There are two main problems with the whole “balls” thing:
1. Most of the time when trying to pick up a ball there is the prompt “press to pick up” but it doesn’t register when pressing, and some times even if the blue circle for the pick up action is filled, it just doesn’t pick it up, forcing you to re-do the hold to pick up thing, with the same problems. All of this while being with so little time and being shot by a lot of adds.
2. It can happen, most of the times while in the second round, that the ball just bounces on the forge, don’t know if it’s a [i]feature[/i] or actually a bug that wastes your time and can possibly screw the run.
TL; DR picking up the ball is incosistent, and when you manage to pick it up and throw it to the forge sometimes it bounces on it.