I am one of the long time D2 PVP’ers too, I can hardly find competitive games that are more fun and rewarding than PVP is in D2. Of course it’s totally imbalanced, of course it has dozens of flaws, but it is fun.
Since 1.09 I have been playing most D2classic PVP, but I play LOD too. In D2classic amazons are really the worst class, but every other class has some use. What makes D2classic a lot more balanced is the fact that items are quite basic. We have sojs, twitch and some other usefull uniques. We have angelics, but what we have most of all is rares. Rares like Executioner’s with 230+ damage, +2 barb skills, -40 req are what we MF for. Amulet’s with +2 skills, 10+ str, 10 fcr, 40+ life, res all etc. I hope the glory of rare’s come back in D3, because it is so much more fun when everyone has different items. But I think rare’s should have a pretty high chance of being usable, a rare chance of being good and a real rare chance of being super. This way everyone who doesn’t want to farm for the best items, can still compete in PVP with his decent items. Skill > items, but with same skill the one with better items wins.
They should also not make the stupid rock<paper<scissors<rock balancing they have in WoW, I do not like being killed by someone because they are the paper to my rock.. I want them to kill me because they are better.
Also with Bnet2.0 I expect them to have ladders, observers and broadcasting, since the platform is made for it we want it for D3 too.
I am fine with them not wanting to make D3 PVP an Esport game, but I think it is in potential a better competative game than WoW is. When people see WoW Arena, they don’t know whats going on. Even people that play WoW casually don’t have a clue what is going on in the Arena. The overview is crappy, the “pro” moves are not really visible etc, even the commentators miss half the kills and good moves. That is what makes SC the best Esport game, everyone who watches it can see that the army wiping out the other army is the winner, everyone can see that a backdoor attack with dropships that kills a lot of drones etc has great effect on the victims economy. In D3 you have a good overview, you can see who is been hit with what attack (something you cant even see in WoW), you can see who is on the defensive, you can see the good moves etc. This makes D3 potentially a better Esports game than WoW can ever be.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I need’t to get it out of my system

You would think by now that people would learn that nerfing PVE skills because of PVP is not the smartest thing to do. Nor is it efficient. Many games are good examples of this.
The game is focused on co-op PVE and should have the first priority. Is PVP important? Yes. Is it more important than PVE in Diablo or any ARPG? Debateable. I’d say no.

Completely seperate modes, completely seperate games, and it should be treated as such.

I like the comments better than the guest article - but well, at least it made people to comment so it fulfilled its purpose .

I’m totally with Risingred - divide skills for PvE and PvP - or you get a mess where one side will always blame the other. You don’t need every skill twice for it, just use a system which differs the skill if the target is a PC instead of an NPC. So you can balance without affecting the other part of the game - which will suit players of both camps.

@Vandro: Well, all this overview you describe (and hope for) in D3 depends extremely on an spectator that can zoom out far enough. I sadly haven’t played D3 yet, but in D2, PvP overview sux just because of the fast movement of characters and the very poor resolution. Its not very entertaining imo seeing missiles of any kind (be it spell or physical) approaching from the border of the screen and killing you, without ever seeing the opponent.
At least in WoW you can see the whole Arena (but there are some LoS blocks, ofc) as an spectator and so follow the movement of every character. Should D3 use something similar, it has great potential for commentated PvP. Should it not, it will (hopefully) still be fun for those who play it, but probably not funny to watch

Any difference whatsoever in-game capacities of different combatants will make for “unbalanced” competitive play.  The only way to have perfectly balanced PvP is to make all the combatants exactly the same.

PvE balance should always trump PvP balance; that is to say, if the choice is between a PvE concession made for PvP or vice-versa, PvP should always make the concession.  Diablo is an action RPG property, after all.  The premise is taking a character through a series of adventures involving many other entities and interesting environments.  Jumping in and out of a town to wail on other players is not adventuring; PvP interaction in the Diablo franchise has been and should continue to be a decidedly secondary aspect of play.

Regardless, balancing a dual PvE/PvE title is always complicated.  For example, assume a slow-moving class has a preponderance of AoE spells that work great in PvE and are balanced well regards other characters’ PvE abilities.  They consequentially do less per-register damage than the powerful single strikes of a fast-moving class which specializes in cautious direct attacks.  How do you reconcile the situation?  Do you increase the damage of the AoE spells in PvP just to counter the massive damage disparity?  Of course you don’t, because then one AoE slowboat could take out multiple characters at once, putting single-strikers at a distinct disadvantage.  Perhaps you make it so the AoE effect doesn’t apply to PvP, but then you change the dynamics of the spell, confuse the playerbase and add another layer of complexity to your codebase.

Furthermore, balancing becomes vastly more complicated with every alteration of damage output.  Regards what we know of D3, damage output is affected by skills, item types, item modifiers and runes (five different ways).  Don’t forget that there are multiple damage types, that there may be effects over time issues to keep in check, and that ranged and melee interaction must be balanced. 

As I said earlier, Diablo as a franchise is a PvE experience first and a PvP affair second, and it’s likely created in this manner.  That is to say, the PvE game is given priority throughout production because it’s the meat and potatoes of the property.  Assuming you’re looking at a pretty solid and well-balanced PvE game, how hard would it would be to balance PvP without compromising the PvE experience?

Hahaha, you want perfectly balanced character classes for PvP while having differences between them, sorry can’t happen. What ever you do either class A will win other class B (more than is right IE 60%+ of the time) or Class A & B will be virtually the same.

As for what most important in diablo PvP or PvE well it’s PvE after all remove PvP and theres next to no change in the fell of the game. Remove PvE and well everything that makes it diablo is gone and you might as well be playing a 3rd person arena battle game.
Given this PvP SHOULD ALL WAYS BE SECONDARY TO PVE (IE if a change for PvP hurts the PvE aspect it should never be implemented the revese also applies to a slightly lesser extent).
If theres gonna be a very powerful item for class A ONLY then class B should of an item of equal power just for them somewhere and so on.

PVE should always be the focal point in Diablo. PvP is nice but I don’t recall all those people playing Diablo 1&2 for many years because of the pvp. Don’t mess with the winning formula of great pve and story with those epic cutscenes for Diablo 2 just because you want to have pvp in Diablo 3.

As someone who played Diablo 2 for many years solely for the PVP, and also competed on one of the top 5v5 teams season 2 in WoW, I am very much looking forward to what options we will be given with Diablo 3.

The two big things are going to be: Items, and PvP-friendly abilities. Assuming Blizzard spends a significant amount of time balancing the items, and makes sure every class has some form of PvP abilities, I have a good bit of faith in their ability to make PvP fun and exciting in Diablo 3.

I really think they should focus more on the 1v1 style of combat as opposed to group combat (ala-WoW) as its something I’ve been missing for a good long while. That’s just my two cents.

I very rarely got involved in PvP in Diablo 2, mostly because I was a 100% legit player and also because I never got into the whole grinding thing.  Heck, I only ever had two characters that completed the Hell difficulty, and I still think I got my money’s worth on the game considering the two or three hundred characters I must have played through over the years.

That said, I’m hoping the PvP in Diablo 3 can cater to more players than the hardcore.  A chance to dip my toe into the pool so to speak would be a nice break from the constant mob farming that made up my life in Diablo 2, mostly because I had 0% ability to be competitive in the PvP scene that exists.

However, no matter what they want to bring to the game for PvP, PvE should always get the bigger stick when it comes to things that have to be done for game balance.  Like the article mentioned, if a skill is perfect for PvE and horrible in PvP, you leave it alone.  The best of both worlds would of course be setups where PvP is on it’s own standalone room setup where skills function differently than a regular PvE room but who knows if that is even a possible at this point?

All I’m saying is that as great as I want PvP to be, as much as I want it to succeed and be a blast, if the PvE starts to get nerfed in order to make PvP more viable that will be the last time I play the game.

Class “imbalance” will always be there, it’s not only unavoidable, it makes the game fun.  Imbalances only matter at the top level of play anyway.  People need to quit whining about potential imbalances- even if there are some (and there will be), imbalances make the game more interesting.  Figure out how to overcome the imbalance, give yourself a chance to win.  That’s part of PvP.  You might need to remake your sprite a couple times to get it right.  Everyone whines about the “imbalances” in D2 PvP, but everyone plays the same types of characters, built according to the same methods.  Of course you face imbalances, you’re buying into the same rock-paper-scissors system as everyone else!  Invent something new, and you get outside the box.  For a couple months nobody knows what to do with you.  Eventually someone will figure out how to deal with the new threat, and then you have to start tweaking all over again.  That’s how the builds used in competitive D2 PvP evolved.  Sure, eventually you arrive at a kind of “end state” (D2 is there now), but that took years.  That was years of fun for the people involved who did something other than blindly copy char builds of d2jsp or these forums.

I don’t PvP much in any game at all, as most of the time you’re up against people who just can’t smear your defeat enough into your face, saying how imba they are and how godlike their equip is.
- I don’t mind losing(of course I do ), but I do mind being humiliated in the process.

If D3 gets a solid PvP part, cool - I, for one, won’t really care much about it. But if it’s going to be WoW all over again, with PvE being nerfed senseless to accomodate PvP, I’d rather not see PvP included at all.
Seriously, if Pacman was remade today, people would demand a PvP option in it…