Name your 3 most broken things in PvP

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I hope they never give Icestorm an MTX, then.

Also it sucks that cold casters finally get something kinda cool and now it's probably gonna be nerfed hard :( Then again, I can take down players with my vortex here and there, and it's only 18/0, so...

Once they'll get rid of cast of crit they'll have more freedom to design some cool spammable spell without breaking the game and we may have some new stuff on our way. Sadly Lightning will get gimped forever by Mjolner.

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Hi Head_Less,

Thanks for your message and sorry for the delayed response. I've asked the other designers about Inevitable Judgement and we agree it's worth looking at from a balance standpoint.

Elemental reflection gear probably wouldn't be a good solution to this problem, as the amount we'd have to give out to counter Inevitable Judgement would likely result in other issues. A less dangerous alternative might be a weaker version of the node that's exclusive to PvP, but we've yet to come to a final decision.

Feel free to let me know if you have any further questions or concerns.

Best regards,
Dan

Meh, I had a similar response 5 months ago on the exact same subject and nothing was really done except for Sparks and it was mostly PvE related.

As for elemental reflective gear, that's an horrible idea as if it would come to exist one day, every single person would play trappers.

My top 3:

1) the pvp damage reduction formula

Pvp damage reduction is needed because players can do way too much damage. I think ggg is correct that a linear reduction would be bad because of the huge disparity in dps numbers, but I suspect that the current implementation is worse than a linear reduction would have been.

The pvp damage formula benefits "shotgunning" skills, where the actual number of hits per second has no/less relation with the T value anymore. It seems like only skills that exploit this are still viable in pvp: ice storm, fire storm, glacial cascade, explosive arrow/lightning arrow wall spam, blast rain, bladefall, blade vortex, vortex, coc/mjolner, mines/traps, tempest shield, cws/cwdt & exploding skulls. I can't remember the last time I saw a budget hld pvp build that didn't revolve around one of the skills on this list.

Tornado shot and molten strike also hit many times per execution. But those received -% nerfs long ago because they proved too good.


My ideal solution: base the T value of a hit on the interval* from that hit to the previous hit, irrelevant of what skill was used to deal the damage.
One single formula for everything. Then balance the skills that become to dominant (flicker strike would be back for instance) by linear nerfs.

* edit: a moving average would have to be used, based on the number of hits in a fixed interval, or the time needed to hit a fixed number of times. Only using the interval between the last 2 hits, would be very exploitable.


Example: Two coc dischargers with tempest shield attacking eachother:
The hit from cyclone, the discharges, the hits from blade vortex, the reflect hits from tempest shield, ... All of those make up the combined dps, lump them all together by doing the T value calculation based on the hits landing on the defender. This would reduce the damage in the same manner as the damage of for example heavy strike would have gotten reduced.

As opposed to how it is now: the cyclone gets it's damage reduced in the same way as heavy strike, while with coc discharge+vortex+tempest shield there is absolutely no relation anymore between the T value and the actual number of hits per second.


2) The "no, your toolset does not work" tools
It's basically the same issue as with map mods, where certain mods don't make a map harder to do for specific builds, they make it impossible. In pvp the same all or nothing design from ggg makes most matches onesided.

A build that has heavily invested into block or dodge, fighting an explosive arrow wall spammer, well that's a build with a lot of wasted points and gear choices. A build relying on life leech as active defence, fighting a bloodless character, again wasted stats. The list goes on.

This leads to cookiecuttering, where powerplayers will flock to the same few skills.
Offensive skills that ignore the opponents defensive toolset as much as possible. Defensive skills that make the offensive toolsets of the expected opponents unusable.
Once there are only players left using offensive skills that ignore defensive toolsets, the only defense that matters is stacking hitpoints+regen.


3) Chaos damage in tempory league pvp
This might be a bit of a pet peeve of me: since warbands, if you want to pvp in tempory leagues, you have to be able to deal with chaos damage. But most players are playing life based builds, and most of those have -60% chaos resistance. If pvp is to become more popular, it needs to be accessible for more kinds of builds. The same is true for -resist stacking debuffs. I find EE multicurse to be worse in temp league than in standard, since overcapping is much harder.

you summed up everything very well kalli, well done. also i really liked your suggestion for new pvp damage formula

Yeah great job man!

Worth sending to the devs I think.

1.herald of ice
2.herald of ash
3.flame totem

these 3 are the broken things in pvp