Hello all. My only experience with PvP was when I played Star Trek Online and I tried a few 'team' PvP matches, Klingon Defense Force vs Federation. As far as I remember there was no 'PvP' gear or settings. You just went in with what you had. Same thing on 'ground' battles. The thing is, all PvP meant was you fought another player with your normal gear / ship set-up that you used for your PvE stuff. Also, if I remember correctly, in Everquest (way back in the day) PvP was the same way. You fought with your normal gear. In DCUO, why do you need 'PvP' gear and stats? Why can't it be where you face off against another opponent with whatever you have on, be it DPS or Support role? From what I understand, that's what happens in a duel, right? Then, the only issue you may have is facing off opponents who are either too strong or too weak. Or, even if you have separate PvP gear with 'Toughness' stats. It's just swapping one set of gear for another, but everything else stays the same. How does that 'break' PvP? You are facing another opponent with whatever gear and powers you have. I am asking because I don't know the answer. All I know about DCUO PvP is people are saying is 'broken'. Not why. Just curious.
Because those games don't have proper PvP systems. PvP and PvE are separate entities and should be treated as such. Any attempt to combine them via gear just leads to exploiting like what we had years back where people ran PvE with PvP gear because they didn't have PvE gear, and people using PvE gear in PvP arenas. While this doesn't sound like a problem on the surface, it was because in some cases you'd be stronger or tankier using the opposite side gear. Aka a person who ran a bunch of legends pvp not even playing as their toon could be stronger in a raid than a person who ran the PvE instances, and the reverse of a PvE person who never PvP'd in their life being stronger than a PvP main who did PvP for years. That's why most games don't have story mode ranking up or gun unlocks carried over into multiplayer. We had that way back in Rainbow Six Vegas 2 on Playstation 3 and all we did was repeat a mission that had multiple areas of multiple explosive kills (high, fast, and easy xp) and we'd sit there and kill ourselves/restart the checkpoint for hours and hours every day until we were max rank. That's not how multiplayer progression is supposed to be. Few examples of why people say DCUO PvP is broken: - There are several artifacts that are broken for pvp in open world. Eye of Gemini, Mystic Symbol of the Seven, and Orb of Arion being the prime three. Eye of the Gemini at rank 160 gives 18% health over 6s every time you use a supercharge in healer or tank stance. The problem is that the supercharge regeneration it grants basically makes a 25% supercharge free of cost. Before they increased the cooldown of movement speed supercharges, you could keep using Gemini every 6s and just have a permanent 3% health per second throughout the entire fight. This made any healer or tank with Eye of Gemini unkillable because mathematically it was impossible for any powerset to put out enough damage to surpass that healing when combined with the already increase durability of being a tank or healer in general. Mystic Symbol gives healing when attacked which scales from Restoration. Given escalating skill points, that means in open world (in arenas, the skill point system is heavily nerfed) that Restoration could be extremely high from SP, augments, phylak's, OP gear, and artifact stats. Which means you attacking someone with a Mystic Symbol becomes trying to cut down a tree with a butter knife. The Orb of Arion just amplifies this issue because it triples the cost and healing out of a priority heal in addition to summoning a pet that does healing over time as well. Let's say My regular instant heal is for 2k health for a 250 power cost. That now gets increased to 6k health for a 750 power cost. Doesn't seem bad. But then you add in the pet that's about to throw out (at rank 160) an extra 12k healing in addition to that. My additonal pet does double the healing that I did, meaning it just got tripled. Instead of healing 6k with 750 power cost, now I'm healing 18k. This leads to trolling in open world from experienced healers because they'll stand still and afk until you get them to 10% health and then just put 1 priority heal with a strong shield and they'll be near full health by the time you break the shield and they can afk again. - Atomic's pull in arenas. Atomic's pull as a tank is a teleport. Because of this special form of crowd control, you cannot break out from it. One of the two forms that I can think of rn where this happens. And essentially what you can do is just go slightly away from a node that you want to capture and then just spam said pull because it's a 100 power cost. Constantly pulling your target off of the node with nothing they can do to be able to stay on it. Obvious first reaction is to turn and kill the tank instead, but he has a healer partner standing on the node that you can't threaten at all because you keep getting pulled away every second. In addition to trying to kill a tank in general, you have him being healed by a healer you can't even nerf or pressure properly. God forbid the Atomic is Flight or Skimming and in the air which disables the ability for you to use melee combos on them which nerfs your burn significantly as rarely anyone goes into Arenas witha ranged WM even spec'd and even if you did, you have the healer on the node who'd be able to lunge you from the first ranged combo you did before you even reached the WM portion. An experienced Atomic tank and Water healer combo is literally unbeatable in batcave 2v2. And to make killing the atomic tank worse: - Arenas has buffed stats based on your current role and stats going in. To give an idea of this, imagine the event version of Shattered Gotham. You go in there and see a bunch of levels that are like level 20, or t1-t2, something like that, and their stats are buffed to 253cr of their current role. Precision and Might buffed if they're a dps, Resto for heals, Dom and Health for tanks, Vit and Dom for trolls, etc. Now imagine that system working Shattered Gotham Reg and Elite. You'd find a person in full vendor dps gear just switching to tank stance and getting a ridiculously huge Health and Dom boost for free, and just battle tank'ing. That's PvP arenas. A tank can spec all his skill points into damage and just for being in tank stance, he'll get thousands of dom and health for free regardless of his pvp cr. Same goes for healers. They can spec into might/pow to spam and get thousands of resto for free just for being in healer stance. They can spec full dom if they want to increase their healing and get thousands of resto for free so now they're maximizing their healing formula. You'll find dps's fully might/power spec'd but in controller stance to get a huge load of vit and dom for free, and given the way revamp works, casting any power casts pot. So now you're dealing with a full blown Might-based dps, with a controller PoT, who has buffed shields because of the dom he got for free, who can also now debuff your healing, shields, and or damage because debuffs don't have any sort of stat scaling and even if they did, they'd be given those stats for free in this case since they'd probably be attached to vit or dom by default. This becomes especially annoying when you fight a power like mental which has Invisibility (has a huge damage tick from Pain Blast inside), Grandeur, Telekenetic Bubble, Reflect Pain, and HL Shield as shields they can rotate between without worry because now they have a PoT on them. Let's not forget the last slot of Psychic Shock, which is a 100 power cost, which can be spammed because of the PoT, which is also a defense debuff, making you squishier, and it's a stun. So you're defense-debuff'd, getting chunked every 12s from Invisibility, you have 5 shields to go through before you can even damage them, Reflect Pain is causing you to hit yourself or you stop attacking and they just get free damage on you now, and you're being stunned every 4s'ish. Have fun. - In addition to Atomic's infinite pulling, Rage's Revenge has the 2nd form of cc that I can think of that cannot be broken out of: a push back. Slides your character backward, breaking any animation that you were currently in and you can't use the breakout ability to stop it. Revenge has a 1.5s cooldown, and a 100 power cost. Which means it is easily spammable for a significant portion of time. Now yes, it because it is a 100 power cost it doesn't hit that hard as other things, but to put that 1.5s in perspective, you can't even land a 2tap hold combo before being knocked back again and having to start over. In some cases, you wouldn't even be able to do a 1tap hold combo. Your weapon damage if that's what you're spec'd for is completely gone. You are a sparring target to sit there and be pushed back and take damage for the next 30s-1min with nothing you can do besides block. And any good pvp'er is just going to clip a block break before the next Revenge cast or in between Revenge and its combo to knock you down. If you're might based, good luck, because now it's their spam against yours and they have heals and the strongest might-based melee dps single target in the game because they're Rage. Oh and none of the combos are interruptable because they changed that with Revamp as well. No blocking outrage or revenge. GL. - Not blockable combos lead to HL Boxing, Claws, Chainsaw, Light Weight spin, Handclap, Grasping Hand, Celestial spam across the board, and infinite Atomic combos healing them in tank stance. Which means you're dealing with 2 of the top 5 single target might-based dps's in the game with no counters possible, and an atomic you can't stop from healing besides an ocassional crowd control effect. If an Atomic tank goes full Might/Power and doesn't waste any on Geigar Blast or Proton Remedy when they don't need the heals and just use their power on combos to heal alone, you're not going to kill them without significant uncounterable spam (Gadgets Tazer Pull and Stealth, Mental Psychic Shock and Reflect and Invisibility as examples). If you try WM combos, they're just going to block ocassionally before any of the hard hitting one's and even if they let a few slide through, they'll just heal it. You'll die from the Might spec and atomic combos damage even though they're in tank stance before you can probably even get them below 75% health consistently. - At the beginning of revamp, shields were stronger than they are currently, and mental and munitions could rotate shields frequently enough to never take damage. Not only is this annoying to deal with in general for trying to kill them, but if they start running around and not damaging you while rotating shields and taking no damage, the game would actually take them out of combat and they'd start getting out of combat health regen, which allowed them to reset the fight whenever they wanted. You couldn't kill one unless they let you. And this was for months.
- Nature dog has as competitive damage to some of the highest might-based dp's, while still having the highest healing out, uncounterability, and dog pets to split damage. A good nature dog is unkillable in a node situation 1v1. Especially as a weapon-based dps, you're hit because you can't block their bark damage, but they can block your weapon mastery combos, and to make it worse, Nature dog's animations aren't the same as humans, which makes it harder to read when they might block. You'd have to rely on pure prediction, or go slowly and wait to see if a block icon showed up. Either way, it's annoying af to barely keep up in damage with them even when you play significantly better, and you'll still die because they have high healing output which you wouldn't because you're precision. - Electricity. Has 2 100 power cost single target spam moves. Arc Lightning is a 200 power cost and heals them a good amount. Bio-Cap is a free health nuke for when you finally do manage to get them low. Either you'll be getting spammed with ST moves while having to go through ridiculous healing output and safety nets from Bio, or you're going to fight an Elec running Rifle and doing 5tap. Rifle's 5tap melee hit is supposed to be blockable, but it hasn't been in over 2 years since the devs don't want to fix it. It's also one of the highest single target weapon combos you can do while retaining not being vulnerable to block. So you spam 5tap with Arc Lightning at the end, maybe throw in an occasional Surge for a burst heal and your health isn't moving significantly fast, while you're putting out good single target damage that can't be countered. Did I mention they could go full prec or might-based to spam but get free restoration and crit healing chance and magnitude significant enough to actual heal heal in arenas (say a 4s/5s match)? - Gadgets mines. After you die to a might-based gadgets inside of Batcave or another node match, they can start immediately spawning mines and have 4+ waiting for you when you get back. There's no way to detonate the mines as the enemy at a range which means you have no choice but to lose points for that node trying to range kill the gadgets or eat the mines but stop the node count loss. Most times, that choice is made for you and the Gadgets will do Tazer Pull when you're in range and pull you into mines. At which point you're losing up to 50% of your health in the first second of the fight. If you lost to them starting at 100% health, good luck doing so starting at 50%. - Tap kings. While melee weapon combos in general out damage just spamming tap melee, they are also vulnerable to counter, after which you lose in total damage if you haven't landed a weapon combo previously because weapon tap dps isn't that far behind. At the highest level, this leads to people abusing taps and just tapping with their weapon and spamming powers instead of finishing combos especially when you have a weapon who's taps hit harder than the enemy's. Say a 2H person against a Bow person. As the 2H, I don't even have to finish a combo weapon versus weapon. The Bow has less tap melee damage than 2H, which means he has to finish combos just to keep up with me. All I have to do is block 1 combo and the fight is over because he'll never make up for that damage gap, he'll be behind constantly. And when he realizes that and panics and tries to do a WM in a last ditch attempt to equal our health again, I'll just late block and that'll seal the fight. If he tries to be smart and do a bb instead, I'll just roll and have a breakout trinket ready just in case because blues (the resistance to counters and shields you get from getting a counter) are weak inside of pvp and barely shield any damage for 1s of time and aren't even long enough to let you do a 2tap hold without being countered as the person who got the blue, which means a breakout trinket is essentially a free fight reset where you can't be punished. *scenario that's possible for those that don't know* Player 1 block blocks Player 2 and jump cancels the animation. Player 1 goes for a 2 tap hold combo while Player 2 is on the floor. Player 2 uses a breakout trinket to instantly get up and block. Player 1 gets knocked down for a block counter form Player 2. Which means after a breakout trinket gets used, you're better off just playing it safe and not doing a combo and being ready for a bb afterward in case they think you're about to do a combo and block. This creates extensive mind games seeing as you can intentionally wait to the last minute to do the breakout and block and Player 1 can't even react and stop the combo because they thought your breakout trinket was on cooldown since you didn't use it earlier. 2H, Martials Arts, Rifle, Brawling, Shield, and occasionally Dual Wield are the worst weapons that you'll see people abusing this with. Those are just the main one's, there are more, but I'd probably go over the forum character limit for a post (I did already, rip). But that just gives you an idea of why the pvp community is dead/the remanining one's are extremely toxic, because the veterans who get put against people who know how to abuse these things ^ have to deal with this every day for 2+ years. Every pvp tournament during that time period has had to ban in some cases up to 50% of a powerset's moves, support roles in general, have artifacts and augments removed, force every participant into Weapons Expert focus in an attempt to minimize spam, banning over half the weapons in the game, and extra restrictions for DQ's based on some other things they can't control directly through bans. That tells you how bad pvp is.
Took me a bit to digest your reply; lots of good detail and information. What I gathered is that in essence, the powers, artifacts and support role stat changes were designed for players who are cooperating against NPC's / bosses, not against other players. Such as Atomic's 'Rage Revenge' that can give an Atomic person a push back ability very difficult to counter when fighting someone else. A PvP system would therefore need not just its own set of armor, but Powers designed for PvP to ensure no one has some major advantage, as well as Artifacts and possibly Augments? Thank you for your reply. I really appreciate it.
So what happened to the Rock>Paper>Scissors of PvP? Or am I just missing something..? Just queued into my first Switch PvP session and this Fire Tank was just unkillable in the 4v4... I'm Water Healer and couldn't even debuff him at all. I'm assuming the system got removed but... Why?
The Healers beat Tanks, Tanks beat Trolls, Trolls beat Heals thing was removed over 4 years ago. I wasn't around on the forums back then to know why. Counters in general in PvP are meaningless/not beneficial due to several systems that were implemented in the stats revamp. You're going to find a lot of spam/unkillable spec's from USPS players that know the pvp system and how to abuse it.
the rock paper scissors was removed when lair battles became a thing. which was great for that 1v1 or 2v2 matches because you were almost always paired with your weakness role but in doing that it drastically changed PVP and made it less team based and more OP DPS powers everywhere and people quit playing roles for a long time. and every change they made after that made pvp worse and worse until we get the state its in now which might be fine for some but those of us that loved it back in the day dispise it now with all the broken powers
Yeah, but then you're playing as a legends character and not your own- if I wanted to play as pre-existing characters I'd play Marvel's mmo.
