Ok, I wanted to comment under the update post, but that has been closed, and then I commented this on the previous hotfix, but that got also closed 2 hours ago, so here we go AGAIN. I want to second several players´ comments about how broken raiding is right now because of bombs being practically half cheaper (not quite ofc, but steelfire has always been by far the biggest issue with bomb farming, and that has been halved), AND all doors and gates having half the hp.
So first off, I think it is good that doors and gates have significantly less hp than the rest of the building blocks - doors and gates have always historically been the weak points of any fortresses and castles, or any defensive structures, really, and it makes sense from a gameplay perspective as well, because I don´t think it is good if players have barely any incentive to go through the weak points and instead bomb the crap out of several meters thick walls, potentially taking down a large portion of the base in the process. It definitely should be possible to destroy any structures, but at the same time, if those structures are T3 foundations, walls, pillars etc., it should be a rather heavy investment to take them down compared to just blowing up the doors. It should never be easy to more or less wipe/level a large T3 base, because then, what is the damn point of even playing the game as was clearly intended? Building large, cool castles has worked well up until now - as it should - but I do not think it will work very well anymore. Now I can solo farm enough dragonpowder in a single day to raid ANY base on my server, and we got some ginormous bases here. Which is some BS and totally unbalanced.
I believe raiding/defending was fairly balanced as it was, now raiding is just way overpowered. Keep in mind that the advantage should always by default be with the defender, not the attacker, because that has always been the case and is really the only reason castles were ever built. If castles could be raided as easily as they are in this game (especially via offline raiding), they would never have been built, ever, because that just would not be even remotely worth the investment. Do not let this happen to CE. I suspect large bases will start disappearing out of fear of being cheaply offline raided by any noob who so wishes, and will be replaced by low-investment small bases that are well hidden (further increasing the payoff of exploiting and cheating by undermeshing and similar techniques).
If the attacker needs to invest more to destroy a base than the defender did to make it, that actually makes sense and is good for the game. If you spend 300+ hours farming and building a base on official PvP as I have, you do not want some ■■■■■■■■ to come with a 1000 relatively easily farmed bombs and blow your base to oblivion just for the lols or because you killed them that one time. Raiding was perfectly fine the way it was pre-update, and now it is simply broken.
So what do I suggest? Well, either, like others have suggested, introduce some kind of offline-raiding protection/nerf, since offline raiding is lame and stupid anyway, yet is predominantly what is currently done. Then maybe this change to bombs and doors can actually be acceptable. For example, as suggested, make raiding any structures owned by a player/clan 75% dmg resistant 30 minutes after the last person from that clan has disconnected. That should prompt players to defend themselves if attacked online, while making it very inefficient for decent PvP players to offline raid compared to online raiding.
Or, just make bombs cost more again and give doors a bit of hp back. I would say 100 dragonpowder per bomb as was before and 80% of the original door/gate health would be reasonable.
But seriously, the only way to stay somewhat safe now might be to farm a crapton of bombs before someone else does, and bomb everyone who might possibly be a threat from the server… and then keep doing that every couple of days, because of fear of revenge. This is not how I want to play this game, and this is not how I want to feel playing this game. If raiding stays vastly superior to building up defences, I will likely quit the game sooner or later, because especially as a solo player, I do not stand a chance to really defend myself, regardless of how many defences I put up, just because I cannot be online constantly.
EDIT: Also also, I wanted to note that I have not spammed doors and gates everywhere I possibly could in my base. But that will change now, because that is the only way I can feel at least a bit safe, so Imma have to go through a billion doors to get out of base. Which is going to suck, but worse even, it is going to look like garbage and not feel like a real castle anymore. I guess a lot of players would stack as many doors as possible after one another (as is commonly done in Rust, where PvP gets even way more brutal and ruthless, and requires a lot of efficiency on the side of both the attackers and the defenders), but I simply felt I could do without it. Not anymore though. So thanks for ruining my castle´s aesthetic, and further encouraging this idiotic door spam way of building (or even walling off any access to the base each time one goes offline, which is going to be absolute cancer for everyone involved, gg), Funcom.
