Remove ballistas from siege

[wayyyyyne]

Ok, so since the majority of people in this topic appear to be too dense to grasp what's wrong with ballistas, I will, contrary to what I said in my original post, try my best to explain why they are bullshit.

Basically, there's three types of ballistas:



A) The ones which will shoot at you at your spawn or maybe like 3 seconds away from it.

Certainly the least common but the most useless ones at the same time. You spawn more or less instantly and also frequently closer to the castle/flag compared to where you got killed. There's zero (0) defensive value in those ballistas. Usually they require some skill to aim and don't forget to take the missed shots into account. These ballistas contribute more to the attackers advance because people will spend time reloading and aiming them with no advantage whatsoever for the defenders to be gained because the same people could just be actually defending something.

B) The ones which will shoot you because they are aimed at a chokehold.

I can see the point and fun of chokeholds but why do I have to die instantly? Shields will only very, very very occasionally prevent you from dying. I can maybe recall like two instances where I had a ballista shot in my triple loomed elite cav with 6 shield skill.
Anyway, it's hard not to get hit by a projectile when in a chokehold so why does it have to take no skill whatsoever to score a kill? I could live with receiving a headshot because that acutally takes skill so why this? Just why?

C) The ones wich aren't aimed at a chokehold and can't pick you off of your spawn either.

You might say they acutally require skill and I do agree with that. And that's also exactly why they are bullshit. It's because you will only score a kill every now so often with these ballistas. People will waste minutes of firing into thin air, minutes in which they could actually be helping their team in one way or another, but no, they prefer to mindlessly reload and not to kill anything.



Apart from all of what I just said, why do people with full melee builds have to have access to ranged weapons (I remember when there was no WPF requirement for throwing weapons and that got removed for a reason)?
It basically means that all the levels and melee gear and skills and whatnot will go into something that could be done by anybody. Also why do noobs aka peasants need to be able effortlessly kill anybody? Because it's either no effort whatsoever or wasting minutes that could instead be spent on trying to help the team or just, you know, trying to learn how to play the game.

Was there a problem before the introduction of ballistas with attackers winning rounds too fast? If so, I highly doubt ballistas changed anything about that. They are a zero sum game at best.

Also, I know that I didn't mention ballistas for the attacking team because it's so rare to even see somebody using them (let alone kill something).

[gallonigher]

All I've gathered is that ballista are here as crutches for those who struggle in the melee aspect of the game, or at least against one particular player-- and repeating the words "learn to dodge" is such a cop-out.  Not everyone has a high agi build where dodging is easier-than-shit.  One day I'm gonna troll everyone so bad on ballista and I'LL FUCKING SHOW YOU ALL

[gallonigher]

Maybe few people think you're worth a ballista shot?  Just because you're 0 ath and can dodge ballistas like Neo dodges bullets doesn't mean you're a threat; point being, I'm required to dodge ballistas a lot more often than you are

[Kafein]

Point still stands that ballistas aren't fun, except for trolls and a few scrubs who genuinely enjoy cheap kills.

[Kafein]

As for 'fun' that's subjective, something that kills you wont seem fun. Dedicated melee dont think ranged are fun, ranged didnt think shield forcefields were fun or added to gameplay, i dont think agi-heroes are fun or add to gameplay and ninjas dont think plate-str crutchers are fun or add to gameplay.

That's an egregious fallacy. All melee players will tell you that they recognize a good fight when it happens, and that they recognize that they often die because someone outplayed them. Ranged, including ballistas, is in the general sense not like this at all.

[Voncrow]

Pls remove, they are worthless and turebal

[gallonigher]

Ranged in general is a different mentality that dedicated melee dont enjoy, you cant lolstab or feint-spam an arrow. But ranged is a key part of the game and dealing with it is just as essential as blocking and spamming feints, if you cant handle ranged you cant handle warband. Also, the last time we had a melee-only server on HRE server it failed hard cos noone liked playing for any period of time.

My main question would be are you anti-ballista for specific anti-ballista reasons, or are you anti-ballista because you are anti-ranged?

Don't try to spin this as another one of those "ranged is OP" debacles.  It's blatantly clear all you're doing is dodging the issue.  We're talking about BALLISTA, not ranged in general.  There is no wpf, ath, pd, (ect.) required to troll a ballista the entire round which means ANYONE, regardless of build or level can abuse it. 


The only solution presented on which both sides equally compromise is for the devs to make ballistae destroyable.  I could (and would) deal with that.

[Kafein]

Ranged in general is a different mentality that dedicated melee dont enjoy, you cant lolstab or feint-spam an arrow. But ranged is a key part of the game and dealing with it is just as essential as blocking and spamming feints, if you cant handle ranged you cant handle warband.

That's a circular argument. Ranged is not part of Warband "because ranged is part of Warband". Otherwise, if there were giant crabs with plasmaguns riding unicorns in the game, those things would be there because they are in the game as well. The game is an arbitrary construction that doesn't need to obey to any higher level rules.

Also, the last time we had a melee-only server on HRE server it failed hard cos noone liked playing for any period of time.

You are trying to represent a correlation as causation. The melee-only server experiments had a lot of idiosyncrasies all partly responsible for their lack of popularity, including the very odd choice of battle mode.

My main question would be are you anti-ballista for specific anti-ballista reasons, or are you anti-ballista because you are anti-ranged?

Ballistas magnify everything that is wrong with ranged as it exists in the game. It's quite natural to point out that some new things are not fun when one has been doing that a lot already about older and similar things.

[Rewolwerowiec]

Also this guy with epic K/D who was just standing behind the ballista most of the time (sadly I deleted all screens showing him shooting, but I remember it well):

(click to show/hide)

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Dude you are wrong about my time spent at ballista .
I remember it like today, I created a character with 2h for fun (agi build with danish).
At the round I could shoot about 2-3 shots of the ballista, which I give with a little luck 3 to 6 kills.
The rest of the frags was captured during combat, but i agree with you ballistas are so OP (2h too).

[lombardsoup]

Get rid of it

[Kafein]

Ranged, being an element of medieval warfare, is a part of Warband. It is a part of crpg because it is a major part of Warband.

If vanilla warband had giant crabs with plasmaguns riding unicorns and the vanilla mechanics were balanced around the fact they would be in the game, you would wreck balance by slicing them out of the game haphazardly because they interfere with your desired way of playing.

"An integral part of the game" is still completely arbitrary. There's no rule that says the game is better with ranged.

Trying to point out that this forum will loudly and constantly petition for certain things, but if ever implemented they really dont like it as much as they'd hoped. The grass is always greener.

You already said that, and missed my point.

You dislike ballistae because you dislike ranged, ballistae 'are not fun' because ranged 'is not fun' to you.

So what? Melee is fun for all participants, ranged is only fun for one side, if even that.

[Kafein]

"An integral part of the game" is still completely arbitrary. There's no rule that says the game is better with melee.

Exactly why there's no reason to discriminate. How many times have you seen people doing ranged duels on EU_3? Yeah. "Only ranged" doesn't see any activity whatsoever because the typical ranged player merely wants to shoot at helpless moving targets.

[wayyyyyne]

Nope.

I won't take this. At least somebody try to convince me why they should stay so I can prove them wrong.

[Kafein]

I won't take this. At least somebody try to convince me why they should stay so I can prove them wrong.

The best Heskey has been able to come up to is "You dislike ranged therefore your point is invalid", so i doubt anybody would argue with you.

And the typical melee player wants to kill enemies with his melee weapon, it's how you play each class. I've seen plenty of ranged duels on EU_3 though it's not a dueling class. 'Only melee' sees exactly the same activity as 'Only ranged' considering the striking absence of a melee-only server, as that server was being horrendously underused.

I feel like we're being side-tracked from the thread a little bit. Would it be fair to surmise without putting words in your mouth too much that you dislike ballistae because you dislike ranged in this game/mod, and i'm generally on the opposite side of the fence? For me ranged are a necessary force of balance and prevent 2-dimensional gameplay. Also they're the pure embodiment of delayed gratification where every arrow you strafe or suffer makes the imminent moment when you storm their ranged nest and ravage them for easy melee kills all the sweeter.

Easy melee kills aren't fun. I'd rather nerf bows and crossbows into oblivion and give them good sidearms to compensate, and actually have fun fighting them. Right now killing ranged isn't fun per se, it's a satisfactory revenge that doesn't even come close to the grief they cause anyway.

[wayyyyyne]

lol, classic appeal to popularity right there

X people voicing their opinion about something doesn't make it any less right or wrong. Ballistas are bullshit regardless of any amount of interchangeable up- or downvotes