No amount of mathcraft would convince anyone and I DO believe we’re talking about Diablo 4 as read in title.
You can not balance that without bans and restrictions, if you’re not okay with that then you’re asking a very troll question for rebuilding a whole new system. Last time I checked Diablo 4 was in pre-alpha state and I do believe they have plenty of time to implement systems.
For instance, you have to ask how an equal stat DH and Barb found each other? Without them being friends, system have to match them through their solo GR clears and plvl brackets. For match to be any balanced system have to decide their damage mitigation bonuses depending on their melee or ranged classes and their plvl-solo clear brackets. That’s new for a casual matchmaking system that randomly put people together to repeat the very same tasks.
On this match up you asked for starters, both parties have to change away their PvE builds (PvP builds use shields, no exception) for more practical uses and introduce more crafted items for PvP. I reckon either some skillrune types would be banned or a new hazard must be introduced with ever growing influence to punish ultimate abilities and standing still. Potential of elemental immunity amulets and banned skillrunes should put things on the line.
Back in the day Diablo 2 made PvP work by banning certain skill uses and community published BM lists for PvP manners. Community published instructions for PvP manners had no impact on PvE portion of the game either. If you’re ridiculing this ideal, then again, do not play PvP.
Balancing doesn’t happen in one day and current system of D3 is not nearly balanced or practical. We all know that. D3 being a failure at PvP is irrelevant to PvP of D4.
It doesn’t have to be serious. PvP is just for having fun. Bans and all sorts of restriction is just a legacy from the Diablo 2 times.
When you’re not up to a challenge, again, do not play PvP. It’s just for having fun and creating community bonds by trades.
Trust me, most of us asking for pvp aren’t asking for it to be forced onto other players (aka pure pvers). We’re just asking for an optional pvp that’s far more fleshed out and/or had more thought put into it than Diablo 3 brawl. Now if we also get some nice pvpve events that are entirely optional and have no mandatory rewards tied to it(so pve players can skip it with no consequences), then that’ll be a great bonus.
Did your name change to Lord Victor all of a sudden? I thought the only thing the same between the two of you was your avatars.
Adding PvP makes that exponentially harder… especially in an ARPG. PvP is generally the easiest to balance when all the characters start out equal, ala Counterstrike, Quake, Halo, etc. ARPGs, on the other hand, thrive on their players’ relative inequality.
No, all I’m saying is that I’ve never, ever played a truly balanced PvP game in my entire life. And I’ve been playing competitive fighting games for 15 years. There’s always tierlists, banlists and people whining about things being broken. In the case of MOBAs there’s even a banning mechanic implemented in the game itself, because it’s simply impossible to have 200 different heroes be balanced against every other possible hero combination. That’s where a principle I learned in software engineering, the “rule of the good enough” applies.
Also, unlike the guy you mentioned, I don’t claim to have a solution on how to make PvP in D4 work. All I can say is that I’ve been having a lot of fun playing ironmans in D2 and the Leoric’s Castle mod has been some of the most fun I’ve had with a video game since the first time in years (which makes me a believer in a dedicated PvP setting rather than just allowing players to duel in the regular mode), and so it saddens me that the only way I can experience this type of content is to go back and play an old game that runs at 25fps.
That’s why I’m proposing to make it a completely separate game mode. Like in Doom 2016 you have campaign and then you have the multiplayer mode that is even made by a different studio. PvP would follow it’s own rule set and would have minimal to no interaction with the regular PvE content. You wouldn’t have to worry about making compromises in PvE because the PvP game would be it’s own thing. To be fair, people who are interested in PvP are probably the type of people who would do iron mans back in D2, create characters with the sole purpose of PvPing.
I don’t know, I have some pretty high level mathcraft spells in my repertoire.
I just stopped by this thread to see what the fuss is about. I understand that PVP needs to be handled well but hopefully the developers will use the lessons learned from D3 to make D4 PVP fun.
If the developers are listening, I made a thread almost 8 years ago with ideas how to balance it! Here is the archived link (from a snapshot of old forums):
If anyone has specific questions for me, you can make a thread in the brawling forum and I’ll read it.
Or they will use Heroes of the Storm balance where Demon Hunter (or ranged class) has pathetic low HP and her multishot is only good at clearing regular monsters, and the HoTS Barb just auto-leap on HoTS DH and delete her less than 2 seconds before you can even use your mobility/defense skill for HoTS DH.
I would just add that, in my opinion, Blizzard game design is awfully typecast and restricted as-is, ever since the brand was elevated to godlike status, to where anything that isn’t a highly standard RTS or RPG has typically struggled to pass pre-production. Sure, recently we got a MTG knockoff, a MOBA knockoff (a spade’s a spade, alright!), and a TF2 knockoff, cool.
But I’m saying two things: One, that Diablo PvP presents the perfect opportunity to “break the mold” as it were, even just a little; and Two, that every game to exist will always have its share of naysayers decrying it as “illegitimate” or “non-viable for competition” so just freaking go for it and maybe something spectacular happens.
I think you need to be in the right circles. I wouldn’t say they are all over but dueling games or tpk games still exist. There are even still dueling tourneys going on. You might just have to check that other site.
I’m not interested in PvP or having it implemented with anything more than slapping a couple Arena’s down and people can go in and mash their faces together in a display of blood and snot.
I’m already seeing people in this thread wanting it to be monitored and ‘balanced’ as if Blizzard could balance a box flat on the floor these days. No, PvP should be tertiary at best in a Diablo game.
Diablo 2, and World of Warcraft are my most played games in terms of hours played. Mostly because of PVP. I grinded gear to get the best so I could PvP better. I honestly don’t super care about balance that much. Look at Diablo 2 PvP. The balance has been all over the place throughout the entire game. Same with Vanilla wow pvp or even TBC. Balance is less important than the classes feeling good. If I have to play a Bowazon to PvP like you did in pre-LOD days, so be it. Or even in later LOD when TPK became big, classes that were otherwise not great 1v1 became crucial in the 4v4 meta and other classes that didn’t bring utility to their team were replaced…
That’s partly why Diablo 2 PvP is a steaming pile of garbage - players had to step in and arbitrate their own rules just to get something out of it. And they take themselves a bit too seriously by presenting glitches or other problems as “mechanics,” as if - for example - it’s a good thing that you can negate certain spells by taking advantage of frame rates.
The same situation would not fly today. D4 PvP would be considered a colossal failure if it were a repeat of D2’s situation.
The classes don’t feel good unless they’re balanced. For example, if a Rogue can kill a Shaman in just a 3-4 second stun lock then it damn well doesn’t feel good to be the Shaman, does it?
Both D2 and D4, have and will have trading so through community bonds it eventually sit through a balance. No matter what you think of, you can’t deny the potential of it when formula is right. I’m not talking about stars aligning once in a century here, it’s the chemistry of the thing.
Don’t like PvP? Okay. No one forces you to get involved but think about the traffic that market get just because people wanna cut to the chase. When you see the interest, you may even change your mind. So, my saying to everyone is don’t discriminate anyone just because they like PvP. You may as well sell items to them and get a bond going.
D4 will have a dynamic, high scaled difficulty unlike Diablo 2 which kept it chaotic but tidier and short. It’s obvious PvP is not and will not be the main course of action here because game has PvE endgame content planned already from the start. They will not leave any space for chaotic PK to happen anymore now anything else might disturb your progress. Even taking a tiny glimpse at the quarterly reports would tell you that; D4 is based on your PvE progress and looting.
Keeping PvP balance only means you can’t sleepwalk through the farming sequences at highest difficulty setting for a power fantasy speedrace. PvP will have no impact on PvE at terms of balance but kept power creeping at slow growth to not break any kind of delicate scale or stakes. PvP builds can be easily split away from the game in an open world and such overpowering skills can be disabled in online PvP matches by community feedback before some whiner demanding skill to be changed or nerfed.
They’re the developers, and they have more experience on the matter right now and they’re also the creator of this whole thing. You don’t trust them to have any sort of control?
I have no idea why you people against this whole ordeal this passionately. PvP and PK are different terms and different expressions. If you can not take one from another apart, perhaps you need to open a dictionary or question your online interactions.
You mean “if the formula is ever right,” don’t you? Because there hasn’t been an ARPG so far that’s gotten it right.
Don’t want or care about a market, so there goes that.
That depends on the modes. The best PvP happens when the differences between the players are based on skill rather than large power discrepancies. This is why the most popular PvP over the years has been from games like Quake, Halo, Doom, Counterstrike, etc. The ultimate problem with PvP in ARPGs (and to some extent MMOs) is that there are always power differences between the players - be it talents or character skills or gear. The games are BASED on those power differences, whereas the real PvP games try to make sure they don’t exist.
They have more experience creating successful ARPGs with PvP? That’s quite a claim… since there aren’t any.
As far as control goes… no, not really. I HOPE they have control, but the repeated and blatant power creep in D3 tells me otherwise.
That’s the hope and ideal, but it’s a bit early to act like a prophet.
20 years later people still enjoy Diablo 2. I’m talking about a potential of the formula.
You mean competitive PvP, sadly, no. If competitive gaming is chess, then playing something for fun is backgammon as you roll the dice and there’s nothing wrong with it.
ARPGs are not designed for competitiveness but fun. Isometric ARPGs don’t give player many different directions to advance (entities always exist in horizontal level), manual reaction (have fun with random chance replacing it) or awareness (you can see only one screen length). Class differences will allow their roles to be distinctive and that’s fine too. If a class is an underdog or require lots of effort to be good at PvP then it may have a role somewhere else like group play or solo meta.
If they have no control on the matter then they failed as developers and they have to drop it altogether by the fear of breaking their server traffic.
By then they supposed to realize they can disable overpowering skills at PvP scene by community demand instead of changing them upon the request of a veteran player who plays PvP “competitively”.
PvP in Diablo is no less appropriate than PvP in Trojan (NES) and that was fun.
The simplest way to make D4’s PvP fair is to downplay or eliminate the role of loot in certain circumstances. (Loot is not the only thing that made D2 great.) Another option may be to offer increased rewards for inferior equipment (to offset the handicap), or separate “brackets” with different rules for what loot you can use.
