Diablo® III

If you insist on trying it, Iria's catalog of flaws is just a hint at how far you will have to go.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/7811152142

That's a pretty long list, and you cannot trust it to be accurate. A tiny fraction of the players who bought this game are playing it at this point, and the PvP community is very poorly represented for glaringly obvious reasons. A tiny fraction of the active players have dueled on the ptr. A tiny fraction of the players who have dueled have made a serious effort at PvP builds. The dueling version of the WW barb almost certainly remains to be discovered, and you are setting yourself up to have to deal with it in an extremely toxic environment.

If you commit yourself to balancing PvP now, then you will soon find yourself picking winners and losers by choosing points somewhere along the line between "nerf the most popular PvP build" and "ignore everyone else." Having made such a choice once, you will quickly find yourself having to make it again.

If you doubt what I'm saying, go find the WoW people who were involved with vanilla PvP. There is no way in hell that you can succeed at balancing this game for PvP without creating an entirely separate system.

Dueling is clearly the most interesting thing in the patch, and you have seen how the mainstream reacted to it. That is an indication that PvP could be far more important to the future of the game than you previously thought, but recognize that you are nowhere near pleasing the mainstream.

The mainstream regards D3 as an item game, and there are no items at stake. The mainstream wants to keep score, and the best you could offer at this point is "count kills and deaths." There is only one map.

The only way for a player to make dueling the focus of the game is to form or join consensus around some mutually accepted set of rules. That would be hard enough with a feature that is so far outside the mainstream, and trying to balance it will make it even harder. The essential problem for players that might enjoy it is the lack of variety, and balancing reduces variety. They need more ridiculous ways to challenge one another, not fewer. The more balancing you do, the fewer people will focus on dueling.

In the third part of Iria's post, under this heading:

V) Exploits and Abusive Strategies

you will find this paragraph

Lastly, there are the counter building players exploit. Players can inspect each other before or during a match by right clicking their portrait and selecting Inspect. This allows the player who inspected to quickly gauge the enemies combat strategy and then leave the arena to quickly change skills to directly counter it! An example of this is when a Barbarian sees an enemy Demon Hunter equipping stun based skills, and thus equips the Juggernaut passive to hard counter any stun builds. There should be some system in place for penalizing players from cheating the rock-paper-scissors game by simply playing their hand after the opponent reveals theirs.

The most thorough evaluation of this feature from a mainstream perspective explicitly labels the one and only way to have fun with the feature "cheating." How clear can it possibly get?

Your effort to make dueling something that is fun to do with strangers has resulted in endless calls for more balance, the approach is doomed to fail even if you give them what they want, and what you have created is not even worth doing with friends.

If you want the feature to gain any kind of traction at all, then you must reverse course. Make dueling mechanics absolutely identical to pve mechanics. Undo the 30% ccr, the storm armor nerf, the 30% dr for ranged, the 5% dr for melee, and any other attempts that you've made to balance PvP.

Balancing classes is an act of picking winners and losers.

If the game is ever to have Team Death Match and bracketing or w/l ratios, or a ladder, it will have to be reasonably balanced, to the degree where characters with similar budgets -- or at least top geared characters -- can have similar ratios where skilled players are concerned.

It would not be good if there were a pvp ladder, where 90% of the top 50 spots were all one class.

So what exactly is the problem with dueling now? Go on, let's have a discussion. It feels reasonably balanced to me right now.

02/06/2013 11:16 AMPosted by Talys

If the game is ever to have Team Death Match and bracketing or w/l ratios, or a ladder, it will have to be reasonably balanced

You're right, of course. If Blizzard wants to make a mainstream PvP feature, then they will have to face the issue of balance. Such a feature might be on the drawing board. but it's definitely not on the ptr. What IS on the ptr is dueling, and trying to balance dueling is a mistake. They've opened a huge can of worms, and they really need to put the stinking lid back on it.

02/06/2013 11:28 AMPosted by Myon

So what exactly is the problem with dueling now? Go on, let's have a discussion. It feels reasonably balanced to me right now.

I'll try to make the case this way:

1. It is no fun to PvP with jerks.

2. It is not possible to define jerks in any way that approaches universal. Are they people who use potions? People who use cheap tactics? People who abuse the portal? People who one-shot you? People who cannot be killed? The post I linked is one thoroughgoing definition of jerks.

3. It is not necessary to define jerks right now. There is no reason for anyone to play with jerks. There's nothing at stake. It's easy to just leave when jerkery takes over. It's just a matter of finding the right people to play with. Balancing is only needed if hostile games are the norm, and that will not be the case with dueling.

4. It is bad to impose a standard definition of jerk on friendly games, and that's what Blizzard is doing when it tries to balance dueling. They haven't gone nearly far enough to make it fun to play with jerks, so we've got to play with friends. We don't need those rules, and their presence makes it harder to keep the game fun because it limits the tradeoffs that players can make without crossing into the locally definition of jerk.

That last point probably needs some clarification. It goes like this:

I'll tolerate your 1m crits if you leave yourself open to cc, for example. Wanna gloom, zoom, and pop me? Alrighty, but make sure that you're vulnerable to charge + rend. Become untouchable in my clique and you're gonna get called on a violation of the spirit of gaming,

So the changes Blizzard made narrowed the playing field for groups like mine. Upping damage reduction makes it harder to stay in bounds. Upping crowd control reduction makes it harder to stay in bounds. Nerfing storm armor ... was just pointless.

And the punchline is that the only way to get any joy from dueling is to find or form a group like mine :/

Honestly, there is no way to balance this. The majority of barbs use sprint/leap+rend. The majority of wd uses haunt+relent, spirit walk+jaunt. The majority of wiz use storm armor. The majority of DH use impale.

Because of this, the PvP experience solely depend on who's pocket is deeper. Who has more igg or usd. Who can win at AH or RMAH.

Honestly, there is no way to balance this. The majority of barbs use sprint/leap+rend. The majority of wd uses haunt+relent, spirit walk+jaunt. The majority of wiz use storm armor. The majority of DH use impale.

Because of this, the PvP experience solely depend on who's pocket is deeper. Who has more igg or usd. Who can win at AH or RMAH.

What you're saying is only true if you find yourself in a game where people play that way, then stay in the game for some reason. The problem is that by trying to balance the feature around that way of playing, Blizzard is making it much harder to assemble a critical mass of people who want to play any other way.

The damage reduction killed off lots and lots of possible gear balancing rules because it makes stalemates so much more likely. For example, there was a little cult forming on reddit around blue-gear-from-vendor PvP. That way of playing hasn't got a chance now: stalemates are boring.

The crowd control reduction kills off another way of balancing gear. It doesn't matter that you can one shot me if I can kill you before you hit me. I've got a guy on my buddy list who can easily 1 shot me if we're both in our best gear, but I think he'd have had a hard time getting that shot off. He thinks otherwise. Now we'll never know, and we're FORCED to balance things out in our gear.

I have absolutely no idea what they singled out storm armor for special nerfing. It didn't even register on my radar.

The "players are elites" thing is good because it EXPANDS the set of possible ways to make groups fun for all of the participants. Any and all "balancing" is bad because it CONTRACTS the set of possible ways to do that.

So they've done all that stuff to limit how big a jerk a jerk can be, but they haven't gone nearly far enough to make the game jerk proof and there's no reason to play with jerks anyway. All that they've actually accomplished is to make it harder to have fun with our friends ... again. I'm starting to wonder if "discourage enjoyable group activities" is a major design goal.

i think they need to spend at least 10 times more effort into balancing than they have so far on the latest PTR patch just to make dueling acceptable. more pvp damage mitigation,(melee should get a bit more especially), diminishing returns or a separate pvp damage reduction for critical hits, remove the chance for Dots to critically hit, cap block and dodge chance at 75% or less, add diminishing returns to all EHP stats that have none, or even hard caps on defensive stats, adjust Crowd control reductions, and adjust all healing stats if needed afterwards.

once dueling become semi-balanced after they adjust all these things in some way, MAYBE they can focus on adjusting a few of the most OP skills for PVP only. Or maybe just leave them alone and give us some team PvP options. Dueling SHOULD be worked on and balanced, so it will coincide with the same rules we will have in future more complex PVP modes.