Does PvP require skill, or does the player with better items win?

[Gillingham]

I just started the game, but I’m unsure about continuing. Are PvP battles (either multiplayer or 1v1) truly skill-based, or does the character with higher damage win?" If it's skill-based, i'll continue because i really love this world.

[Kyutaru]

It's an RPG. So stats are your strength rather than skill. I can buff up by damage then fire a Flash Wave and one hit your guild's squishies. So nah, it's about big numbers and spending to achieve them earlier than other people.

[glaphen]

I mean zerg vs zerg only requires skill in strategy, items hardly even matter for that. 3 vs 3 I feel takes skill, I had all blue with no traits and won against whale teams many times, especially in the map with holes that you can push people off the whole match making it a 3 vs 2, there's also supposed to be 12 vs 12/24 vs 24/48 vs 48 battlegrounds released this month in Korea. There's not even much you can pay to win gear at this point anyway, trait prices are going down, and that's the only thing you can pay for and have a limit, runes won't really be pay to win at all, trait resonance will be but very minor stat differences, future artifacts probably aren't either at all.

[sEver]

Gear advantage helps you a lot, but you're never going to be resistant to everything.
There are rock-paper-scissors relationships, and anyone can be killed if outnumbered.

The space for skill in small scale pvp is mostly in knowledge of various classes, anticipating their actions and timing your defenses. PvP is extremely CC heavy, and most people with skill issues have no idea how to work around that, yet in this CC heavy situation, some are getting more kills than others.

In the official discord we see people who have spent 2-3k euros on lucent to gear out to the maximum possible power level and they're still frustrated with losing arenas.

If you watch some vids about small scale pvp on the lizard island, you can see there is a lot of place for skill in small scale pvp.

In the large scale it's much more random, no gear is going to save you if you're focused, and as the bro above me said: Flash Wave needs a nerf XD

[[巨人]]

relax! there is no PVP in this game, only Quests and Dungeons

[Varien]

I find the best way to stay alive is... not get hit... I usually don't know what kills me, I just die lol.

[shovelhead108]

Most all pvp in this game is high level, high gear score players ganking lower level players in peace zone events, forcing night, and forcing peace events into pvp events. The map will still say peace even though its in now in pvp mode. I always wonder why all these pvp players are in low level questing zones where they know the players they encounter are neither looking for pvp nor are they geared or skilled in pvp.

[Honorable Harbinger]

At 3k Gearscore now as an FTP player, I can ensure you, there is no PVP in this game. There is the 2 Meta classes that demolish anything else regardless of your gear, effort, or talent. A swiper will absolutely win and stay at the top no matter the time investment as a FTP.

PVP is a joke in this game, and the likely reason I will stop playing, Aion had awesome pvp, this is trash.

There is a very distinct reason you will never keep up with a swiper as well, and that is the time gated content. At level 50 you will have 10 contracts, 3 dungeons, and about 30 minutes worth of open world dungeon you can do every single day to keep up with the swipers. It would take months of this to get to max gear score, by the time you are there, the next gear will be out and swiped for already.

[glaphen]

Originally posted by shovelhead108:

Most all pvp in this game is high level, high gear score players ganking lower level players in peace zone events, forcing night, and forcing peace events into pvp events. The map will still say peace even though its in now in pvp mode. I always wonder why all these pvp players are in low level questing zones where they know the players they encounter are neither looking for pvp nor are they geared or skilled in pvp.

Nothing of what you said is correct, you cannot force PvP anywhere but the bosses when it's not night and then some specific person uses a 12 hour cooldown eclipse. If it's a Dominion event then it's PvP, doesn't matter if it's low level event, people are going to be there.

[glaphen]

Originally posted by Honorable Harbinger:

At 3k Gearscore now as an FTP player, I can ensure you, there is no PVP in this game. There is the 2 Meta classes that demolish anything else regardless of your gear, effort, or talent. A swiper will absolutely win and stay at the top no matter the time investment as a FTP.

PVP is a joke in this game, and the likely reason I will stop playing, Aion had awesome pvp, this is trash.

There is a very distinct reason you will never keep up with a swiper as well, and that is the time gated content. At level 50 you will have 10 contracts, 3 dungeons, and about 30 minutes worth of open world dungeon you can do every single day to keep up with the swipers. It would take months of this to get to max gear score, by the time you are there, the next gear will be out and swiped for already.

And what do you think they can swipe for, the most they can do is buy the better gear drops faster, when tier 2 is released traits will be 10x cheaper since there's a billion traits across the server collected and blessing will give you anything that could ever be expensive for free. There's literally nothing left to buy once you are fully traited, an omega whale can buy purples to reroll trait resonance to change 1 stat to another for barely any gains.

[Kyutaru]

Two things:

1) The limited gear doesn't matter because people are able to share their drops. The game is built entirely around the lucent machine. The auction house is how you are MEANT to get gear EVEN as a F2P. You will get drops you cannot use for your class. So you SELL them and buy drops you CAN. You can even craft to turn your drops into lithographs, which sell for even more money than traits. Every player in the game is getting drops every day. If everyone shared their drops with each other, everyone would be geared by now.

Which brings me to...

2) Prices are set by players. Looking between early access servers and launch servers, the launch AH prices are significantly cheaper due to fewer whales and less competitively greedy players. Players dictate all the prices, not the game. The game is only as pay to win as players allow it to be. Everyone COULD be listing their stuff for 10 lucent each. But they don't want to. The community is solely responsible for trying to extort each other for more than what is fair. A queen staff selling for thousands of real life dollars, 250,000 lucent, it purely the result of player greed. Not the developer or the game's design.

Failing to understand how the game is structured is your own shortcoming. The game's not the problem, the people playing it are. And rather than being the one that's different, or rather than capitulating and becoming like the rest of the merchants, you give up and complain because you lack the understanding to see how this is entirely due to a lack of patience and a compulsive spending habit on the part of the playerbase who even BUYS these listed products.

[NotxEevee]

Originally posted by Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov:

I just started the game, but I’m unsure about continuing. Are PvP battles (either multiplayer or 1v1) truly skill-based, or does the character with higher damage win?" If it's skill-based, i'll continue because i really love this world.

It's swipe to win and gear based.

[Eido]

If items didn't make a difference in pvp, no one would want to get them, so you wouldn't need to do pve. The only issue is that items don't make too much of a difference

[Kyutaru]

Originally posted by Eido:

If items didn't make a difference in pvp, no one would want to get them, so you wouldn't need to do pve. The only issue is that items don't make too much of a difference

Clearly you haven't fought whale guilds. Even at 3400+ gear score, the whale guilds are still nearly impossible to fight. They all have so much evasion that they take no damage most of the time and can't be CCed half the time. Then there's stuff like Queen Belly's staff. That is a MASSIVE gamechanger for the guild that owns it. That staff breaks raids. Stats can have a huge impact on your performance in this game, and paying is the best way to stack them. Evasion is such a stat that it only matters if you stack it very high, which you can't do unless you bought all your traits in a rush instead of slowly gearing up. Try hitting someone with 1.7k+ evasion. It's a struggle.

~~~

Ultimately, players are playing the game wrong. They play it like those card game kids who open a pack of 15 random cards and keep them all. No, bad, that's not what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to keep the ONE card from the pack you actually plan on using for your deck and SELL the other cards to get more packs. Do the same with items in this game. No reason to hold onto your gear or dissolve it into useless purple dust. Selling it to buy more gear is the game. And oh boy does stuff sell, making thousands of lucent every week from it. Some people who sold the first items at launch made way more but prices are starting to settle. Instead you have people complaining that they ran the same dungeon 20 times and didn't get the drop they wanted. Hello? You got all those OTHER drops and Dungeon Tokens too! Either craft the bag containing the drop you want or sell all the loot you did get and buy the one you want.

People need a freaking tutorial on how to play the game, I swear.

[JoeW]

pvp is just cc and statchecking, hardly any skill involved

[glaphen]

Originally posted by Kyutaru:

Originally posted by Eido:

If items didn't make a difference in pvp, no one would want to get them, so you wouldn't need to do pve. The only issue is that items don't make too much of a difference

Clearly you haven't fought whale guilds. Even at 3400+ gear score, the whale guilds are still nearly impossible to fight. They all have so much evasion that they take no damage most of the time and can't be CCed half the time. Then there's stuff like Queen Belly's staff. That is a MASSIVE gamechanger for the guild that owns it. That staff breaks raids. Stats can have a huge impact on your performance in this game, and paying is the best way to stack them. Evasion is such a stat that it only matters if you stack it very high, which you can't do unless you bought all your traits in a rush instead of slowly gearing up. Try hitting someone with 1.7k+ evasion. It's a struggle.

~~~

Ultimately, players are playing the game wrong. They play it like those card game kids who open a pack of 15 random cards and keep them all. No, bad, that's not what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to keep the ONE card from the pack you actually plan on using for your deck and SELL the other cards to get more packs. Do the same with items in this game. No reason to hold onto your gear or dissolve it into useless purple dust. Selling it to buy more gear is the game. And oh boy does stuff sell, making thousands of lucent every week from it. Some people who sold the first items at launch made way more but prices are starting to settle. Instead you have people complaining that they ran the same dungeon 20 times and didn't get the drop they wanted. Hello? You got all those OTHER drops and Dungeon Tokens too! Either craft the bag containing the drop you want or sell all the loot you did get and buy the one you want.

People need a freaking tutorial on how to play the game, I swear.

Uhh no I ran Karnix 42 times as sword/bow and didn't get a single weapon, I also only got 6 purples total, and only 1 was worth selling, even though it's a 38% chance for a purple, so some people didn't get all those other drops...
Queen Bellandir staff looks like complete garbage, it's a 5% on burning with staff skills, they have almost no burns of value, a 12 second cooldown slow to cast triple use skill that you can turn into only 1, that's at most a 15% chance, 3 meter AoE size you can add is nothing, another 3 meter AoE that only inflicts on heavy attack or already burning, and the slow to cast meteor skill that should be killing in the first place, otherwise they have to turn their mobility skill into a long range small AoE field that only inflict burn every second, and most of the burns don't even have a 100% chance of landing in the first place. All that for damage that only happens 3 seconds later, which you can move away from your allies or cleansed in that time anyway. If it applied on all burning it would be broken, but staff has the worst burning.