Given a recent Blizz tweet, it seems that they will not have specific PVP gear, but rather you need to adapt builds and gear to suit your PVP needs... with that said, what are PVP specific gear that you think would be good to use... and good as an investment?

I mainly play Barb, so I'll throw out defensive items with high block % like Stormshield (still pretty expensive with cc%), Helm of Command (should I invest in a plan?) and Justice Lanterns (all have block %). Also, I'm intrigued by butcher's sickle (does it proc well?). I've heard ranged Barb is the way to go, so maybe Three Hundred Spear? @yoyo feel free to chime in haha.

What do you guys think, at the very least, it's not a bad idea to invest in some of these items i feel. #excitedaboutpvp

@eleganthobo

I would speculate that a weapons throw Barb has tremendous potential in PVP. Imagine a ranged class with the Barb's survivability. I think a well executed ancient spear into a hammer of the ancients combo would be devastating. Not to mention the potential leap possibilities. So yes I currently have a nice Three Hundredth Spear patiently waiting in my chest. :)

My bets would be:

1) Gold and jewels. The only constant in the DH economy. No matter what, people will buy these as they have had constant abilities that can be applied from level 0 to the highest paragon level. Additionally, when people start to realize that X weapon does really well in PVP, they'll need to buy gold to buy said weapon unless its on the AH.

2) Exotic "adds elemental damage" or a freeze/stun affix weapons and amulets. This game is about loopholes and inches gained in the math. Elementals have shown interesting fad-like trends in this aspect and people will try anything to get that extra amount of damage. Fads = panic buying that drive the cost of items quickly. Triums, frostburns, witching hours with freeze, etc.

3) IAS/CC/CD jewelry. Thats pretty basic and easy. Who doesn't want trifecta items?

4) Weapons you know that are BIS for certain builds. Perfect Chant's sets, really good 300th Spears and weapon throw cost reduction belts, Mempo with CC, etc.

I think it has a lot to do with how Blizzard is going to change the rules for the Arena. I would expect Crowd Control, Pets, Life restoration, Critical Hits, and damage reduction skills to require tweaks. A CM wizard would be pretty much invincible without some pretty heavy CC nerfing. Gear with high Life Regeneration and/or LoH could be nearly invincible. Ranged classes with critical hits and critical damage would be a danger to one shot practically everyone. Every class has a skill that makes them invincible temporarily which could make PvP pretty stupid - every time a Barb or Monk gets close to a DH, WD, Wizard they'd just Smoke Screen, Spirit Walk or Teleport away.

Balancing PvP across all 5 classes in D3 is going to be very, very difficult.

I'd guess:

Primary stat
Vitality (and %life)
All Resist
Crit chance, crit dam
Crowd control reduction
crowd control chance

Basically, I think CC chance items with primary, vit, resist, crit are going to be the items people drool over for PvP. I don't really see IAS being as desired, as I think people are going to gravitate towards heavier hitting abilities instead of faster casting ones, since your opponents will be trying to constantly kite / juke you.

Also, I can't wait to see the WD be the most favored class in PvP, with all the CC abilities we have (zombie walls, grasp of the dead, stunning garg, horrify, confuse, hex...)

Also, let's not forget legendaries with special abilities: eg, summoned minions, etc.

I forsee the butcher's sickle actually being useful with barbs/monks refusing to let their prey escape :-D

@ecocd actually, I think a CM wiz might be worthless vs classes with good CC breaks. Any DH with a lot of disc or a barb with WotB would likely destroy a CM wiz. If you can't see a WD using spirit walk, I wonder if they'll be able to easily sneak up on people and cast bears.

Since it's gonna be team based, the important dynamics may be in how well the team plays together.

agree with @Sabin, a modified version could work - teleport, freezelock, nuke for the kill.. or play defensive with slow time? It's going to be pretty crazy with so many permutations of skills and teams..

Agreed with @jhonka, i can see gold prices for block %, damage reduction %, and cc reduction going way up for PVP.

How does cc reduction go up? Even if you get the full 14% reduction from gear (only on Amulets, Rings, Helmets and shields), that means you're frozen for 14% less time. 1.3 seconds instead of 1.5 seconds? If someone kill you in 1.5 seconds, they're going to be able to kill you in 1.3 seconds. As @sabin noted, it's much more about CC breaks than CC reduction. I suppose, if you stacked it up to, say, 50% it could make a difference, but you'd be giving up a mod on your Amulet, both rings and your helm. That's pretty tough to swallow.

I could definitely see block % being more important and hence the market for Helm of Command to go up. On the other hand, the market is already pretty saturated from previous patches so it's hard to believe that it would be worth going into the crafting business. Now that I think about it, Helms without sockets could suddenly become valuable since there's no need for MF or Experience in the Arena.

Damage reduction is already one of the most sought after mods so I don't see how it could increase in value any further.

Radiant Star Amethysts could become as popular as Radiant Star Topazes and Rubies if the extra Life % proves to be worthwhile on socketed helms. The respective Flawless Square gems usually jump in value far, far more than their Radiant Star counterparts.

Hmmm, so I guess I would say socketless Helm of Commands with fantastic rolls and Flawless Square Amethysts would be good speculator items right now.

did anyone play in the beta? or at blizz con? Didn't they have pvp there?

for me, d2 was all about getting gear FOR pvp... that rush, that thrill, can't be beat!

Vit/Life i figure you are going to want huge pools of hp. Average dmg of people is +100k even if you have 80% dmg reduction they kill you in 5 hits. I have the feeling people are going to be one shotting and be one shotted. Fast paced PvP.

Im really not sure how bliz is going to balance PvP it seems impossible.

Posted by mantice at 12/03/2012 11:28 AM

Im really not sure how bliz is going to balance PvP it seems impossible.

I think that's why it's taken this long :-P

Posted by Jhonka at 12/03/2012 11:56 AM

Posted by mantice at 12/03/2012 11:28 AM

Im really not sure how bliz is going to balance PvP it seems impossible.

I think that's why it's taken this long :-P

That's practically a thread on its own. Dreaming up the idea of offering 4-on-4 PvP sounds great in theory, but there's going to be no way to keep up with the degenerate team strategies. As soon as they nerf one OP strategy, a new one will pop up a few hours later.

Even worse, what if those strategies use a specific weapon? Within 6 hours, every team needs a DH with a Buriza (or whatever) to be competitive. The legendary weapons going for 15 million new go for 150 million. Blizzard either nerfs it or bans it entirely from the Arena and the weapon immediately drops back to 15 million having wiped out 135 million Gold of value instantly for a few hundred players.

PvP is all but guaranteed to cause them far more criticism than praise for months after release. I would be holding off on it as long as possible if I were them, too.

@ecocd Even if CC reduction doesn't actually become very useful we might see an initial spike in price, if only because it seems to be the most common stat that folks predict to increase in value when topics like this come up.

@yoyo DON'T TELL HIM THE SECRETS

IF YOU DON"T ONE SHOT ME I WILL ONE SHOT U

Meh. Personally I won't mind if Diablo3 never sees PVP.
Its an ARPG, pvp shouldn't even factor in this game.

But I guess I have the minority opinion.

As soon as PVP comes out they will start nerfing skills left right and center to attempt to balance the impossible.
And this will only hurt the normal game balance.

PVP requires balance across classes to work. The only way to balance stuff is to make skills from different classes do more and more the same. Hence... no more diversity.

Posted by Bort at 12/03/2012 10:27 PM

Meh. Personally I won't mind if Diablo3 never sees PVP.
Its an ARPG, pvp shouldn't even factor in this game.

But I guess I have the minority opinion.

As soon as PVP comes out they will start nerfing skills left right and center to attempt to balance the impossible.
And this will only hurt the normal game balance.

PVP requires balance across classes to work. The only way to balance stuff is to make skills from different classes do more and more the same. Hence... no more diversity.

That hit the point @Bort
And the casual player/farmer like me will have to start over every other day.
I hope they find a way to not hurt normal players to much.

Posted by Bort at 12/03/2012 10:27 PM

Meh. Personally I won't mind if Diablo3 never sees PVP.
Its an ARPG, pvp shouldn't even factor in this game.

But I guess I have the minority opinion.

As soon as PVP comes out they will start nerfing skills left right and center to attempt to balance the impossible.
And this will only hurt the normal game balance.

PVP requires balance across classes to work. The only way to balance stuff is to make skills from different classes do more and more the same. Hence... no more diversity.

You & me both are in the minority opinion, I guess. Never cared much for PvP & definitely am not about to start playing it now.

It's been forever since I played D2, but if I recall correctly, there were no actual "stuns" allowd in D2's PvP, were there? Instead, an ability that would normally "stun" a monster would only "slow" another player. Otherwise it'd be way too easy to simply stun lock your opponent & they'd never be able to respond, period. If so, I imagine D3 will be more of the same. In which case the CC Reduction might help to reduce the amount of time you're "slowed" from what normally would have been a stun...? Unsure.

Posted by Bort at 12/03/2012 10:27 PM

Meh. Personally I won't mind if Diablo3 never sees PVP.

_b

I'm banking on PvP skills, dmg, deductions, nerfs,will be PvP only. I think it won't carry over to the whole game, just arena.

@bort @h311o @eastdragon42

I have a personal vendetta against you all. I'm going to kill you when PVP comes out!

=p

Posted by Buzzell at 12/05/2012 06:32 AM

@bort @h311o @eastdragon42

I have a personal vendetta against you all. I'm going to kill you when PVP comes out!

=p

So I only have to avoid the arena lol
But meh maybe I'll investigate in PVP sometimes

Posted by eastdragon42 at 12/04/2012 12:55 AM

It's been forever since I played D2, but if I recall correctly, there were no actual "stuns" allowd in D2's PvP, were there? Instead, an ability that would normally "stun" a monster would only "slow" another player. Otherwise it'd be way too easy to simply stun lock your opponent & they'd never be able to respond, period. If so, I imagine D3 will be more of the same. In which case the CC Reduction might help to reduce the amount of time you're "slowed" from what normally would have been a stun...? Unsure.

There were a couple builds in D2 that stun locked the other player. Smiters could stun lock the player unless they had a lot of faster hit recovery. There were a couple others too that I can't remember.

I've never been a huge fan of PVP. D2 always just seemed to be whoever hits the other person first wins, and that isn't fun to me, it's just boring and pointless.

Posted by NightCrawler9 at 12/05/2012 10:04 AM

There were a couple builds in D2 that stun locked the other player. Smiters could stun lock the player unless they had a lot of faster hit recovery. There were a couple others too that I can't remember.

I've never been a huge fan of PVP. D2 always just seemed to be whoever hits the other person first wins, and that isn't fun to me, it's just boring and pointless.

Yes, if stunning is at all possible in pvp, then it does become totally pointless cause whoever hits first pretty much automatically wins...which is why I thought they made it impossible to do in D2. Guess I was wrong. Then again, I never played PvP anyway, so it's not surprising that I got my info wrong...