As a WoW player who figures himself to be a competitive player type, I’d like to play the game with warmode on. Mostly for the reason of efficiency in aspects of the game that I do not enjoy too much like questing.
As such competitive player type Open World PvP can be very interesting and insightful of clever usage of game mechanics which only belong to the open world. But the hindsights sometimes translates to strategies, game knowledge and mechanic pratices which appears helpful to (re)grow to a pvp player.
As it appears crucial to be, such hindsights become meaningful when shifts the power in a confrontation due to some mechanical, strategic or knowledge improvement which highlights a “powerful move”.
For this being able to happen, both sides of the confrontation require to be roughly equal in power which is not the state of current Open World PvP. If you enter the maw, rather groups try to tackle you down, knock you over the cliff or start a stunlock in while being in combat with elite mobs.
It appears that open world pvp is not balanced in that regard. Meanwhile it sounds interesting to me to reimply pvp-scaling for open world pvp only, I’d rather look at the core of the problem: power. Power does not only translate to character strength but also groups and environmental advantages by class design and zone specifics.
My proposal trys to roughly balance the power of a confrontation and punishes an overuse of powerful strength. I think of a ranking system where you rank up when you succeed a confrontration and you drop when you lose. Character of higher ranks cannot start a fight with way lower ranks. Furthermore there is limit of involving characters in the confrontation like a shadowy duel. The amount of character who can participate determines of the difference in their rankings.
Since there is a raw sketch, it suffers of problems which have to be addressed briefly. These problems relate to “clever usage” or exploits to gain an overwhelming power due to the Duelmode.
The problem of encounters
If there is a group trying to do an encounter where healing and tanking appears to be crucial, the Duel Mode could be used just to hold somebody hostage or die due to the groups seperation. This problem can be confronted with either applying the usual Warmode meanwhile the encounter (when in group) or a PvP protection (when solo). This does not apply when already involved in a duel.
The problem of utility
When it comes to open world pvp mind control and knocks have a very high potential to erase characters of the existence. Meanwhile it is a clever use of game mechanics, it appears to be an abnormity in characters strength. This can be addressed with an increasing rank gain. This should apply in general to players who apply a spell rotation which is best discribed as “one shot” (e.g. convoke, final reckoning).
The problem of sustain
When it comes duels between healers or hybrid classes, there are matchups which appears unwinnable (atleast to my understanding of it) since one side does not have enough throughput and the counterpart has an easy-duel. The idea here belongs to a power shift meanwhile the duel. I think of a dampenig system which translates in healing decrease (for healers), sutainability decrease (for tank) and damage increase (for healers and tanks) in a short period.
This translates to another problem of stealth and cc-chains. Meanwhile being out of combat or hard cc’t, the duel-area should shrink. When fleeing of a duel it counts as a small win/loss and should result into a duel protection for a short time (e.g. 2 minutes).
Since I am not a native speaker, nor this sketch addresses all problems I did not even think of, I’d like to see it as an idea with the potential to grow. Please leave a comment of constructive criticism for either the idea or my language usage (to practice my english is also a reason to write this). Thanks for the read.