Ideal PvP Scene?

Could someone please describe their ideal PvP environment for Path of Exile?

I mean, I get it folks - the shit's broken. I'm just not sure we've quite described what it is that we'd like the Sarn Arena or 1v1 queues to look like.

Picture this: You walk into the Arena and there's 2 dudes clubbing each other repeatedly, kiting here and there to smash potions and cast defensive war cries, coming back for round 2, rinse & repeat and then one marauder dies and a victor is crowned.

Picture this: 2 casters engage in an a battle of putting up defensive spells and throwing projectile spells at each other, chipping away at the opponent's ES pool, retreating to recharge when necessary, casting some minions as meat shields here and there etc., coming in for round 2, rinse & repeat and then one caster gets in that lucky fireball that knock the other caster flat.

So erm.......

Is this what we're looking for????


I'd like someone to kindly provide some constructive input on this and how you think the game and damage scaling would have to be adjusted, so that we can put the crying in the forums to rest about explosive arrow, zerphi's scoldsbreath, LA, mines, Aegis, your cousin etc. being "too powerful".

Something tells me the elephant in the room is being ignored. The game has huge PvE content designed to keep you grinding till you get uber powerful gear and you're now capable of tackling bosses that have millions in terms of life pool and quite unforgiving damage levels.


One personal experience I'd like to share: The main reason I spent countless hours to put together a fine-tuned flameblaster that can hold its own in most match ups to begin with, is the very thing I see people complain about: "Explosive Arrow is broken!!! :'''(".


Who's experienced that feeling of first getting into PvP and meeting someone with a much much superior PvP build that totally trashed you? And then spending a bunch of hours to put together a stronger build to theirs so you could dish out that long awaited revenge?

I think we need to ask ourselves what motivates us hardcore PvP fans to keep coming up with crazy shit to test in the arena. If you're not motivated by beating other "OP" builds, then what does motivate you?

Just my 2 cents. Honestly, the thing that keeps me coming back for more is the hope that someone made some new ungodly broken OP build, so I can figure out how to one-up them and dumpster their ass out into oblivion.

Idk bout you?



TL;dr: Dafuq do you cry-babies want anyways?

"

Picture this: You walk into the Arena and there's 2 dudes clubbing each other repeatedly, kiting here and there to smash potions and cast defensive war cries, coming back for round 2, rinse & repeat and then one marauder dies and a victor is crowned.

Picture this: 2 casters engage in an a battle of putting up defensive spells and throwing projectile spells at each other, chipping away at the opponent's ES pool, retreating to recharge when necessary, casting some minions as meat shields here and there etc., coming in for round 2, rinse & repeat and then one caster gets in that lucky fireball that knock the other caster flat.

So erm.......

Is this what we're looking for????

Yes

I would actually enjoy those much more than this actual meta. You know taking actual decisions and use more than 1 button to win. Having fights lasting more than 0.2sec without the need of broken shit like zerphi or 100% block.

"

Gay_Lord wrote:

Picture this: You walk into the Arena and there's 2 dudes... ...each other repeatedly... ...to smash ...then one marauder is cr0wned

Is this what we're looking for??

[white noise]

TL;dr: Dafuq do you cry-babies want anyways?

GGG delivered on spiders with zana mod so the next step is compeditive cosplaying, I have some ideas in mind but it hinges on if Rlowe will hold round cards and if we have enough funds to hire prostitutes.

A good and a fair question!

In short, the environment in season 2 for LLD was actually quite fun and close to ideal even. Apart from a few things the damage caused actually did stick and 1shotting almost didnt even exist. Damage sticking back then was mostly because all the characters were life-based and every use of a potion had a purpose. You can go watch some vods of lld 3v3s as an example. Season 2 also had a lot of team blitz events, which were the crowd favourite for a reason because balance plays a smaller role when there are more players in the field (you make a mistake, you get focused).

Currently damage doesn't stick in LLD anymore because 1shotting is so easy with a few broken things (most of these things actually did exist earlier too though). In HLD this is also true as the damage is even more insane and 1shotting is actually the only way to play at the moment.

On top of the above, HLD has another problem too though because ES builds exist there. This means that the damage doesn't stick because of the regeneration mechanics of ES. ES alone makes everything very black and white because you either die in one clash or you will never die. Pathfinder creates another similar issue since the ascendancy class gives you unlimited potions which makes the life characters work similarly to ES characters in the sense that you can't die unless you get pummeled down in 1 short clash.

Now how to create a similar environment to HLD that existed during season 2 in LLD? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that pvp wont be that fun if the chip damage you cause doesn't matter at all. This could be worked around by making potions actually matter (make them cost more or make replenishing them harder in pvp) and making some sort of a drawback for ES (a quick idea: your es may start recharging only 2 times in a single round).

All in all, balancing life/es/damage/recharge in a way that a game of 1v1 would be truly fun and mechanically challenging, is actually quite complicated. It is much harder to balance 1v1 than 3v3 as all the problems are intensified in a 1v1 scenario because lets face it, you cant really fuck up things in 1v1 duel gameplay-wise. In team scenarios the outcome is more easily determined by the actions of the players instead of their characters whereas in 1v1s the guy who has the better build/items often wins.

Another way to make things fun even in the current meta is the blitz format. It allows life characters to use the same potions as CI chars do because everything depends on that 1 short clash. Even in season 2 LLD the team blitzes were quite often decided by some idiot engaging the enemy in a dumb fashion. This would probably hold true to an extent even in the current HLD meta.

summary/tldr: Force/create team (blitz) events, make potions matter by making them harder to replenish, reduce the extremities in damage and defense (1shots, zerphi, aegis) by fixing the broken things and somehow create a drawback for ES in pvp

As a side note, the reason I'm still sticking around is despite all the flaws in the game, I still find poe a fascinating world where you have to understand interactions and synergies between many different mechanics before you can even start to fathom how it could work in different scenarios against other complex combinations. In general I enjoy numerical combinations you can't easily explain through a calculator.

Just off the top off my head:

No 1shots, period. Sorry flameblast.

Fix all skills t value interaction

Fix AoE overlap FINALLY

Cap on Ele pen

Everyone is killable - not just by 1shots. Life/ES gain is within reason. es regen "tanks" need addressing

No zerphi's

Cwdt/cws damage greatly reduced - players must deal most of their damage with manually cast skills

Pathfinder flask gain/flask bonuses does not function in pvp

Pathfinder status immunity addressed - either down to 50% so some other actual tree/gear investment is needed or on a rolling 5sec timer

Auras do not to be recast so lowlife can finally play

i share same feelings with jorge. i dont have rules to be honest like, no zerphi, no EA, no LA no one shot(i admit that its getting too much lately) etc.

I like to struggle with what i have to defeat something totally broken and popular with that i built by using less known, less developed, kinda less broken elements of the game.

when i see zerphi builds rising, it give me joy and a reason to min max my build to one be able to one shot them yet get not one shotted by them at the same time. i actually enjoyed that im investing brain work to be able to deal with something new, something broken.

when i joined pvp and saw EA's state, that made me struggle to find a way to deal with it.eventually before frost wall nerfs we had LA builds which can counter EA easily. still, LA does great job vs LA since it works like EA too (but blockable - requires more gearing bla bla yaddi yadda)

he also explained what people expect very well, the first 2 paragraphs are what people are expecting and dreaming of poe pvp, it makes sense to me, i cant perfectly understand it and appreciate that idea but i like struggling with what i have in my mind to broken stuff too. the first "pvp style" if we have it, trust me we'll find new stuff to complain about. this is never ending loop.

(not as broken as before nerf spark though, still i was able to kill them - even fyndel's spark, after lots of min-maxing to be able to deal with his variant of course)

"

Ahfack wrote:

Just off the top off my head:

No 1shots, period. Sorry flameblast.

Fix all skills t value interaction

Fix AoE overlap FINALLY

Cap on Ele pen

Everyone is killable - not just by 1shots. Life/ES gain is within reason. es regen "tanks" need addressing

No zerphi's

Cwdt/cws damage greatly reduced - players must deal most of their damage with manually cast skills

Pathfinder flask gain/flask bonuses does not function in pvp

Pathfinder status immunity addressed - either down to 50% so some other actual tree/gear investment is needed or on a rolling 5sec timer

Auras do not to be recast so lowlife can finally play

TO be fair with ranged a cap to life regen should also be put in place. 400/sec is I think good enough to regen but not too strong to just leap away and get all life back in 1 sec.

Yeah, I think my guy is around 600. 400ish if that's the agreed amount would be fine in my eyes.

"

Ahfack wrote:

Just off the top off my head:

No 1shots, period. Sorry flameblast.

Fix all skills t value interaction

Fix AoE overlap FINALLY

Cap on Ele pen

Everyone is killable - not just by 1shots. Life/ES gain is within reason. es regen "tanks" need addressing

No zerphi's

Cwdt/cws damage greatly reduced - players must deal most of their damage with manually cast skills

Pathfinder flask gain/flask bonuses does not function in pvp

Pathfinder status immunity addressed - either down to 50% so some other actual tree/gear investment is needed or on a rolling 5sec timer

Auras do not to be recast so lowlife can finally play

So between this and what Lapiz brought up, do you think that would fix PvP to be a little more tolerable?

To be honest, I don't mind needing to hit something 6-10 times with a flameblast if that's what would be considered fair. I don't feel the skill was really ever under scrutiny from the Nerf Watch Squad till recently, where it became evident that you can make the skill PvP viable with enough cast speed and some practice aiming the blasts. Most PvE blasters that come into the arena are laughingly easy to dodge, seeing as they're geared for totems or very slow blast stacking.

Lapiz can flameblast one-shot my 16k es Guardian with 81% fire res

And yeah, pvp would be much more tolerable :D