Hey everyone, and community mods!
I wanted to create this thread to discuss the imbalance, and in some cases complete uselessness, of various siege weapons. I used to lead wars in the Kressa server for Syndicate and have been in nearly every single one of them. That being said, this will all be from my own personal experiences and I am hoping to see if this is an agreed upon community issue that needs addressing, or just a perception issue.
My current issue with the siege weapons is that with the current meta (heavy armour healers and hammer/gaxe spam), they serve no purpose. Only the explosive cannon has even a semblence of usage, and even then it’s only for the knockback effect. I’ll put below each siege weapon and the problem I have with it along with a proposed fix (with guesswork numbers). I welcome everyone to add input to this post so we can have a good discussion about it, but please try and be civil.
Repeaters
Issue: They do less dps at max than a ballista (when accounting for cooldown time) and are completely negated by phys dmg resist. Since they take a huge amount of time to do any real damage, you are easily picked off by snipers.
Fix: Give each hit of the repeater Rend. Something like 5% up to 10 stacks for 1-3 seconds seems good. Keep it short so that a prolonged barrage on a single character (namely a heavy armour healer in their sacred ground) cannot withstand the increased rend, but not long enough to encourage “spraying” the field.
Ballista
Issue: The projectiles seem to move a bit too slow, but that could just be me. Also, they are practically useless beyond siege weapons. This punishes any defense that has a single one up when the offense doesn’t use siege (which, since they are mostly useless, they don’t).
Fix: Maybe if you hit a player with a bolt, it knocks them down and back AND roots them (as the bolt sticks them to the ground) for a few seconds. This would allow some seriously cool gameplay by having coordination on siege weapons. Pin someone down with a ballista and then mow them over with the repeater.
Burning Oil Vat
Issue: A hunk of junk. It’s only real use is invasions, which would be completely warranted, if it were actually worth anything. It’s damage is FAAAAAAAAAAR too low to be even moderately competitive with a 600 gs corruption focused dps.
Fix: Have it do incredible amounts of damage and increase the CD. Instead of it being a “use ten times on this one Brute and do basically no damage” it should have a longer CD to encourage strategic use, but have it do like 100k dmg or something, so the strategy is rewarded.
Horn
Issue: Seems to be a tiny area of effect.
Fix: Just make it a global or semi-global effect. This would allow people to actually get use out of the rear hardpoints during wars. Maybe have it give increased corruption damage for a time too.
Cannons
Issue: They do basically zero damage and have an extremely long reload time as well as a tiny magazine. This means that besides the knockback, which is EASILY accounted for by just dodging, it’s completely useless
Fix: Give it a much larger clip, maybe 20 (since you are unlikely to get kills and therefore battle tokens for refills), and reduce the reload time.
I really like the idea of proper usage of siege weapons turning the tide of battle, but atm almost everyone just ignores them and just turtles on the capture point. When the meta for defense is to have all cannons for knockback spam or all horns for melee, you know there is an issue. I hope the devs see this and can try some balancing passes for the weapons.