credentials: top 20 on 5 classes for Season 1, #1 cbt1/2 pvp, #15 in kms2 pvp, ms2 pvp discord, lionheart

Visual form (Trello): https://trello.com/b/9C5Hy8iD/ms2-pvp

tl;dr List of Faults (sorted by Priority):

1. new PVP Gear causing imbalances (specifically Wiz/Knight, and Sin being weak)
2. Open Shadow World PVP STILL being UNBALANCED (attacks stun you forever since it considers players = PvE mob)
3. House PVP (Balanced) does not activate PvP Gear.
4. PVP Gear Accessories don't have Attack Speed (nerfs the low tier classes)

Suggestions to Fix:

1. Negate Knight's Perfect Guard, Nerf Wizard weapon values, Buff Assassin weapon values.
2. Change Shadow World PVP's buff to Red Arena buff.
3. Change House PVP buff to Red Arena buff.
4. Bring back Attack Speed on Accessories (around 10%)

Note: These are all fairly simple changes, not requesting some huge system changes! Mainly just number tweaks.

Below I expand on the above ideas.

1. Pros/Cons of the new Scoring System:

Pros:

• Players can more easily reach Platinum Ranking. This can be changed by lowering requirements of Platinum.
• High Ranked players can finally reach Grand Champion easier with LOTS of playtime.

Cons:

• Players will get stuck. Someone can bounce between 30 and -30 if there are only 3 people in queue.
• Lower Ranked Players will have less incentive to queue against a higher player. Currently the most incentive for this system goes to the high ranked player (assume 90% winrate). The old system rewards a lower ranked player beating a higher ranked player. They can lose 5 matches and win 1 match and come out ahead in points.
• Since it makes it scary for newer players, less people will queue, which eventually makes Grand Champ vs Bronze (already happens with the old system, but Bronze player only loses 5 pts, very small)
• Players who want to try new classes/alt characters can't catch up, since there's no way to gain extra points by beating better players while having low MMR (no winstreaks or 45)
• Makes the ranked leaderboard more grindy, rewards playtime over anything else.
• Requires large playerbase to matchmake properly (historically there are hours with very few players, or even a dead queue)

Hearthstone is an example of a game with static points for the people's rankings. But they have A HUGE PLAYERBASE which supports this type of ladder, skill floors where you can't derank, and they have winstreaks implemented, which makes this system much more reasonable. Overwatch is another game that had it implemented in early seasons, then got taken out and was disliked.

2. How to fix Shadow World and House PVP:

Currently, the most balanced version of pvp is Red Arena and Maple Arena (agreed by community and balanced for by the original korean devs)

Here's the tooltip for the Red Arena buff. The tooltip is not completely accurate or detailed, but you get the idea, it balances pvp properly.

Compare it to the tooltip of House PVP buff and Shadow World PVP buff. One doesn't rebalance properly, the latter doesn't give enough HP or rebalance skills for "stun immunity".

I'll go over Shadow World first since it is the more unplayable version. Currently, Knight can 100% cc lock you by chaining spin and typhoon. This is because players are treated like a PVE mob, similar to how Knights cc lock ads in cdev. To fix, the devs just need to enable a different pvp buff in Shadow World, and we suggest using the current Red Arena buff which "grants immunity to stun" (which really means disabled pve staggers). That part of the buff/code disables PVE stuns and staggers, and should be in open world pvp. Why would there be balance for PvP skills if it isn't being USED in open world PvP? The Red Arena buff also gives the proper amount of HP to players so they don't get one shot. In Shadow World, it's currently around 50k hp (1150% of 4.5k HP), and in Arena, it's 100-200k HP. But what we suggest is probably closer to 300k HP, since the damage on weapons won't be properly scaled to PVP since it needs to hit PVE mobs as well. Ideally, there would be a system that calculates your damage differently when you try to attack a PVP player, but that might be too complex of a change.

Next is House PVP. It's very close to Red Arena, but it's missing some minor balance adjustments for some reason. Mainly: Revenge buff at 25% hp is not active, and Berserker/Knight's halved skill effects. Currently some of their skills work at full effect rather than half (Zerk can heal 60% of their hp). Another change that would help equalize would be to reduce the Attribute Point differences by giving all players 70 points in HP. Currently a new character with no prestige will be heavily disadvantaged without the 70 AP that most players have.

So with these new changes, we suggest a new Tooltip: "Fighting Instinct - PVP Activated. Increases Health and rebalances Skills, Enchants, and Attributes for PVP. Removes Buffs." This is for clarity and accuracy, unlike the other tooltip which promises "immunity to stun". This will be used for both Arena and House. Shadow World would require slightly different values or a new system, so it could use a buff with a different name.

3. Perfect Guard, Evasion, and Class Balancing

Perfect Guard introduces a free 15% RNG to block/evade any move for Knight. The only way to counteract is it to get 15% Piercing, which usually you can get from certain PVP gear, but usually not a full 15% chance. We think the RNG should be negated completely by just reducing the Perfect Guard stat to 0% (on Knight shield). Not only is it inherently unintuitive and a hidden stat in general, it makes Knight a little too strong right now that you need to build specific stats to not miss important skills.

Evasion can either be negated similarly or at least reduced enough that requires a player to sacrifice 1 accessory slot to compensate. Current classes that have innate evasion through SP: Thief, Ranger, Runeblader, SoulBinder.

On class balancing: Currently classes are fairly balanced as-is. Changes aren't currently needed, but if the developers are willing to listen to community feedback, then the community could on which class they think is the weakest and some small number tweaks could be effective.

Example: Currently Sin and Ranger are agreed to be a bit weak in their numbers and toolkit in this version of MS2. A slight numbers increase on their PVP weapon would be enough to suffice. They don't have any auto-lose matchups, so it isn't a severe problem, but a tweak would be healthy.