Hi guys,



I wanted to update you with what our planned PvP changes are, and what the timeline is for them landing in-game.



Skill Changes



All trigger gems and triggered skills will be having significant damage reductions. Ideally, these will be used primarily to trigger utility skills and curses, and won't be a significant source of damage. This includes Lab enchants and items like Poet's Pen that trigger skills.



Suppressive skills like Kinetic Blast, Explosive Arrow, Blight, Glacial Cascade and Volatile Dead will also be getting significant damage reductions.



Supports which functionally multiply the number of skills you're using at once (such as cluster trap) will be having small damage reductions attached to them to essentially make them a utility choice (more hits vs bigger hits).



Other sources of abusively high damage, such as Flesh Binder, are also going to be reduced significantly.



These changes will happen in 3.4.0



We also plan to update the PvP scaling algorithm but we're still testing stuff. This will likely come in 3.4.0 as well.



Flasks



You will no longer be able to generate flask charges during a PvP match from any source. That means Ryslatha's pantheon power, the Pathfinder, and on-flask mods will do nothing during PvP. It also means killing enemy minions will grant no flask charges. You will still get a number of charges between rounds.



This is coming in 3.4.0 as well.



We have an experimental flask change we'd potentially like to try as well, wherein all players at the start of a typical best-of-9 only have one flask filled, and will only get charges for one flask between rounds until they lose a round. Each loss 'unlocks' another flask. The idea is to provide a catch-up mechanic as well as to add a layer of strategy to how you select the type and order of flasks you bring to a match. This will also lower the overall power-level of the Pathfinder in PvP.



This change doesn't have a release date yet. I wanted to gauge your feedback before we put work into this.



Minimap



We're disabling the ability to see enemy players on the minimap. You will still see allies. This is to make off-screening more difficult.



This is coming in 3.4.0



Secondary Damage



We want to change how secondary damage (such as the explosion from Explosive Arrow or the corpse explosion from Detonate Dead) is handled by damage mitigation.



Currently, these bypass block, dodge and evasion. In the future, we want secondary damage from attacks to be able to be blocked, dodged and evaded just like other attacks, and secondary damage from spells to be spell-blocked and spell-dodged, just like spells.



Some of the details of this change are still being worked out, but we hope to have this in patch 3.4.0 as well.



Why wait?



Some of these changes could be pushed out sooner, but with player-run tournaments running right now, and with players investing in their builds, we don't want to make significant changes that will negatively affect these events and players. Several balance changes will also affect the Hall of Grandmasters, so we want to hold onto everything until the start of the next league.





Thanks for all of the feedback, and feel free to continue to provide more. We're listening!



Last bumped on Nov 15, 2018, 7:50:47 PM