Big Balance Thread - All in One

I feel I have relatively low playtime in hld, I started pvp about a year ago, but the one thing I see permanent and overused is EA. IMHO the fact that so many people are using it shows that it's problematic, and imbalanced. Matching the same thing over and over is frustrating and it scares away most of the people who would actually disagree with the wide poe community's opinion that hld is bad and such, and actually tries it for fun, where I also started.

My idea and suggestion to change EA would be to apply a penalty to the secondary damage of the arrows which didnt hit any actual target (stuck in the walls), and it could be even buffed if it is shooted into opponents, so this way of using it would be much more competent and skill requiring than just spamming the walls.

Talking in more general what pvp and hld need is more people playing it, which is affected by the below things that came in to my mind:

Gearing and cost of builds including legacy gear in standard is problematic, and creates margin between players. I recall that GGG's opinion on legacy gear is that it's the feature of the league so I dont see this changing in any way for pvp, but felt Id mention it, because it is greatly part of the balance, so maybe someone has a good suggestion in this.

PVP getting more attention, and good balance changes is heavily affected by it's popularity in the game. I don't see it as negative as some people do, because it may only take some good ideas to greatly improve the state of pvp from where it is right now. A good example of this is the duel video posted recently on reddit, where much more players see stuff than on the official forums, and many people enjoyed watching this based on the comments. We should create more content like this, because this is an easy way to increase the popularity of hld, and let new players have a view of this part of the game.

Many people have good enough gear in standard to try hld, who quitted the game or barely playing because pve got boring for them, but they don't dare to try pvp because they don't know where to start, how to learn, or just afraid to try, these people are the unexploited fuel for hld. Among us there are some who are very helpful to new people in hld, so I'm asking your opinion on this, what could we do to get this people into playing pvp?

Rupenus, get this thread locked vida asking a mod and we will start a new one. I dont want to take over your thread idea but i have something in my mind that would work to keep such thread on topic.

I will create it, you will be able to copy/paste all of your thoughts on it once you see the rules of it !

This way we can keep away offtopic arguing and non balance aimed opinions away.

Also you can change the name urself.

I'm not going to talk about the high end of balance changes, but about the base for a change:

Ideally pvp would be accessible for all functional pve builds, but in my experience the difference between pve and pvp is so vast, that perfectly viable pve builds become totally unviable for pvp. This alone creates a pretty big barrier to entry.


Some examples:
1) There is pvp damage scaling, equalizing damage somewhat between different builds (in a pretty unbalanced way, but it deserves a thread on it's own imo). This damage reduction scaling is only applied on the the base damage, without taking defences of the target into account. So despite there being damage equalization in place, a new pve player with low chaos resist will get into a lot of totally onesided matchups.
Another consequence of this, is that lowering enemy resists (EE+double cursing) to increase damage is a lot more effective in pvp than in pve. An experienced player will have significantly overcapped fire resist, a new player trying pvp will not. Similarly builds that stack penetration will do comparatively better dps in pvp than pve.
An example in the other direction: chaos damage versus CI.

My suggestion: Some kind of base defense equalization that is applied after debuffs+penetration.

2) The "your enemies cannot leech" modifier. Leeching is one of the most popular defences in pve, but pvp builds on marauder side or rich players with a corrupted helmet can 100% negate it without any significant sacrifice. This makes it easy for a new player to kill himself on another's defenses.

You could say that it's the same in pve, where the majority of builds get stuck with cannot do mods at high tiers of map levels, but imo that is also an example of bad design. Modifiers like this should be making the opponent/map harder, but not impossible.

My suggestion: no more 100% immunities, but multiplicative reduced effectiveness modifiers (also in maps :p).

3) If you are ranged and your projectiles have 0 pierce chance, you cannot pvp since cwdt+frost wall is easy to link and will be up 100% of the time.

My suggestion: make frost wall destructible or give it an innate chance to be pierced.

4) Builds with ramp up or high start time: minions, charge based builds,...

I don't think there's an easy change to make pvp more accessible for them.



Not related to the above, but still a pet grieve of mine:
Asocial players who shut down sarn arena fighting through their actions. I suspect we've all seen it happen. It only takes 1 asocial player with a build better than the rest, to shut down any possibility of fights occurring between everyone else. Dead arena in a minute or 2.

My suggestion: vote kick + temp ban for entry.