Skill Based PvP vs Random Number Generator Based PvP

[wehrmacht]

Why this thread exists

The creation of this post is due to the dark forces working behind the scenes, attempting to recreate the exact same resist system used on TZVZ for the P1999 PvP server. Why is this a problem you may ask?

In conventional Everquest PvP, the role of the random number generator wasn't very big. It really only affected caster nuke damage. If two melee were attacking each other, the amount of swings it took for one person to die, was large enough so the winner wasn't determined entirely by statistical variation. The sample size per fight was usually high enough that the winner or loser was determined solely by jousting ability.

Around Velious era, people that wanted to play PvP casters usually only played classes such as wizard and necro due to having spells with resist modifiers that always land. You can see where I'm going with this, the random number generator played little role in melee or caster PvP since most of the time people are casting spells that always land anyway.

Why TZVZ sucked

Now lets examine what TZVZ was like. The winner of many TZVZ fights was determined solely by things such as: did the wizard 8 second stun land or resist, paladin blind landing or resisting, whirl till you hurl landing or not, snare or root resisting or landing, mage pet stun or root resisting or not, the list goes on and on.

TZVZ took an almost entirely skill based PvP system (assuming each person was of similar gear) and utterly destroyed it by introducing enormous RNG variables into every fight.

Why would anyone want to play in a system like that? If the winner or loser of a fight is solely determined by the random number generator so much of the time, you might as well just play russian roulette with a handgun instead. It's the same difference.

As you can see from the other resist balance thread, virtually nobody agrees with how it should be. Half the people want some kind of caster's paradise, the other half want things to be just like EQ live during this period. All I know is that RNG played a much smaller role on EQ live than it did on TZVZ and it should be the same way on P1999 red server. If you want to leave RNG for spell casting damage since it's more "live like" then that's fine. But the other stuff needs to go since EQ PvP was not so dependent on RNG based luck.

If you want to go one step further and completely remove RNG from spell casting PvP, then you can do the following:

Change the resist system from avoidance based to mitigation based

If you ever played DAoC before, then you know what I'm talking about. This means that direct damage spells land every time with no full resists and your resist stat lowers how much damage you take by a fixed percent instead.

The following is just an example, the actual numbers aren't important. Benefits would decrease the higher in resist you went:

First 100 fire resist lowers damage 30%
Second 100 fire resist lowers damage 20%
Third 100 fire resist lowers damage by 10%

I would implement this only for damage spells. Spells like blind would obviously not work with this system and would need to follow normal magic resists from EQ live instead. Otherwise some guy could just stand there and chain cast blind on you over and over while his friend beats you to death as your screen flickers on and off. Same thing with root.

For stuns, I would let them land every time with the resist stat altering duration. Put level caps on them so only one will work against equal level players. Otherwise, people will load up 10 of them and perma lock people.