Limited PvP in PoE (The Equal Playing Ground)

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atlimar wrote:

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pneuma wrote:

Fuck yeah, sealed.

Better yet, do drafting by having players teleport to other instances in a ring after they select an item from the chest. Allows for creativity and evens out lucky draws and introduces hate-picking/counter-picking/banning meta-gameplay.

Constructed can fuck off. :)

Drafting is right there in the first post ;) Glad you like it!

D'oh!

The best part of this style of PvP is that the level restriction can be somewhat variable. You can bump the character levels up to 40 or 60 or 90 (or down to 15) and bump the auto-generated gear up (or down) to match.

They can play with the levels to see which have the best variance in classes, which are the most fun, etc.

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Kranyum wrote:

my only problem with this is that you seem to draw a parallel between MgT cards and gear which is very hard to do.
In MtG cards are widely different and specific cards can be very good for some strats
In PoE gear mostly revolves around the same things, the marginal strategy items being very rare.

What I mean is that the beauty of MtG is that cards hold different values for different players as the strategies which employ them are widely different. In PoE if we are talking about Gear, pretty much everyone is looking for the same things.

Even support gems follow the same pattern in PoE so you cannot really "draft" support gems.

A draft like system works only when the items available for draft are holding a relative value to different strategies. In PoE the good items/gems are all way too close to one another for this to be a healthy game mode.

this. I'm not a fan of this.
THis kind of pvp promotes and exploits a lot of vulnerabilities that you cannot or will not have the resource to gear up for.

Perma stun/freeze being so dominant when your flask choice/resistances.

This would rely so heavily on RNG imo leaving you feeling helpless in so many match ups.
In the current meta game, most builds are versatile enough to deal with different all kinds of builds like melee/caster/trapper/archer/hybrid. Most players are versatile enough and have very few vulnerabilities.

Does anybody remember cutthroat? These matches would resemble an image like that. Glacial hammer/heavy strike being so dominant. Then what? Balancing nightmare.

Stun/Freeze/Curse are way too strong in the run of the mill deck.
Most of the matches would be so one sided and uninteresting. Yeah sure, sounds good on paper. The utopian idea of everybody on a level playing field. But the one sidedness or stale matchups would definitely be extremely prevalent.

I am for reducing the cost of multi modding for Low levels and such, but overall I just feel like this is a bad idea after execution. I'm just most of the polished pvpers will not enjoy matches being so one sided and lose interest in it very quickly. I could be wrong tho.

tl:dr if this is what poe pvp turns into. I will probably quit haha.

Problems like bleed/stun/freeze aren't going to be nearly as pervasive as they are with BiS gear, since you won't be able to build specifically around Puncture, or other skills. The skills are inherently designed to be fairly equal, it's only when you start mixing in absurd gear levels that you get serious balancing problems. There also won't regularly be 5 or 6 links available (they could even be disabled, but without a decent way of regenerating mana, I doubt they'd be usable in this type of PvP), and you will be limited in how many skill gems you can pick. Say 5 or 6, so you have to make a meaningful choice between main skill, support gems, traps, and auras/curses.

The problems you bring up are created by the current BiS gear PvP spectacle. They are unlikely to be nearly as relevant in this sort of PvP. If something like perma-freeze Ice Spear, or perma-stun EK/GS is achievable even without gear, then it would be fairly easy to re-balance this.

If Ice Spear becomes the most popular meta, then you will know to look for cold resist on the gear pieces. Since the people you are going to compete against aren't going to have BiS gear, achieving 20-30% resists might be more than enough to mitigate freeze with a decent life pool. These numbers are entirely made up, but it should be easy to balance around this, as the skills are somewhat designed to work evenly in this way. If you end up getting no cold resist gear, but maybe some decent +life stuff, you can pick Purity of Ice as one of your gems. Just throwing out examples here, not saying this is how the meta would turn out.

If skills are so unbalanced that you can't POSSIBLY have a good round of PvP without at least 30-50% in all resists with randomized gear, then, again, this would be easy to re-balance without severely affecting the current BiS PvP fest.

I like the current "Constructed" PvP events, but I also think this could bring a great addition to the table. In its essence, I think the idea is solid. As always, it may require some balancing and careful tweaking for a successful execution.

Yes, someone might have a build that will hard-counter yours, but for a successful Swiss tournament, it's your average result that matters. This will directly create a meta which circles around making builds that can handle a variety of situations, rather than hard countering certain strategies. Though hard counters might become a viable strategy if the meta leans too much in any given direction.

A large part of the fun in these tournaments would also come from seeing what gear you open up and constructing your character for each event, battling it out is kind of just a bonus. Everyone is put on, what in essence is, an even playing field. After that, it's up to your skill & game knowledge to execute the tournament to the best of your ability. If one skill is so good that it hard counters every other tactic, then that's a problem with the skill, not the tournament system itself. There's some RNG/luck involved, but just how much can be balanced. You could be given X amounts of orbs to try to re-roll pieces to further even out variance levels in drops.

Keep in mind, this is just an option for people who haven't been (or don't have the chance to) grind(ing) the game for hundreds, or even thousands, of hours, in order to construct a perfect PvP character. It's an alternative, and it's not meant to replace anything.

without proper gear there are a number of problems that are not as apparent when considering the current balance around actually good items.

Casters without +1 gem items and lvl 2 empowers are next to useless in terms of damage. RNG can't be part of the balance that determines who got gear to cap vs a certain elements. A capped resist char with just 1k hp can take quite a bit of punishment from a caster without corrupted gear.

Stun and freeze from heavy strike and glacial hammer are very strong (kind of like cutthroat races) because most people dont have 1.2k+ life and decent stats to mitigate/avoid the damage.

In order for this idea to play out well (imo) the given gear would need to be well above what you find in 10-15 piety runs. You need to be able to cap resists, have an assortment of corrupted gear, and decently rolled physical and ele weapons. Without decent damage output builds just have next to no chasing and stopping power. It is far too easy to draw a round by just running around. And if a you have the lead and there is a reward at stake there is nothing stopping people from just running around till the match ends. Heck even with the current meta where some of the skills need a nerf it can be very hard to catch people that are just trying to run around.

As mentioned by andkamen, there is a big potential for people running out the clock rather than actually engaging. I've always liked the way that Bloodline Champions solves this. The arena simply gets a shadow that moves in from the edges and forces engagements. Entering the shadow will insta-kill you or tick off HP for example. As more obstacles and LoS opportunities are swallowed up you're left eventually with nothing but to engage the other player. In BC this only happens when the timer actually reaches near the end.

This is certainly a very real problem, but again, it's not a problem with this type of tournament per-se, it's rather a problem with how PvP currently works, and should be addressed separately. It doesn't invalidate the idea of running "limited" PvP tournaments.

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atlimar wrote:

Problems like bleed/stun/freeze aren't going to be nearly as pervasive as they are with BiS gear, since you won't be able to build specifically around Puncture, or other skills. The skills are inherently designed to be fairly equal, it's only when you start mixing in absurd gear levels that you get serious balancing problems. There also won't regularly be 5 or 6 links available (they could even be disabled, but without a decent way of regenerating mana, I doubt they'd be usable in this type of PvP), and you will be limited in how many skill gems you can pick. Say 5 or 6, so you have to make a meaningful choice between main skill, support gems, traps, and auras/curses.

The problems you bring up are created by the current BiS gear PvP spectacle. They are unlikely to be nearly as relevant in this sort of PvP. If something like perma-freeze Ice Spear, or perma-stun EK/GS is achievable even without gear, then it would be fairly easy to re-balance this.

If skills are so unbalanced that you can't POSSIBLY have a good round of PvP without at least 30-50% in all resists with randomized gear, then, again, this would be easy to re-balance without severely affecting the current BiS PvP fest.

no its actually the opposite.
Stun/Curse/Freeze/chill/bleed have always been the biggest threats with the lack of gear.

Its not until you get appropriate amount of Gear (HP) that you start to push these off the table. The freeze threshold goes lower, stun, shock everything. You can use Leo 35% mod combined with other stun avoidance (heart of oak, practical application) that you start to push these problems off. Getting enough Evasion to make Ondars Guile worth it to avoid those pesky bleeds so you dont need as many staunching pots.

Gear creates more balance, I know it may sound silly but it truely does. I don't use a chayula/dream frags because I have tailored my gear to not need it. I don't have to run as many staunching potions because I have enough evasion to evade the arrows in general. I can control spike damage and have a fighting chance to react to whats thrown at me.

We've seen unanimous requests for balance changes, and yet you talk like balancing is so easy. What you're asking for is trying to balance skills based off of not having maximum resistances and reassessing how status ailments are calculated.

Without proper attack speeds, run speeds, gap closers matches will be very very stale.
The Best way to see the representation is in a cutthroat league. And if you were ever a part of it or spectated it you'd know exactly what I'm talking about.

I have to agree with Hegemony here. PvP is all about making your build work in most scenarios. I have to use Eye of Chayula for stun immunity if want to stand a chance against melee or high damage spells, like lightning ball with hugh lightning penetration. I also have to use wanderlust for freeze immunity if I want to be able to play against freezing characters.

With those two items I sacrifice 1000 life but my all roundedness in pvp is many times better. Like Hegemony points out, you can achieve similar results in other ways but it always comes from gear.

Against bleed, you have to have a staunching flask and/or a counter attack that gives you the advantage on the next attack, such as chill and temporal chains. You are dead otherwise.

So, I would propose that in your system it would work like descent champions but you get to pick one item for each slot. These would be pvp tailored items that only existed in that tournament/season. I know this is against the nature of what path of exile is about but I do still think this would be a fun alternative to the current pvp, not a replacement. I should say that I really like the current pvp, especially open, so you know my bias.

The poker buy-in system I really like and I have always wanted it. You also briefly mentioned that you could have tournaments which start when the cap has been filled. This is a great alternative to having scheduled events. In this way we could join tournaments all day

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HegemonyTV wrote:

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Kranyum wrote:

my only problem with this is that you seem to draw a parallel between MgT cards and gear which is very hard to do.
In MtG cards are widely different and specific cards can be very good for some strats
In PoE gear mostly revolves around the same things, the marginal strategy items being very rare.

What I mean is that the beauty of MtG is that cards hold different values for different players as the strategies which employ them are widely different. In PoE if we are talking about Gear, pretty much everyone is looking for the same things.

Even support gems follow the same pattern in PoE so you cannot really "draft" support gems.

A draft like system works only when the items available for draft are holding a relative value to different strategies. In PoE the good items/gems are all way too close to one another for this to be a healthy game mode.

this. I'm not a fan of this.
THis kind of pvp promotes and exploits a lot of vulnerabilities that you cannot or will not have the resource to gear up for.

Perma stun/freeze being so dominant when your flask choice/resistances.

This would rely so heavily on RNG imo leaving you feeling helpless in so many match ups.
In the current meta game, most builds are versatile enough to deal with different all kinds of builds like melee/caster/trapper/archer/hybrid. Most players are versatile enough and have very few vulnerabilities.

Does anybody remember cutthroat? These matches would resemble an image like that. Glacial hammer/heavy strike being so dominant. Then what? Balancing nightmare.

Stun/Freeze/Curse are way too strong in the run of the mill deck.
Most of the matches would be so one sided and uninteresting. Yeah sure, sounds good on paper. The utopian idea of everybody on a level playing field. But the one sidedness or stale matchups would definitely be extremely prevalent.

I am for reducing the cost of multi modding for Low levels and such, but overall I just feel like this is a bad idea after execution. I'm just most of the polished pvpers will not enjoy matches being so one sided and lose interest in it very quickly. I could be wrong tho.

tl:dr if this is what poe pvp turns into. I will probably quit haha.

I've been saying flask's as GGG's primary resource to deal with ailments is pretty crappy since day 1. We need item equivalents that are actually semi useful, Diablo2 did this perfectly. You can't have all your mitigation reliant on flasks, they are easily drained by smart players and combinations of repeat bleed,freeze/chill,cursing,shocking one after another does this pretty quick. You can start matches and simply fuck with the opponent with punctures and repeat cursing as you kite them into flask starvation. After that you're sitting in a pretty dominant position. The new flask mechanics were welcomed but we're still in need of good items as another source. We need more Dream fragments,Chayula's. Rings and amulets make the most sense. The new uniques weren't bad but they are obviously targeted at LLD more so then anything.