keg nerf.

Personally, I like the stalemate-breaker aspect that the kegs present, but I'm afraid I must agree that they are a little too easily deployed.

Consider that there must be strategy deployed to stop a keg from reaching your front defenses in one of the following forms:
1.) Archers or knights equipped with water ammo to stall the keg carrier
2.) Skilled general fort defenses to kill the keg carrier very quickly, since all he has to do is be evasive to get to the wall.
3.) Disposable fortifications out in front of the main defenses to delay the keg carrier's progress and cause the keg to detonate prematurely.
There may be more possible defenses, but that's all my brain can come up with while its swimming in cold medicine.

Now consider that to deploy a keg, there is little or no strategy required. The keg carrier need only wait until either the enemy base is not terribly well defended, or there's a bunch of his own teammates around to act as a distraction. Then, he can run suicidally toward the enemy base, making a halfway decent effort to be evasive of attacks during his approach, then hunker down near the wall until the blast goes off.

So what I am saying is that there is a disproportionate amount of skill required to defend against a keg vs. delivering said keg. At least in my opinion, blocking a keg is somewhat difficult, and delivering one is somewhat easy. Generally speaking, it should be easier to successfully defend than to successfully attack; home field advantage and what-not. That's the point of establishing defenses, after all.

I think that possible changes to correct that imbalance could be a combination of some or all of the following (possibly more, too; feel free to chime in):
1.) Fix the bug that allows people to invisibly attack while carrying the keg, obviously.
2.) Reduce the speed, and possibly jump height, of the character carrying the keg.
3.) Disallow the character carrying the keg from attacking and shielding. This probably should also extend to all classes so that any character holding the keg cannot do their right-click action (like grappling hook). I know this is pretty brutal but would make it essential to have at least one buddy helping you to have any chance of successful delivery.
4.) Change the effect of lit keg destruction to simply be that the keg harmlessly breaks with no detonation.
5.) Make kegs go out when struck so that they must be re-lit and start the countdown anew.
6.) Allow any character that picks up the keg to put it out with spacebar.

I certainly don't think that all of the above suggestions would be necessary, but some combination of them could certainly work.

Many of the suggestions of how to defend against an incoming keg require, in my opinion, an inordinate amount of preparation, camping, and in some cases, straight up clairvoyance to have any good chance of success. Also consider that you could put the keg in the hands of an exceptionally good knight on your team and give him the ability to carry his team even more so than he already does.

This game already suffers from a number of mechanics that render teamwork unnecessary, and in some cases, inferior to a strategy favoring single expert players taking advantage of any number of tricks to take down the enemy team by himself. I have no problem rewarding expert play, but there must be at least some things that require you to rely on your team from time to time to achieve big results, or new players will quickly begin to feel like bystanders and go play something more engaging for them. I think we have already seen a fair amount of this, to be honest.

I know that there are many of you who already feel that this game is the pinnacle of balance and perfection in every respect. I certainly don't agree with that assessment, but you're welcome to that opinion, of course. As usual, I would love to have my mind changed, but you'll have to make good points to do so. Also, before anyone says it, I'd like to go ahead and say that the familiar refrain "it's fine; leave it alone" is not actually a point; please tell me why its fine if you'd like to debate.

 

@Kouji
Consider that sieges are won by wearing down the enemy, and seldom by storming in and blasting out the enemy's defenses in one fell swoop. Now, that obviously applies to real life medieval combat much more than in KAG. Still, the point remains that if your team is holed up in a well made fortification with competent defenders, it should be much harder for me to defeat you than for you to defeat me. My guys are standing out in an open field with little or no cover, while yours are completely protected by the fortification, until you come out to fight my guys at times that you decide are the most advantageous for you. It seems only reasonable that you'd have a distinct advantage.

Now, specifically in regard to the kegs, consider that they are either created at regular slow intervals indefinitely in TTH mode, or purchased with gold, which has no hard limit to the quantity available in CTF mode. Now, the stone walls they are destroying are made from a constrained resource that, sooner or later, will run out. In addition, the hole the keg makes dramatically reduces the strategic advantage of the wall (assuming it even continues to exist), at least until it can be repaired by a builder. In addition, holes like this are generally harder to repair than they were to initially construct, because the enemy team is often pressing hard on the area to make sure they can make the most out of the successful keg blast. So, the builder is likely under way more pressure during the repairs than he was when he was building the wall the first time around.

Don't get me wrong, though. I totally get your point that this game requires one team to eventually beat the other team. It doesn't do anyone any good if the walls are impregnable titanium fortresses of doom. Making it way too hard to assail walls can result in endless stalemates if not done right.

That said, though, it seems to me that once the kegs start rolling out, walls become increasingly trivial obstacles until they're all just totally steamrolled by keg spam, at least in my experience.

One factor that has become increasingly obvious to me is that the siege weaponry is more of a neat gimmick than an indispensable tool for taking fortifications. I think that the reason for this is that they pale in comparison to kegs. Sure, you see people using catapults and ballistae a fair amount, but the vast majority of the games are decided by successfully taking out enemy bases with well placed kegs collapsing them. All that work that was put into putting vehicles into the game is marginalized because another more simple mechanic is simply just better, and doesn't even require any stone, like the catapult.

The short story is that all I'm saying here is that its just a tad bit too easy to swarm the enemy walls and get someone in there with a keg, and suddenly the tide of the battle is turned. I'd like to see successful keg runs have to be earned through good tactics and teamwork, not spamming kegs and walking into a blender 'til it works.

 

hierbo best vet.

yes. This is what I was getting at. Kegs kill teamwork and strategy. catapults should be so much more effective, as it takes knights and builders to maintain the catapults. We need so much more teamwork in kag.

 

I've been toying with the idea that there should be a period of immobility that comes with priming a keg, ending with a planted keg that can only be moved by the enemy team, making it a sort of chokepoint that the team needs to defend; something like a tiny search and destroy minigame within KAG itself.
I also love the idea of kegs being able to be shut off with spacebar, except with a couple changes. I feel that only the opposing team should be able to do so, to prevent griefing. Also, it should not reset the timer on the keg when it is relit, which would add an interesting mechanic, make it more of a risk to send a keg in, and allow a tiny bit of realism (GOD FORBID SOME REALISM IN A VIDEO GAME, IT'S JUST NOT FUN OMFG BAN) because you can't just stick a new fuse in a powderkeg.

 

I thought about that. You can't just cook your keg, because only the opposing team can disable the fuse. Doing that would require a saboteur from the enemy team helping you turn it off when it gets low fused, and with the way that teams work, someone on your team would probably slaughter that guy for the +1.

I like the idea of a smokescreen on reuse, or maybe just an entirely separate smokescreen keg/bomb; I hadn't thought of that. Might be annoying, but I see some real tactical use there, and maybe it could even replace the obnoxious water bomb.

The whole CS gamemode is what I was thinking of, but the idea of having a 2 second defuse time would require a very very early bomb enemy clearing time unless fuse timing was lengthened to match. Not only that, but with 99% of servers having no ticket limit, no one would hesitate to run in and attempt to defuse it, making the keg into something akin to the monkey bomb from COD that lures in enemies and then blows up.

 

I like this. Take an enemy's keg and defuse it real quick, then charge out and "accidentally" drop it. They charge forward like "yeah we got a keg fuck yeah" and then when they activate it... nothing.

Oh man the trolly moments. You'd have people buying kegs, lighting them, then deactivating them a second later just so the enemies can't use them.

But in a way I can see this contributing to griefing. (Ie: I die and respawn at base with 500 coins, buy a bunch of kegs and toss them on the ground, then some guy lights and defuses all of them rendering them useless for others.)

 

Saw this thread a while back and wanted to comment, but I really wanted to get in a game where my team was without kegs and the enemy team did, just to really gauge how it feels being beset by kegs. Just had a game where the enemy team had, among two military supply factories and one or two water ammo factories... twelve demolition factories. I have not the words to describe my reaction.

We were down to our last base by the time they started using kegs. Every time they used a keg, I'd jump the guy and slash it apart. If he lit it, we both died (along with everyone in the vicinity). If he didn't, I'd let them go and jumped off towards the next keg, as another was often close behind. The only time their kegs did any significant good is when they had more kegs than we had people willing to jump on a keg carrier. There were a couple times that people on my team ran from the keg, and it did do some damage. (Mad props to our builders in that game though, they were amazing. Kept right up with the repairs.) After I informed them in team chat that they can break the kegs even through shields though, we took back the second base. And the third. And the fourth.

As far as tweaking kegs goes, I personally think their power and usability is fine. If the opposing team puts up any fight, you really have to smash in with significant force to land the keg. If they see you coming and it's not next to their base, they have a significant advantage in taking you out, due to your reduced speed (and therefore reduced slash distance) and the fact that they really don't have to worry about your shield. They can just dance around until they have a relatively safe slash, at which point it would be trivial for them to keep momentum as the carrier can't bomb, water bomb, or shield bash, which ends up in a broken keg.

I think the main problem with kegs really isn't the kegs themselves. It's people's mindset around them. They see a lit keg and most will stay out of it's blast radius. It ups the ante on any fight, regardless of the skill of the combatants. If you don't take the keg out, stuff goes boom. If anything, I'd say if there were a change it would be some way to highlight to the other team that "HEY YOU HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF THIS ASAP".

I'd be interested to see an attack / defend scenario with all experienced players, one team with keg and one without. I'll try my hand at mapmaking (and if need be modding to disable defense's kegs) if perhaps we could get a bunch of people to agree on a time and throw down.



(...also a couple of times I got to see a dropped, lit keg get hit by an arrow and go flying back into their ranks. It was hilarious and glorious.)

 

^really? did you have a knight at the top of your tower at all times or something?
because you are right, taking out kegs when you are on the top of a tower is easy, but when you are on ground level with the kegger, it is easy for them to slip by.

 

We were on ground level. Eventually the space between our bases became a crater, as you can imagine. Catching a kegger really isn't that hard with their speed penalty. I'll see if I caught a screenshot of our base when I'm back at my desktop.

 

These guys must not have known jack shit about kegging. Most people would just shieldbash their way through and blow up when close. It's not hard to get in, at all.

 

They had their shield up the entire way. Your shield doesn't protect your keg.

 

Not just having your shield up. Shields in KAG are almost useless now. No, I mean actually shieldbashing. You can't get a slash off if you're stunned the entire time, and by the time you get one off, it'll be lit and you'll blow up your own base.

 

Shields are deffinantly not useless, shield bashing IS the shield

 

Compared to Classic, they might as well be made of plastic. There is an almost ridiculously large delay between slashing and shielding, not even to mention that with the advent of extremely mobile and far reaching double slashes, you are almost guaranteed massive damage against you. Shields were not made for hitting people with, they're made for blocking damage. Shield bashing is literally only good for one thing: sending someone flying off of a tower that you're landing on, and it's so much better to just stomp and instakill them. Using bashing in actual close quarters combat against anyone of the tiniest amount of skill will just get you straight up double slashed in the face.

What really limits its usefulness is the looong delay between slashing and shielding. I understand that the devs did that to keep fights quick and mobile, but it makes shields kind of a side note in the knight's arsenal. I use my shield most often for gliding and riding on, because the shield is just a utility tool right now. I'd consider trading in my one handed sword and shield for a greatsword that does double damage or something. I'd probably get a lot more use out of it.

Any damage to a lit keg will make it explode, regardless of source, given enough of it.

 

You didn't read a word I said lol.