Is it possible to revive PvP in D3 with some tweaks?

General Discussion
1

While there are many reason people don’t play PvP mode in D3, like lack of loot or purpose beyond the fun of it, the main problem is the adventure mode powercreep, that turns the game into one-shot galore, making pvp impossible.

So I was thinking perhaps this could be solved by having a specific blanket balance of power exclusive to PvP mode, so that brawls are steady and reactible. Though I’m not really an expert at balance (I know zero about it to be fully honest), this is what I came up with as examples:

  • Normalize the damage output: this means that damage is capped, and that legendary items pertaning skills can only change their functionality. Affixes and passives that focus on dealing extra damage, will do so in proportion to the capped (or normalized) damage output.
  • Disable passive health regeneration: brawls are to be slow but not snooze-inducing. Damage dealt cannot be un-dealt. This includes lifesteal and healthglobe spawning. Active healing will have to be normalized as well, so it’s possible but not easily abused.
  • Increase cooldowns: it’s all about reacting to properly paced skill usage, so spam must be not allowed.
  • Regulate crowd control: CC chains are to be very difficult to execute. Give a player under CC a grace window after the end of it, so they cannot be eternally CC’d. Moreover, ONLY CC skills that do not focus on dealing damage (like caltrops or frost nova) can do long-term CC, the rest will have short durations, and their spam will be regulated. CC focused skills will have longer cooldowns.
  • A reward system: i have no idea here. Banners? Transmogs?
2

I would rather have them focusing on D4. Ever since it was announced for that matter.

1 Like
3

It can be done but the current match finding system have to be tweaked with filters just to get it going and new items have to be added with skill tweaks just to balance it. In my design I separated PvP in two parts; brawl mode and PvP mode arenas, as in plural.

Brawl doesn’t require any conditions and consist of only one area. The treachery is it flattens out your paragon levels automatically and everybonus that comes from it. Nullifying all plvl won’t make Brawl mode any balanced (there are broken builds still), but at least it would be possible for low level pre-70 characters (preferably 52-60 or lower and banning one out of five skillrune types) to have fun with it without minding plvls.
PvP arenas are a bit of complicated and I call for plvl and highest solo GR clear while looking for a rival to determine the standard damage mitigation that applies to ranged and melee type players. With some thresholds, standard damage mitigation can be scaled up higher as plvl and solo grift clear of challengers grow with narrower brackets. As a competitive approach, PvP mode offer different arenas to be unlocked through achievements or achievement points and even allow player to tweak rulesets about; health globe spawn delays, refill conditions for pylon/shrine spawns, trap hazard triggers and so on.

As for regulating crowd control and health regeneration, you can introduce a small structure just like shrines or pylons in the arena, called wards. These structures can detect ultimate transform abilities (WotB, Vengeance, Archon, Champion of Akarat, Epiphany) that give you CC immunity and drain your health directly along the duration if you stand near their range and it damage you further depending on your depleted primary resource.
As match goes on, wards can gain more range and push their influence to cover most of the arena until they get somewhat reset by pedestals scattered around the map just like environmental hazards or refilling shrines. There are passive abilities and invulnerability frames to withstand ongoing control impairment chains and they’ll do just fine as long as wards are up and active.

Besides a filter for solo GR clear and plvl to determine damage mitigation game should support this motion by introducing crafted PvP gear that only activates their powers in the PvP arena mode. Said items can offer more damage against humans/elites while also having less damage taken from qualities to them. Such traits can be added to the less used skillrunes for instance.
Going further, you can create PvP based shields that ignore and nullify critical hits (hint: monsters can not score critical hits and thorns never crit) on block and other pieces that make nephalem glory last longer/refresh cheat death, gain cooldown reduction as health goes lower or grant absorb equal to a small percentage of thorns output. Things never can be balanced but can be made interesting.

As for rewards there can be bets for your duel winning streaks one on one with random casual matchmaking. What can you bet? I don’t know. What can you risk?
Such bets ofcourse will be disabled when doing a match between friends or invites. So there’s no possibility of abusing the system for bots feeding their multibox user mats, items or gold. Something so simple at the surface, not complicated at beneath either. Only if you read and think twice.

tl;dr: there’s a possibility but it won’t be a healthy approach to keep the old systems for the “old times’ sake”. They need tweaks to lessen impact of the power gap between player bases.

1 Like
4

Wow that was thoughrough, great insight.

Perhaps players can bet gold, blood shards and/or materials?

5

So I dont know if I’m in the norm but I love challenge rifts. I looked forward to what hot mess I get to play with for the week.

I honestly dont think there is a way to make brawling fun since everyone is soooooo OP and can one shot anything. And I dont even know if the suggestion I’m going to make is possible but here it goes…

Zero paragon points in the battle area… the game randomly rolls you a class, skills, and gear… you choose when entering YELLOWS (gets you all yellow gear… this maxes out at marquis gems)…LOD (this gets you a lvl 50 LOD and a combo of yellows and legs + 3-4 yellows, 4 legs, and 4 ancient legs…1- 2 lvl 25 leg gems that are random and main gems are flawless imperial… SUPER LOD lvl 75 LOD and all items are ancient leg…1- 2 lvl 50 random leg gems and all gems are flawless royal… finally SUPER SET 1-2 leg gems lvl 50, one guaranteed 6 piece set for your class all other items are legs or set items (50-60% guaranteed to be ancient) gems are flawless royal

Ok that’s super messy but it doesnt matter your lvl, paragon, or class… you and your friend/rando go in and pick a criteria model and let the game auto generate you each a random lvl 70 toon (no paragon) that has random skills and passives as well as gear. The fun would be to Duke it out on the fly and see who could come up with a strategy on the fly… you could keep rematching over and over with the same toons or back out and reshuffle or pick a different criterion.

Then there is the option to maybe have a NPC opponent instead and have an achievement for kill the NPC 500 times or something

Anyway its probably an impossible idea but that would require too much effort but I’m curious about your thoughts??

6

why shouldn’t that be possible? for the guys from d3 maybe. but not for real developers. they can’t even get a couple of legendaries out here. therefore you will wait forever for pvp.

while other teams manage to bring out MUCH more content than d2 lod addon + path of diablo in 3 months, the guy here just manages to “develop” 1 playable set for existing skills. and skin looks just as “great” as models in wow 15 years ago.

and for me it’s a mystery who the information is up there for. so far, all top suggestions have been ignored.

7

For PvP it need Arena with ratings.

8

The one ingredient you really need to revive PVP: Ears :slight_smile:

1 Like
9

Ears would be a crafting material :smiley:

1 Like
10

Not worth the time or resources hyper focus on d4 pvp in hope we get whats promised this time around… !!

11

While I appreciate the enthusiasm, it is far too late to fix PVP in this game. I also proposed a similar idea involving normalizing the damage back in the PTR for the PVP update (1.0.7) ALMOST 8 YEARS AGO! And all my efforts were in vain!

Here is a more recent summary of the issues:

And here is my VERY old post from the old forums (archived on the internet since those forums are gone):

12

The issue here is not just imbalanced damage output to damage mitigation ratio. Developers seemingly don’t want PvP to prevail because they can not predict the outcome of it, on the account of server performance. I can’t justify their actions of gradually killing this scene otherwise.
For example in a 4-player free for all brawl, there will be a mass of area damage and damage over time spells (hint: bleed and summons are overpowered in brawl), that’s not entirely good for server performance if any player can withstand so many damage from other 3 players or keep sending mass summons or inflict damage over time. That means lots of calculation traffic sent to the server just for a mindless fun and it appears developers had no time for players having fun.

Follow up issues are as always damage-defense ratio and how it became impossible to tank anything; this is just on the surface. Another glaring flaw, deep beneath is the power gap between player bases and how a “one fit all” model from 6-7 years ago doesn’t fit anymore.
A damage mitigation ruleset like 99.99% will only encourage stalemates. With no global punishment, ultimate transform abilities with abused attack speed will overwhelm the best defenses without even trying. Playing in a vast empty space without resources won’t allow player to utilize other possible aspects of the build such as speed or personal skills like positioning and timing to their advantage.
These all needs to be addressed.

Before damage increased to the point of quadrillions and gazillions, brawl was possible with shields, high block rate and very high end full augments gear. This means about 3-5 months of full grinding just so you can find other people who really invested and wasted their time on this game as you are.
Now after overall damage of sets get a 3.5-5.5x buff, it’s not possible to tank anything anymore and general damage mitigation helps nothing to balance the game. It needs to be scaled and for the issues of superior powers they must come with a penalization for balance.

But who am I kidding? They will never introduce any penalties to this game just to keep players arrayed into the sand pit area they wanted. The build diversity we’re looking at is just a crumb of cookies we trail chase. Ain’t we all?
The thing is, even PvP becomes a playable separated mode, I’m willing to bet that they want nothing to do with it. Because:

  1. Server performance is always unpredictable when you pit 4 players against each other and let them summon and abuse whatever they want. They won’t move an inch without playtesting the predicted outcomes and how it can affect server when it becomes popular. They can’t stand to create potential stalemates that scour the servers to begin with.
  2. Current system will not work by any practical means so they have to back to the drawing board to start with. First, they have to introduce a separated (just like adventure, story and challenge, there will be a fourth; PvP) scaling system that fit for most of the builds by considering their highest GR clear and base average plvl clears. Secondly, they have to implement this to the current casual match finding system with filters to determine damage mitigation.
  3. Most of the previous designers (one item designer I know for a fact at least) and some developers of Diablo 3 currently working on Diablo 4 or Diablo Immortal. Unless they have a great passion in Diablo 3 I doubt they’d return to make new content for this game. As I gathered from the all recent updates following the copied formula of 50-60% damage reduction followed by 10000-20000% more damage to the specific skill Sets, I guess they lost the passion part years ago.
  4. Practicality and sustain is always questionable. After active trading is gone and everything resolved with exchanges the community can not actively interfere with PvP scene to fix the broken at all. This means the developers have to actively think of all the possibilities to temper the impact.

I’m not even mentioning the designing items and arena maps for different tilesets, environment to balance different traits and utility aspects of different builds. This includes creating chokes, enclosed areas, splitting sightlines, placing shrines, pedestals and trap mechanisms at different arenas for diversity.

For balance issues even at a Brawl level they have to identify anything that might disrupt the balance between builds; any skill that might be deemed too overpowered to use in the brawl area must be disabled through skillrune types by class besides removed plvl bonuses.
For example; Demon Hunters might have overpowered Indigo and Crimson type skillrunes that will get disabled when they step inside the brawl area; for Crusaders it can be Obsidian and Indigo and Barbarians might have Gold and Alabaster skillrunes too overpowering to use in brawl as well.
Even the most flatten out experience in PvP, the Brawl, needs tweaking for it to be any practical. That’s the result of being gradually broken by power creep.

Regarding the last point above, even if they introduced the PvP they can not entice the player for long even with bets system. When compared by the time efficiency the usual farming most likely to grant you more mats for the effort you shown in the arena.
Sure some people will enjoy going at it but it won’t change the fact that you have to grind to the tooth and nail for months just to participate in a very silly five minutes match and have your fun. There will be veteran players who have been playing since day one and waiting for a signal that could smash any average player.

13

It’s not the same team. Developments made on D3 don’t hinder D4’s development in any way.

14

They moved some from D3 over to D4 if I am not mistaken. There are not many left working on D3 anymore. And I stand at my opinion = focus on D4.

15

Recently there have been some job postings specifically for Diablo 3. The game is still being worked on and there’s no real reason to stop working on a game that is still fairly new for Blizzard game standards.

Sure, they are focusing on D4. That doesn’t mean they need to stop improving D3. Again, completely separate projects. I’m not particularly interested in what OP is proposing, but such a change wouldn’t require a huge development effort to be honest. It’s not an expansion or anything, it’s just a game mode with a few balance tweaks. Hell, a single developer could pull that off.

16

If they had the staff for D3, why would they need to get more?
One streamer, whom was in contact with them, said, there were literally one guy working on D3 at one point.

These are not completely seperate things, since it’s from the same company and it is in the same genre/catagory of game.
D4 should be focused on and not D3. Sure I would like more content for D3, but for this old of a game, there is only so much you can work on, when the core of it is already been played for so long. A fresh start, means new ideas and new core to the game mechanics etc.
A single developer can’t do it all alone. And on top of that, working on bugs and ptrs and whatnot.

17

That did happen, I am aware. But after that we got the jobs postings for D3 and the situation has changed since then. We’ve been getting the most content in the game since the release of the Necromancer pack on the past few seasons. I dont know why they suddenly regained interest in D3, maybe it’s a stunt to promote D4, but it happened. It’s definitely not just one guy working on it at this point.

From my understanding, all OP proposed is a few balance changes to the already existing (but completely forgotten) brawler mode. That shouldn’t take more development effort than something like the challenge rifts, armory, or the new sets we’ve been getting. I believe changes to bring a feature of the game that nobody uses to be something potentially playable wouldn’t hurt anyone, alhtough again I wouldn’t be personally using it.

18

A simple “oh it’s just implementing it”, is not just that. Pvp would require more than this.
It’s like seeing people wanting the Ah back.
How fun would it be? Botters will still have the advantage. Set bonuses, items etc. They work differently. People would cry for buffs or nerfs for some classes. You would need to implement players taking damage. Taking cc abilities, how it affects the player as well.

19

What adventure mode?
The problem is, that stats are out of this world, and that’s primarily because of Set items and Paragon, more specifically the way they were implemented in RoS… as in their stats.

Not really, no… because it would require waaay too many major tweaks… as in rework big parts of the game… as in Blizzard are not going to dedicate resources to that.

20

Let it die… kill it if you have to.