain Supply from whatever gets attacked, drain supply from nearby camps by building Ballistae (their only real use, lol), and drop as many Supply traps as possible so that the enemies are slowed down as much as possible.  Every now and then, I manage to stop an assault because they break through the gate and step on a trap and can't build a ram on inner.

 

That doesn't strike me as healthy gameplay, but it's clearly my best option.  If a ram gets built, the gate is 100% dead and I can only slightly delay it with disables if they're lazy about reflects.  

[Dawdler.8521]

7 hours ago, Sviel.7493 said:

 

You can't distract a zerg...these are human beings, not dogs.

Human beings that moves like sheeple and cant go anywhere without snuggling up to their firebrand security blanket.

If you dont think you can do anything at all thats fine. But lowering the supplies of a keep/SM will have exactly zero impact on that. If anything it'll be easier for your strategy - less supply to drain.

People do realize that we're probably only talking about a 500/800/1100->500/700/1000 change, maybe 500/600/800 in "best" case scenario for a keep, right? SM probably get 1500 at T3 instead. Towers are unchanged from what I understood.

Edited January 29, 2023 by Dawdler.8521