About balista balancing.

[Lemdoran]

Hello world.

I just made a post on the idea suggestion of the game (here : https://tlsfeedback.featureupvote.com/suggestions/189409/few-balista-issues-ideas )
About things that i would like to see modified / enhanced / tweaked about balistas.

From my point of view, their are barely usefull at the moment cause of their targeting priority being (really) not adapted and their great tendency to either miss (cause ennemy dodge) OR at contrary having 10 of them shooting a poor souls that had 2 hp and may have be one shooted.

May i gather some input from other balista/trap spammers ?

Or maybe my idea is just bad from the start, and thei're fine like that? all input welcome ^^

[NM9G]

The fact that they also block vision is pretty brutal as well.
Edit: saw that you already put that, my bad.

But yeah, when I first saw them I figured they would be more like the pierce through attack from crossbows (hit x in a row in a straight line), maybe that could be a replacement idea and it would fix double targeting. It would probably need a materials balance tho.

[Lemdoran]

Yep, either an ignore armor or a "line shot" that damage every ennemies will be cool and make them more suitable later on , as long as it avoid allies on the path :o

[Myth Alric]

I think a line shot would be cool but also I wouldn't want it accidentally shooting walls or characters. So I am not sure it would work. I wonder if the strategy might be to put a bunch of them in the corners of the town, so they just shoot stray guys trying to running around the sides.

[eric-belair]

honestly if they just fix the prioritzation to avoid all shooting the same enemy ill be ok with it.

[Narfwak]

upgrading them should cost materials, not gold. 50 gold to upgrade one ballista to shoot twice is absurd

[Tegga21]

Originally posted by Narfwak:

upgrading them should cost materials, not gold. 50 gold to upgrade one ballista to shoot twice is absurd

By the time you need double shot gold is more readily available than materials

Balistas blocking line of sight is a no-go, all targeting same enemy as well..

Not sure what the solution is; they are quite expensive and suck and are often a hinderance. Catapults are way better.

[JuX]

Ballista and catapults are more like early to mid-game solutions to help struggling heroes, since their effectiveness diminishes with every night.

Not to mention they are not worth their investment since watchtowers quickly render them obsolete with help of either longbows or warp gates. So even if you enable upgrades for them they are unlikely able to compete with traps and towers.


Instead Ballistas should be player operated to fire 1x shot at long range, which ignores armor and can be upgraded with additional damage and shots. To be more like anti-boss weapon, while catapults handle minions with splash damage.

[Lelouch]

Pretty sure there is a bug with their attacks too mentioned in the 2nd/3rd paragraph in my post.

Yeah I learnt my lesson with the ballistas right behind walls... cant shoot through them, gotta move around them, just hazardous in general and simply easier to put them 1 tile further back.

But has anyone else noticed that sometimes a ballista doesn't appear to shoot at an available target?
I've had a few times, when the camera locks onto a quadrant to play the attacks and it zooms near two ballistas with a target, but one fires and the other doesn't.
So then I look at its field of view and that target is blocked by a vestige wall for 1 of them so fair game right? Except there is a second target (or multiple) a little further away, that are in its FOV and range that it should have been able to attack but didn't. :(

As for their balancing, you're kind of right, from what I've seen, they are really strong early game, sometimes killing things in one hit or its in range of 1 hit from a hero or ballista next turn, allowing you to get those S tier nights easy to boost you through the rest. While later in the game, things have high dodge, high block, and are just generally tanky in health and/or armour so they really lose their effectiveness.

In one sense it's good for the game, because it prevents you from solely relying on a build lots of ballistas strategy to win every single game because it doesn't matter what heroes you have.

But in the other, it feels bad to watch them miss an enemy constantly or all shoot at one target or target a bad enemy type for them and really that just comes down to the automatic turn they have. If we could target what they fire at, ignore the high dodge and high block enemies that waste a lot of their damage it would be fine.

However it would be bad gameplay to take an extra 5 10 20 50 turns choosing targets for ballistas wouldnt it.

SO what I think we really need is the ability to prioritise targets. The choice to arrange these prioritise could be given to us the players or just set.
But if we had the option we could then say;
Ok, kill the low hp remaining enemies first, then target the simpler hits, leaving high dodge and block until last
Or leave the low hp enemies to further down the list for my multi hit hero attack or propagating spell.
While setting these priorities we could even set the number of ballistas that should attack a single target.
And even things like whether to target the furthest, strongest, or closest enemy as seen in TD games

Similar to how you can over attack a target with your heroes multi attacks, Its perfectly right for ballistas to over-kill a target as well, but some limited control over this would be fantastic.

[JuX]

Think the issues you speak of is the fact ballistas behave the sameway the enemies do. Their attacks are done simultaneously, so they are all attacking the same target and overkilling it, hence it appears as if they are not attacking.

[Lelouch]

Originally posted by JuX:

Think the issues you speak of is the fact ballistas behave the sameway the enemies do. Their attacks are done simultaneously, so they are all attacking the same target and overkilling it, hence it appears as if they are not attacking.

unfortunately the enemy is not dead so :/

Plus the game I'm currently playing appeared to have a ballista shoot a target that was out of range (in fact all targets were out of range). maybe they ran through its range though and that counts? no idea

I feel like theres a bug in the way the game groups the auto attacks.
I read their steam news post about the meta, part 3?, and the way they grouped the combat in various ways to be played which is why it makes me think of that.
dont quote me on that though haha

[Lemdoran]

yep, targeting is really my biggest issue with this. Maybe devs haven't expected players to stack billions of balista (well, dozens, lol), wich happened in other games on the past. But it seem i'm not the only one, and their targeting really need a little polish :')

I agree with people saying that playing them manualy is a no-no, far too long. But just a way to limit overkill and (maybe) a way to upgrade their accuracy with some gold / materials seem a good plus.

[MagnaRagnus]

I think Ballistas are fine. They help defending corners from annoying flanking enemies. In higher quantities(3+) they hit pretty hard. Actually I think they are a bit too strong right now...
In comparison catapults are trash.

[Butler]

Ballistas a great. One ballista is terrible. When you replace all of the walls with ballista, its broken. When you have two lines all upgraded (mounted to see further) and suddenly anyone caught in melee or who makes it to the 'wall' dies.