A flat damage decrease won’t really help. IMO it would be best if the game handled it the same way Dragon Nest did: each skill has both a PVE and PVP effect. Skills are quite varied and slapping on damage decreases across the board won’t make PVP fairer. Some classes will also suffer because other classes retain the arguably “unfair” skills that make them OP in PVP.
Dragon Nest doesn’t do this (insofar as I remember) but it’d be nice if you could switch between a PVE and PVP skill set-up.
Main problem is still TOS balancing team. To think they let those skills stay for 2 yrs tells how stupid theyre. They simply dont have a sense of balance. Recognizing such skills only need commonsense which TOS dev seriously lacking. As long as those people stay we will never have true balance.
I dont think we will have any changes in the future because the source of the problem cant be fixed (devs stupidity).
@Standardized gear: It will only make this game even more unbalance because unbalanced skills are still there for how long already. Some classes also require equipment to be viable, meaning if you standardize their gear they will be less effective and thus making inherently OP skills even more OP. MOBA dont have standardized gears, they balance it out by adjusting items/skills to be less effective or buffing them if underwhelming. Standardizing equipment is a lazy method.
I think that standardised equipement would make it easier for IMC to ascertain which skills are extremely broken in a balanced matchup and balance accordingly. Although due to how many classes and skills there are, i think it would probably be extremely hard for them to balance PvP without having a big effect on PvE as well.
As you said, the problem doesnt only lie in absurd damage or percentages, some of the problem lies in the mechanics of the skills, and considering how IMC has handled the game so far i dont believe we will get a proper rework of skill balancing soon, but standardised gear would help towards having a more healthy PvP where most people can participate without a huge entry barrier.
I would go with compressed stats by some formula on equips and HP, like the crit rate softcap AND totally different numbers on skills only for pvp.
Imagine having a button that lets you switch between pvp and pve tooltips in the skill UI.
@Fenatte
If IMC manages to present wide variety of standardized equipment sure why not. Con of standardized equipment is non-existent itemization. It all boils down to skills and stats which i think is not possible with TOS unbalanced skills and stats allocation.
Archers and Swordsmen are like carry in MOBA they need itemization to be viable. For me standardizing will only make PVP more bland and 1 dimensional. The solution for me is to adjust transcendence and adjust all influential skills (damage, utility, CC, ) and make all classes have equal chance of winning in PVP. Items can be manually adjusted like skills so thats better than standardizing them at least for me. Standardizing will also prevent good itemization ideas in the future like ice pick etc.
Dragon nest did this great or at least close to being playable compared to what we have now in TOS. They balance out each skills to be less OP or influential in PVP. 2 sets of skill bars and stats is also welcome (for PVE and PVP). Different maps that favors or have advantages to your class which you can shine on to promote different strategies to beat those classes. War of Imperium like PVP is also good.
TOS PVP balancing is the absolute garbage out of PVP games I played. Pokemon is also garbage, lots of OP pokes but extremely good because of community clauses and restrictions basically it all boils down to people who are balancing them.
Makes sense, standardising gear decreases the variety to effectively skills and stats lowering variety in PvP. Perhaps having item effects from youre items carry over might be a good idea, however that would require a lot more various and iteresting item interactions and effect to be made, which i would definitely love. Weapons are currently all about their damage stat, which makes it very boring in the current state.
I also really loved the way dragon nest handled their PvP, but thats also partly due to how their combat system functions, which in their case standardised equipment makes for entertaining gameplay because of how their skills interact.
In ToS its really hard to balance skill interaction due to the massively different ways to build your character so every skill has to be balanced seperately which leaves little in terms of skill interactions.
I think i agree with you now, but i think in the current state of ToS, standardised equipment would definitely be better than the money way currently, and they could then potentially rework itemization in PvP later on to add some more variety, i’d prefer some at least semi-playable PvP until then
Right now PvP is who can hit first, I’m guilty of this, I play Musketeer and I can one shot almost anyone and same applies to me. Unless, they have a Sage or Rx7 on the other team or my team which is another story that needs balancing. Then you have the bugs such as Falconer hitting the other team even before the match starts or your skills not working against mounted opponents.
i dont think it will ever be balanced
i think they never really thought of pvp and gvg when they were making this game
Revenge Sevenfold - Now lasts 1.5 seconds and is channeled throughout the duration. Does not apply to pets.
Safety Zone - 5 hit duration
Missile Hole - 5 hit duration
Restrain - Works for as many hits as its level
Hook - You have to actually land it on top of the person for it to grab them not miss and still grab them. The person casting it cannot take any further actions while maintaining the skill.
Stealth - Characters under stealth leave a faint shimmer behind. If anyone has played Heroes of the Storm then that’s exactly what I mean.
Magentic Force - Only pulls you in the area of it’s actual visible effect, not from half way across the map. Now has double cd.
Raise - 3 second duration
CC Immnuity - no two cc of the same effect can be comboed. After every CC there is a 3 second immnuity to the same effect. For example, you cannot be perma frozen or knockedbacked continously, after the first one you gain immunity to that same effect.
Even though standard gear would be better for pvp, I would be really sad not to be able to use the weapon I farmed 3 months to get!
What I suggest is very simple:
Standard weapons, HP and defenses, and a bigger arena to fight.
They could implement this in.an instance and test how many players would participate.
I’d you love to Pvp, but I’m one shot 90% of times, it’s not fun, it’s way broken as it is right. now.
If anyone remember ‘vanilla’ RO, if was a pure one shot fest. Until people realized how to build properly and to equip properly.Maybe we are all building wrong.
Maybe 5 or 6 Nuale are mandatory along with really high def gear.
Like in ro, people eventually realised you needed a thara frog card and a poo poo hat with either marc card or the one who turned you in an undead along with at least 80ish VIT as a base line for a build.
ANd even with that, sinx would hit you for 90+% of your HP if you survived the hit. But the major difference was that in RO you could spam pots to stay alive. Here we can’t. So ya a 40-50% dmg cut would be a good thing in pvp I think.
Noone would be 1 shotting with standardized gear
I agree with your point, but the thing I dislike about it is that it discard all the efforts player made to acquire good gear. Basically a guy who just created his account and used tome to level up in 2 days would be as strong as you, that farmed for months. That’s where I don’t like it. In MMO’s you usually have to work to compete with the best. Making standard gear would remove that aspect of the game.
Only for TBL though. There’s still dueling, GvG, bossing, etc.
Meh…?
Maybe even an unranked and ranked TBL. In unranked, you can use your equip, in ranked TBL though, it would be standardized gear.
If we keep gear as it is, that new player would enter TBL for the first time, and get oneshot by people with better gear with him, effectively deterring him from trying to do PvP again. Perhaps weapons could have a minor impact on your damage instead of completely standardised, but in the current state, it alienates players that want to do PvP only and newer players because it forces them to do lots of PvE before theyre even remotely close to having a fair match.
Standardised might discard the effort of players who’ve invested in their gear, but the current system discards everyone that doesnt have viable gear. Which scares newer players from trying out the PvP.
Also on a completely seperate note, as @Awoooo said in the original post, healing from clerics is way too powerful and encourages strategies where you oneshot your opponent before they have the chance to heal up. Heal completely nullifies any kind of extended fights because any chip damage can be healed up easily. I would suggest they increase the cooldown on heal, and lower the heal amount significantly for PvP. First after they nerf heal can they balance classes and skills to support extended fights instead of the oneshot fest we have right now.
The Priest revive skill mechanic should be revised in PvP again. If we have skills like revenge of sevenfold from Kabba and so many others that causes huge ammounts of damage and so much cc. Revive locks must fly away to it’s pve state.
ALL classes need more Hp for PvP arena.
Diminishing returns are crucial for so much cc involved.
Char desync from server and server lag when casting skills… C’mon solve It once and for all IMC 
So Sad when my buddies corpses start to move their butts away and I Just can’t ress them anymore. lol
Two words for this: elo rating!
This is also a problem with making boss fights more interesting. But somewhat offtopic. The same issue applies to enemies vs players in pve. Enemies can’t hope to possibly beat the strength of healing that players have unless doing massive rapid amounts of damage.
I think healing in general is due a lot of changes. It’s very strange to have a healer class that can do the amount of damage it can do at the same time as the amount of heal they have.
@Miriede We have ELO though. The problem is that there aren’t enough people in the pvp queue for ELO matchmaking to work well. Low elo players are forced to play with high elo players because there really aren’t many players playing pvp.