~ Ultimate PvP balance thread ~ HLD & LLD

Namelocking plays a huge part into winning a pvp match, you can either lose or win the game due to a good or bad namelock. There are currently 1 skill that is capable of breaking namelocks and it is blink arrow, i think this gives them a strong advantage over others and each class should have its own type of namelock break. Lightning warp should break namelocks if bink arrow can, and one should be implemented for melee as well. This is mandatory in order to not give anyone a bigger advantage over others.

I feel this subject has to be brought because some builds have a lot more utilities than others when it comes to moving around the arena efficiently. I'am going to talk about problematic ones obviously.

Melee builds:

Whirling blades. It is way too fast, can literally be used on any type of build linked to increased attack speed support and will outspeed all the other movement skills with minimal investments. Some builds are impossible to catch if they start to just whirling blade around the arena, it is easier for bow builds due to projectile speed but extremely hard for a caster. It should be reduced for pvp.

Spell casters:

Lightning warp. It is too slow, many casters are currently switching to a dagger just to be able to use WB. I think this completely defeats the purpose of each build type having their own perks. I should not be forced to use a melee skill in order to move faster than my casted invested skill, WB 2L outspeeds my XXX% increased cast speed and 3L LW as a caster.
It needs to be increased.

A crit build should have more damage than a 2h build but have less defenses.

IMO, crits should remain the strongest damage output in pvp, but not to extreme measures like some builds have at the moment.

The two extremes went too far on each bridge, defense oriented builds have too much defenses and are impossible to kill, DPS oriented builds have too much damage.

And some builds ''overpowered'' have both combined, and i'm targetting EA here, too much defenses paired with too much damage will ofcourse beat any build out there.

Take another exemple with two players, rupenus with his crit LA can almost 1 shot my 9k es, which is an exemple of dealing too much damage at once.

Aegis tank builds are literally impossible to kill with their defenses, rumi flask, granites, all of these provide insane boosts to aegis and these builds are only prone to dying versus hard hitting crits. For the most part block is balanced in itself right now, the problems lies within the legacy aegis shield and the use of broken flasks, block isnt the problem here because we cant stack it as much, flasks and the item is the problem.


These tanky builds are almost impossible to kill with current spell,. The only way for me to bypass so much defenses is by either using flameblast or molten shell ( again here why am i forced to use 1 shot mechanics to defeat these ? ) which imo should not be the only answer, and then again flameblast is very easy to move away from. The only type of builds that can defeat these quickly is 1-2 shot mechanic builds, bow is best suited for this.

People with 2h rt have the same problem, rounded dps/tank builds being uncapable of killing full immortal builds, it's totally understandable since the opponent has not enough dmg to kill him, but also they dont have enough damage to go tru the opponents defenses. Who's at fault here ? the 2h rt not dealing enough damage or the immortal having one perk at extreme levels ? The immortal build is at fault and his defenses should be decreased. The immortal should be the one who's punished for trying to build as a onesided mind state ( all def no dps ), not the rounded build.

1-2 shot builds should not be the only answer to kill tanky builds, defenses are too strong while some offenses are too powerfull, the two has to be balanced out with the ones that are more '' rounded '' between the two.

The meta is not hard to understand atm, it's either all DPS or all DEF. Rounded builds are the ones being punished more than these two, this needs to change and rounded builds should be much better than builds that maximizes on only one perk.

Immortal +- < rounded builds ( most matches ends in draw and the rounded build is incapable of killing the immortal, which is terrible )

Immortal < full dps ( the immortal sees his defenses completely bypassed from 1-2 shots, which is again terrible )

rounded build < full dps ( the rounded build would be better off as full dps against this one since the medium investment into defenses from the rounded build serves completely no purpose, so who has the advantage ? the full dps build. )

As a conclusion, who's at fault ? Builds that focus on only one perk and that is capable of boosting it to extreme levels.

Projectile speed is way too efficient way stacked in PvP, some builds can utilize high projectile speed numbers to make use of unbalanced mechanics.

There are two type of builds that can utilize this mechanic to have an unfair advantage.

Bows: If someone has a lot of projectile speed, you can offscreen people in sarn arena. Killing players who arent even in your screen and the projectils go so fast you cannot see anything or it becomes invisible after some distance. You can literally kill players when they are not even in your screen, i think this is unacceptable because someone can utilize the map in order to aim where you are and you arent going to be able to do anything against such range because you simply dont know what they are doing and wont be able to see it coming.

Spark: This is an issue with projectile speed right now, the duration of sparks is too long and paired with a lot of projectile speed you can literally flood 1v1s arena to the point where there is absolutely nowhere to go in order to stay in a safe position. The projectiles go so fast that it only takes a few casts to get an arena flooded and there is nothing to do against that. In sarn arena, the sparks can become invisible at some point because they are going too far, you arent seeing anything and you're getting damaged from invisble projectiles.

Projectile speed should be capped in PvP to remove the ability for bows to be able to utilize offscreen as an unfair advantage. It would limit the flood issue of spark too and make it more manageable, spark duration should be somewhat lowered as well.

Crit is among's pvp strongest perk in order to do damage, it can be utilized to boost the damage of almost any builds to extreme levels and sometimes achieve 1 shot damage potential. However people tend to generalize crit too much and want it reduced the wrong way. There are different types of crit specs, physical crit, elemental crit and dot crit.


Caster elemental crit: caster elemental crit is not the problem, if we look at current spell's state the majority of them are currently weak and you can hardly get more than 500% on most casters. Some spells need crit in order to do damage, and there are plenty ways to reduce dmg taken. Nerfing the crit too much for casters would make it impossible for them to kill tanky builds and top ones, i even have a problem killing them with firestorm and it's one of the strongest spells atm, especially aegis tank builds or high regen ones. In the current meta, i dont think there is any self casted spell beside flameblast that can two shot a good build right now, there are exceptions of course like very squishy builds at full dps, but we cant base ourself on that. Now if we take a look at a spell like arc for exemple, which used to deal too high damage with crit. Arc got nerfed some time ago and it now deals reasonable damage a step before being too weak, you need atleast 3-4 arcs with crit to kill a good build now, and even more when facing a really tanky one. If we look at fireball, considering how hard it is to hit with this skill now and it cant even shotgun, it takes many fireball hits in a row with crit to kill someone, even worse since most of the time you will be missing the target.

Casters also have generally low critical chance, people dont realize this but most of us have between the 30-45% chance mark, where as bow and melee can get so much more. Because of that, crits on casters need to hit hard because there are less chances to proc it. Hard hitting crit should be part of why casters are strong and its imo the nature of how spells are in most games.

There are a few broken things reguarding crit on casters though, which are quite easy to point out by most of us. Tempest shield and cwdt spells.

Tempest shield: The thing with this skill is that it stacks very well with crit and block, the more block you have, the more hits youre going to get in via how much APS or CPS your enemy has, if someone is using cyclone for exemple, he is going to eat a lot of damage due to the APS. I would reduce the lightning dmg dealt, but without destroying it and it needs to remain effective against fast hitting skills as a counter to them, it needs to have it's own purpose without doing too much damage to people without high speed. However i would not touch the damage effectiveness of this skill, we can link added chaos to it and this serves as a punishment for people who are not capped chaos any % lacking is a +more modifier. I would also reduce the crit % of tempest shield in pvp to make it crit less often. Rumi's concoction remains a problem with tempest shield, but that's not tempest's problem, the flask is at fault.

CWDT spells: I see this the same way i see tempest shield, it needs to have a bigger damage reduction to emphasize main skill using, some builds rely 100% of their cwdt's to beat the opponent and this creates really bad gameplays and boring ones. Considering how many skills you can link to this and how often they will detonate depending on your setup, they do too much damage and especially when paired with crit, make it so there is more pvp damage reduction to cwdt spells.

After fixing the two underlying problems with automated setups and tweaking the spells that are currently underground will make them a lot more balanced, without destroying their crit properties because spells need it.

Bow/projectile/physical/elemental crit: This is a problem in the current meta, these builds generally do more crit damage than most. You can do many crit builds with bow from elemental to physical, if we look at the physical portion of bow crit, its the most damaging crit output of pvp right now and you can easily 2 shot pretty much any build nowadays except really tanky ones. Now the real problem with these is the fact that they have generally way higher speed than most out there and much longer range paired with high arrow speed. Physical crit is unmitigated unlike elemental crit, you can mitigate it via deceiver or the nodes, but you cant mitigate it via talismans, yes ofcourse there is lightning coil but it's not very good and doesnt provide a rounded build for pvp. Immortal call was once a good counter but has been fixed and now no ones uses that. I personally think physical crit bow builds do too much damage, you can literally 1-2 shot others from off the screen and nothing else in the game offers that. You can also achieve more crit multiplier with bow builds and its much easier to get.

Bow builds have a lot of options to choose in term of skills to use, their skills dont rely that much on the type of gem but more on the type of weapon you use, you can literally use any bow skill with harbinger and the damage is going to be there, where as caster scale a lot more via how the gem is balanced damage wise. With a bow you can use puncture which will do the initial hit damage of split arrow for exemple but will also add a dot which will be also increased by crit and it will do insane amount of dot damage, it is countered by flasks and thank god we have them but i still think crit dot dmg is way too high.

They also scale really well with converted damage and still stacking physical %, there are a ton of skills that convert and gems as well, theres a lot more possibilities.

My conclusion:

It's pretty hard for a caster to bypass 500% crit multiplier 45% crit chance, most of the spells at the moment are relatively weak. (As a fact with BiS gear i barely break 500% mark)

It's easy for a bow user to bypass 650% crit multiplier 65% crit chance, most of the bow skills at the moment are relatively strong.

A lot of people might think this is biased due to the fact that i'am playing caster, but that's really how i see things right now.

But what about melee haunt ? I didnt talk about it because i think melee crit is fairly balanced right now, considering how many builds punish them for being close up.

If a builds crit multiplier reachs over 600% multiplier, it enters the dangerous zone, what this means is that much multiplier will certainly lead to a 1 shotting main skill. Since we want to avoid that as much as possible, i think crit multiplier should have a certain cap.

Multiplier could be capped at 550%, this could be a great start and 5 times the damage doesnt soon as bad as builds having 650+. Now for crit chance, since some types get easily get over 75% using a high chance main weapon, crit chance should be capped as well to reduce the amount of crits proced. I think if we cap crit chance to 60% it would be a good start.

If crits are capped, skills that are too strong with crit will get a nerf which is a good thing, but skills that were weak even with crit will need revision of their damage in order to increase it back to make them balanced in pair with the ones that did too much that are now nerfed with the cap. Melee skills that are potent with crit will also need revision if they become too weak.

Applying a slight cap would be a good start for balancing crit, we can then see how it performs and adjust further after by reincreasing it or reducing it even more.

I personally think ''avenger'' ( Recharges 3 charge when a critical strike is taken ) is too strong in pvp. When you look at PvE the flask mod is balanced because monsters will rarely crit and you arent getting charges all the time. But when it comes to pvp, some builds are focusing on critical damage to kill their opponents, and with divination flasks having over 2k life per charge with avenger mod against a crit build it's pretty much a hard counter. If your life is enough you can keep utilizing flasks like you want and its pretty unlimited. Such advantage is very game dedicing because lacking flasks can be dangerous in any matchup, i dont understand why ES builds have no flasks at all when life based builds can regen 2k life instantly nowadays and have unlimited flask charges against a crit build. I personally think the amount of charges gained should be lowered to 1 for pvp not 3.

This is amongs pvp biggest problem right now, the fact that many builds can utilize it to do twice the damage they are capable of doing with their main attacks.

Here is a list of skills that can abuse frostwall to achieve shotgun or aoe explosion effect.

LA : You can have a lvl 1 cwdt fw , The bolts explode behind the wall and if you use LMP with pierce for exemple you're going to be hit by 2-3 arrows in one single hit which is comparable to shotgunning, unnacceptable.

EA : You can have a lvl 1 cwdt fw, the ea stacks will explode on the wall and most of the time the damage is instant due to frostall detonating too much with low cwdts.

AB : Overlap effect aoe shotgun when having cwdt lvl 1 fw, it will shotgun the opponent that has a fw next to him due to the cwdt setup.

Iceshot: Same as LA, when using LMP the bolts will explode in a cone behind the wall, and the fw is ALWAYS cast in front of you when the opponent uses it on cwdt.

It also serves a purpose to anyone in pvp that has it linked to cwdt, it's way too easy to proc and anyone can abuse of it in some way. These builds that i stated all abuse frostwall to achieve 1-2 shot damage potential. Frostwall needs to be disabled for low cwdts setups and needs to become breakable. There might be more builds than can abuse of it, but i stated the main problematic ones.

To extreme measures, frostwall could maybe be disabled for cwdt and only used in self cast.

This is an unintended bug by GGG, sparks will become invisible in a wide arena if you have a lot of projectile speed and duration, it is most seen in sarn arena where you can get hit by sparks without seeing antyhing on the screen.

Refer to my projectile speed cap post for an idea on how to fix this

I think this is a problem with bow builds and can be easily abused especially in sarn arena, some skills provide a ton of projectile speed and if you stack it even more you can kill enemies without even having them on your screen from really far away, which is not fair in my opinion. For exemple in sarn EA arrows are extremely hard to see and we often get killed from nowhere offscreen, the same with LA or puncture. I personally think bow projectile speed should be capped in pvp, this way no one is capable of using offscreen as their advantage. Take for exemple a melee that tries to fight a bow build with more mobility than him and 100 times the range, it's literally impossible to catch the ranger in this case and you take damage without even seeing where the enemy is. There should be really minimal offscreening, that means that bow builds should still be able to SLIGHTLY shoot further than the screen but not too much, right now it is just way overkill and somewhat broken

Here are really simple tweaks that would balance explosive arrow without destroying it.

Make it so they are forced to use BCR gem like before, people dont know but pre 1.3 PVP EA builds had to focus on getting the arrow stacked on the players to kill them since wall per hit damage like wall explosions were not as damaging. The damage scaling of the skill was nowhere what it is now and in 2.0 you can increase the damage of the explosion a lot more which leads to wall explosions being stronger than the player damage explosion. The way EA works is that when you shoot an arrow on someone they have a chance to either block it or dodge it. If the arrow gets blocked there will be no detonation, if it is stacked on the wall the block/dodge mechanic is not rolled and the arrow will detonate.

The way i think we can get explosive arrow balanced further in pair with other skills is make it so the explosion damage can be either blocked or dodged. Atleast people will be able to avoid some damage instead of eating it all in the face. This is pretty similar to old caster shotgun spike damage, you would hit 3-4 hits in a single one which is pretty similar to EA detonating many at the same time. Since they can put BCR gem away it gives them an option to put another powerfull gem unlike others who have to keep a green slot for it and limiting their output. This would tweak ea damage down by removing them a powerfull gem possibility.

I will also share an old idea brought up by an ICU member Dullahan a very long time ago, make it so they have charges to spend. What that means is that you could have a fixed amount of explosive arrows that are spent by shooting and recharged by getting kills or waiting for the cooldown recharge. This way it would lessen the spam factor and give an opportunity for the opponent once the EA character has spent all his explosive arrows to get a few hits in. We all know EA currently is all about right click spamming in every direction and this simple mechanic would fix this issue a lot. It would also not change anything reguarding PVE since you can get kills very easily.

Shotgun mechanics have been removed for caster, it was considered OP back then to be able to shotgun utilizing freezingpulse, fireball and many other ones. There are still a couple skills that were left behind this change and can somehow bypass this mechanic using either frostwall or a lot of aoe. Arctic breath can bypass this change by stacking AOE and if you utilize GMP on objects it will be huge enough to overlap and shotgun which leads to a lot of damage and 1 shot potential. I compared myself the same AOE on fireball and there is absolutely no way for them to overlap, if you then equip AB with the same settup they can overlap and seem to have a much bigger aoe. I think if fireball cant overlap AB should definatively not overlap, this issue should be fixed by decreasing AB's aoe range.

There are currently two bow skills that are able to still shotgun and opens the door to a lot of 1 shot damage outputs. If we look at LA's primary damage when struck on a player the damage is calculated and reduced, however the explosion damage after hitting a frostwall just like EA wall explosion bypasses this and receives no reduction this making the secondary damage extremely strong. Now for some reason when a LA player has a frostwall on you if they shoot at it you will get struck by a comparable to shotgun effect paired with and that secondary effect is not reduced. Considering these builds can crit this is unnaceptable, there are no reasons as of why they should be able to still utilize the shotgun mechanic when fireball which is suposed to be an AOE skill cannot even shotgun anymore, and i'm pretty sure LA crit has more x-y damage than fireball does so this is nonsense. The problem mostly is frostwall, make it so it becomes breakable and reduce the secondary damage of these skills, it is too damaging.

The same mechanics applies when an opponent casts a frostwall on you with cwdt or selfcast. The initial hit will hit the frostwall, lets say they shoot 3 projectiles, the projectiles will explode on the wall and deal aoe damage behind it in a cone like ice shot does. That is secondary damage and does not receive the pvp reduction correctly and it applies the shotgun mechanic in some way.

Refer to this picture showing where the secondary damage is dealt, the initial hit is marked with x's, the cone damage from ice shot and LA is shown with lines.


This is the reason why we get 1 shotted by these bow skill builds, it uses mechanics that has been removed for spells, which was considered OP back then.

I'm almost certain that new released skills like blade vortex do not have a PvP damage calculation as of now, which would explain why they are dealing so much damage right now. Considering this skill can crit and how many times it can hit per second it deals way too much damage. This skill should receive a damage reduction pvp modifier in order to be balanced. Players dont realize that this skill can be used as a secondary output, which means that you dont have to focus on this skill as your main. You can link increased duration to it and spam it before going into a fight and utilizing another main skill while having vortex around you. A skill that can be used as a secondary output should not deal so high damage, a good 30% pvp reduction would be needed.

So i got this idea since it is pretty obvious that 2handers will be falling apart with the upcoming patches since the removal of sword bcr cluster which was really helping the majority of 2h swords to be competitive.

Their damage is considerably lower than other types of two hand wielding items like bows which can crit and have more range paired much with a much easier access to dodge.

I feel like without introducing such nodes they will really be left behind, seeming as they were already struggling against the majority of pvp builds due to being handicaped for being 2h.

The '' reality part '' of this idea is that in truth 2h weapons are heavy, maces and axes technically should have chances to go tru an enemy shield due to how heavy they are and their crushing properties. While sword is a sharp weapon that in reality can easily be used to go around an enemy shield using the sharp tip of it.

This will also lead to having more options when it comes to playing 2h in pvp, one of the most common was 2h rt sword build, and i have seen 2h rt axe build doe pretty well too. With the removal of BCR for sword is decreasing the efficiency of the most common one by a good amount. When you think about maces and staffs which are quite unviable in PVP, i myself once tried a 2h phys staff build and i really felt handicaped compared to others. I dont even wanna think about mace which are quite inexistent.

It's extremely easy and rewarding to use this mechanic, you link cwdt lvl 1 with arctic breath 1/20 paired with LMP or GMP and you can abuse the fact that this will slow down your opponent a lot with minimal investments. Many think this is too strong and myself think it offers too much for what it takes. ANY pvp build can abuse this mechanic and they should do something to atleast limit the beneficial output. I personally think they should apply a cooldown on it so it doesnt trigger on every minimal damage taken, right now it can detonate in many times per second with a lvl 1 cwdt. Or they could make it so it can only be used with a certain lvl cwdt to make it detonate less often. I think the same should be applied to frostwall, the fact that they added a cooldown to it is great, however it can still be abused with a lvl 1 cwdt setup, making it only usable with a higher level cwdt would fix this issue.

I think there needs to be a way to deal with chaos degen especially with the new released poison mechanic. I often find myself getting hit by physical crit damage and even if i kill the enemy it's likely that i will be eating a chaos dot and end up dying few seconds after with no way of dispelling it. If we can dispel burning status, why cant we dispel poison status ? A simple new mod to dispel poison status would be enough. Or a nice new pvp flask that gives chaos resist and dispels the status