PvP?

[Gripphon1]

Perhaps my luck streak was diminished, as most PvP i've done was never very intense. It was all about who could teleport and get their hit first, sometimes stunlock.

There are still people among more regular PvP crew who think pvp is all about teleporting in and stunlock opponent. Some say diablo pvp is only teleporting and no strategy and skill at all. Some say gear is everything, other say they like pvp where they can 1 shot opponent and so on. There are many views on what pvp is and how to describe it. At first I also shared most of those views. I had no idea how to defend against windy telestomp, I considered it to be game over. Or fireball sorc telestomp. Or how the hell to battle against trapper, chick has ridiculous traps and free stun, she just kills you without trying etc. Eventually players learn to play the game and learn to counter some of those things. People learn how to battle windy, how to render trappers traps miss you most of the time, how they approach those crazy damage bowazons and so on. It takes time to get a bit deeper into pvp to learn those things though, and most players are simply not willing to play enough to learn it. They get telestomped 20 times by someone and call it a gg for all time thinking diablo pvp is all about crazy teleporting around and randomly killing people with high bursts of damage.

PvP imo, needs to be more balanced. Magic damage needs a huge penalty, absorb does as well. It would also be nice had they introduced the unused "arena" mode.

Only way to counter magic damage is to have character with high hp. Beta cta + 1.07 shako and trust me, necro or hammerdin won't have so much free lunch in you anymore. As for absorb, this is why we have rules in pvp. It is not allowed to get above 85 maximum resistance or 20% absorb (with exception of dual raven) because it counters elemental characters a freaking ton. Most people play with no absorb at all now, and even when they put that 20% absorb, it doesn't feel OP, you can still battle them normally. We have some items banned because they are too strong. With our PvP rules you won't get into game with fireball sorc and wonder do you even do damage because others absorbed the hell out of you. Even with maximum absorb allowed fireball sorc can dish ~550 damage per fireball which is enough to kill things around. Trapper also don't mind someone using Wisp. On battlenet they use both Wisp and Thundergods against her. I tried to find a solid trapper vs bvc video but couldn't because everyone has so much absorb that her traps hardly do damage and they just hunt her down in her own trapfield. And what is player supposed to learn from all that or even have fun playing is beyond me. I would simply refuse to battle someone who absorbs me that much to the point he can ignore my 10k traps. Only way to play that match is to lay traps down and run around in circles. Super boring.

Here you can't do that, she will squash you if you just head on blindly into 5 traps. It requires strategy to beat her even with Wisp. This is why we made rules such as they are, to balance playing field.

I know the idea of "hacked duels" won't get support on here, but I figured it was worth throwing out.

It won't be accepted because people around here don't like cheating, and secondly PvP-ers around here actually enjoy building their characters and putting them to use instead of just creating them in some program. It completely lacks any sort of achievement or accomplishment. It is like a difference between when someone else writes essay for you and you just turn it over or if you write it yourself, hitting all the "breakpoints" and stuff yourself. Not even comparable. The playing part, however, is the same, but that's completely beside the point what PvP really is around here on this forum. It is character building + playing, not just playing.

 

[Gripphon1]

As for some match balances, diablo is not balanced. Many matches are balanced to some point, but some are simply not and players learned to accept that. If you are BvC, you learn you will have hard time battling many characters and you learn you are at great disadvantage against characters like hammerdin or any sort of bonenec. You can still beat them, but most of the time they will just take you down. Or as bowazon you have to accept that max block windy will hunt you down until you die. Or if you play orb sorc you will have to accept it takes like 200 orbs to kill pretty much anyone, and you also won't even touch windy most of the time. As a random shapeshifter you must accept the fact you are pretty much food out there. And so on... But, higher tier characters are pretty balanced and matches are nicely playable assuming similar playing skill and similar wealth of gear.

 

[Pyrohemia1]

PvP is unbalanced, but there are two distinct breakpoints at which the top tier can be created.

In terms of damage types, from most to least mitigable, there are magic, elemental, and physical.
In terms of attack types there are ranged and melee. Ranged has a dramatic advantage over melee due to safety during execution of casting, shooting, or throwing.

One can try (and fail) to balance around ranged magic damage by minimizing absorb of elemental damage. This makes all melee characters tier two or lower.

Alternatively, one could try and balance around top tier melee characters: rabies, BvC, chargers, smiters, and WW sins. This requires allowing ranged elemental magic to be absorbed significantly. Physical damage has a 75% followed by 50% penalty to 87.5%, but elemental attacks generally have much higher numerical damage values, and have range mitigating close-combat risk.

I personally enjoy playing both elemental, ranged, and melee characters, and think that elemental damage is overpowered unless significant absorb is used. I think that magic damage on hammers is overpowered, and the fact that both hammer fields and bone spirits do most of their damage while invisible is enough justification by itself to remove those skills from formal dueling etiquette. Playing them in free-for-alls is fine, and bone necros aren't even that great without a skilled pilot, but losing life to invisible projectiles in a 1v1 duel is distasteful. Blizzard is similar when it becomes invisible, but that is much more rare in 1v1 duels.

I similarly dislike charge-induced desynch, and control loss due to mindblast stun. If traps are bad due to absorb then one can ride out the stun and make further attempts. I thoroughly reject the idea that traps deserve to be good more than the ensemble of melee or physical damage characters.

Ban invisible skills (I know many things can go invisible, but I'm talking about skills that linger and frequently go invisible), mind blast, high level leap, charge spamming (can only be used as a combat skill rather than a movement skill), having more than one minion or minion recasting, buffing of energy shield from stash, all slow%, and I think that dueling would be much more directly interactive and hence rewarding of skill and control during play.

The build I dislike most following hammerdins is wind druid telestomping, but I see nothing inherently broken about their skills. They are merely solid, even if I dislike their playstyle.

I don't think it's possible to fix the fact that dueling only feels crisp when ones ping is ~50ms or lower. It's funny that a BvC can go from having a positive matchup across the entire field on ones own host to a massive underdog and a lesson in frustration from whirling in place and failing to teleport with ~150ms ping.