PVP Brokenness & Thoughts to Fix It

vordayn

Being away for 1.5 modules, PvP is languishing more than ever. I thought Solo queues would have helped, but I spent about 20-30 minutes waiting for a queue to pop with solo queue. The population is so low. I see the same players over and over again, with very few new players mixed in, and the latter stand no chance against the established players.

My views on what is wrong:
1. Gap in stats - with the accumulation of modules, there is a definite power creep in player stats. This transitioned over to PvP, but is unhealthy to foster new player interest.
2. Class imbalances e.g classes which are over self-buffed / single rotate
3. No incentive to play PvP

What has improved:
1. Reduction self-healing - DCs and OPs and various sources of healing have been toned down. They are no longer invincible (except Healadins as pointed out by @etelgrin).

What needs to happen:
1. Neverwinter Combat League
2. System designers to look at the over-performing classes and balance them
3. Normalising stats (within PvP only) to narrow the IL divide

Here are some statistics on class performance in the top 100 Leaderboard as of today:

Top 100 as of 19/2/18

A snapshot:

Class composition top 100 PvP leaderboard:

Top 20	%	Top 50	%	Top 100	%
GF	35	GF	26	GF	21
TR	20	TR	22	TR	21
OP	0	OP	10	OP	15
GWF	10	GWF	10	GWF	10
CW	25	CW	14	CW	10
SW	0	SW	1	SW	10
DC	5	DC	12	DC	9
HR	5	HR	4	HR	4

As you can see in the top 20 players, more than 1/3 (35%) are GF. In the top 10 players, 6/10 (60%) are GF.

In the top 100 players, GF and TRs are represented as 1/5th of classes, and OPs 1/6 of classes. In comparison only approximately 1/10 are GWF, CW, SW and DCs, and 1/25 are HR.

Note, there are no SW or OP in the top 20, and in the top 50, there is only 1 SW and 2 HR.

Note: There are only 4 HRs in the top 100, so their stats are likely skewed.

Kills, Deaths and K:D Ratio

Class	Kills	Deaths	K:D
GF	73636	15695	4.7
TR	47707	4770	10.0
OP	19686	4942	4.0
GWF	35178	5124	6.9
CW	32526	9456	3.4
SW	11275	3465	3.3
DC	7580	3025	2.5
HR	6448	3426	1.9

One can see here that GFs killed a total of 73,636 times, compared that to the TR which killed 47,707 times, even though there were the same number of players.

The TR has a better K:D ratio due to their stealth and evasive abilities. The GWF also rates a mention with a good K:D ratio due to presumably their speed to evade death when imminent.

The HR has a K:D ratio even worse than the DC at 1.9 vs 2.5 respectively.

Kills and Deaths per person in the top 100 PvP leaderboard

	Kills per person	Deaths per person
GF	3506	747
TR	2272	227
OP	1312	329
GWF	3518	512
CW	3253	946
SW	1128	347
DC	842	336
HR	1612	857

This shows the number of kills and death on average each person-class did in the cumulative games i.e. [(total kills)/(total no. of the class)] to average out over-representation of classes

The GWF and GF leads with 3,518 and 3,506 respectively, followed by the CW at 3,253. High number of kills are expected of DPS classes. The GF is described as a 'Defender and Controller', yet ranks almost equal to the GWF in the total number of kills per class-person.

Compared to the GWF however, the CW died more frequently at 946 vs 512, expected of a squishier class.

The TR, OP and DC have good survivability at deaths per person-class at 227 vs 329 vs 336 respectively. The SW also had a respectable number at 347, presumably due to their mobility.

Not much is expected of the HR at this stage.

Discussion:

The developers have these statistics on hand, and yet there still remains an imbalance in the game.

The K:D ratios of the top 20, 50 and 100 players in solo-domination show how wide a gap the top players have in their ability to kills players (there must be a correspondingly poor death to kill ratio on the lower end of the leaderboard). This really represents the senseless slaughter of newer or less well-geared players.

To allow these inherent imbalances to continue, and with no incentive to play PvP, the devs will implicitly allow PvP to continue its slide towards stagnation.


In summary:

In anticipation for the PvP fixes, please take note of requests to see an improvement in the health of PvP. The Neverwinter combat mechanics are good, but the balancing has become way off.

I am hopeful that there may be changes, but the time waiting to see these improvements have persisted (in some cases) for 6+ mods now. While there have been attempts to improve things, the state of PvP now in terms of population is worse than it was 1.5 mods ago.

First the Foundry, now PvP. What else will you have left if you continue to neglect these aspects of your game?

vordayn

etelgrin said:

vordayn said:

What has improved:
1. Reduction self-healing - DCs and OPs and various sources of healing have been toned down. They are no longer invincible.

Healadin? One button to full health?

True, they do persist. I often see more OPs chasing the kills with stuns and Divine Judgement finishers.