An hour sounds fast, until you think of multiple hundreds of goblins all working together on that one goal.

You don’t have one Carpenter cutting down the arm of the device over multiple days, you have 30 goblins swarming it and getting it done in 5 minutes.

You don’t have one person nailing a section of the base together, you have 20 goblins putting the entire base together all at once.

You don’t have one Ropemaker creating the sling, but 10 goblins getting it done from both sides at the same time.

You don’t have people doing a thousand different safety tests to make sure it all works, goblins just shove a rock in, and if someone smushes a toe or the weappj breaks apart over their head, they yell a bit and get on with their day.

The humans were attacking a Goblin tribe, so she’s still technically correct.

And even before that, Bethal attacked her tribe when they hadn’t killed any humans in the north.

But, she didn’t know she was even in his territory at that point. Her perception of the humans attacking first was their ambush and gassing of her tribe.

One of the viewpoints from Teriarch basically told us that all mages nowadays use the same basic Message spell, with no form of encryption or anything like that. This makes it easy for anyone in the know to be able to intercept and read those spells.

That means there probably are methods to encrypt or authenticate a Message spell, but no one knows how to do so anymore.

The humans also likely don’t have a convenient, relatively close working example to copy from. Drakes aren’t going to sell siege weapons to humans. It’s also possible other siege weapons made with the help of skills would have components that literally couldn’t be copied without those skills.

Trebuchets are quite easy to build if you know the basic concept, and are willing to put in the effort to test. But trying to come up with them on your own, when you don’t have an example to copy from, would be much harder. Most people would just give up, especially if they were used to relying on skills for nearly everything. It took weeks for Laken’s people to get a working prototype when they were working from probably decent drawings Ryoka made. People used to skills aren’t going to want to waste weeks or months with nothing to show for it.

Adding onto that, the goblins that made the trebuchet were literally the same classes as the humans that made them, Tinkerers. That is exactly the type of thing that class is supposed to do.

Except he didn’t really throw the Antinium under the bus. The plan the Horns came up with was made with Ksmvr advising, who didn’t believe other people knowing about the Antinium entrances to the dungeon would cause any real problems. It’s not like other people will be able to go into the hive to use those entrances.

And the Antinium have been fighting the dungeon for years with virtually no progress. If anything, more adventurers would mean pressure being taken off the Antinium, so they’d have a better chance of actually starting to proceed into the dungeon itself.

Depends somewhat on exactly how thick the wall is. If it’s thin enough, rocks hitting it with enough force could push the rubble far enough away that there isn’t really much of a hill they’d have to traverse over. There’d still be some, sure, but a hill only 3 or 4 feet tall wouldn’t be much of an impediment.

Besides that, one of the biggest factors is also removing high ground where defenders can shoot down from. Clearing a large area of wall where there is much less that can be rained down upon attackers going through the breach is very helpful.