PvP in New World IMO is trash. It is a clunky mess, filled with unbalanced weapons, clearly superior weapons within their own category, and mediocre perks for reaching certain stat thresholds. PvP across the board needs vast improvement if this game is going to come anywhere close to being a true PvP game. AGS has stated that they love PvP and PvE equally, they love players who enjoy both, and that they do not have a favorite. In reality however PvE is blatantly superior, especially when PvP offers 0 benefits to your growth. Below are changes I believe are mandatory.
- Region Specific Automatic PvP Flagged Zones
Summary
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Great Cleave, Shattered Mountain, & Edengrove should be changed to PvP zones. Meaning as soon as you enter the area you are automatically flagged for PvP.
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All Resources, chests, and enemies within this zone should spawn 50% faster than anywhere else in the game, and provide 50% better rewards. This means 50% more experience, 50% more weapon mastery, 50% more luck for drops from enemies and chests, and 50% more rewards for all Town Board and Faction based quests.
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Upon death in this zone 10% of the cost to repair your gear is dropped as gold, which can be looted. ( The gold dropped is generated on your death, and not taken from the player killed ) On top of this half of the resources you have gathered are dropped on death.
With this change these 3 zones become the most valuable place to be in the game for both PvE players, and PvP players. PvE players will level up faster, get resources faster, and improve their skills faster. PvP will have the opportunity to profit from PvP by attempting to kill players in these zones. Likewise it becomes a good area to learn to PvP and practice PvP Strategies to be used in future wars for territory in the main land. Never will players have to ask where should I level, where is the best place to gather X, where can I level my weapon the fastest, or where can I go to make a lot of money. All the answers will be to go here. Players who hate PvP can ignore this area, except for quests that are located here, and with a majority going here, that means there will be more free resources to gather safely in the main land. Good luck running a bot here cause every one gets free reign to kill them indiscriminately with 0 risk.
- Clunky Weapons & Skills
Summary
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All weapons in NW are clunky to use, have built in roots, slows, or long animation locks. The worst kinds of PvP are the ones where you lose control of your character, where combat is not fluid, and where you are offered 0 options to counter a specific type of damage, or CC.
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Allow all players to dodge out of any animation they are currently in, and give players damage and CC immunity for the entire duration of their dodge animation.
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Allow players to tab target a specific player and have all melee attacks / melee skills automatically track towards their target.
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Make weapon swapping instant, allowing for more fluid combos and uses of a variety of weapon combinations which currently are not viable, especially when you can get stunned / staggered or CC that cause your weapon to stay in your hand, but it shows your weapon was swapped and your sitting there trying to use your bow skills while you have a spear in your hand.
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Once a player has been stunned, frozen, or other form of CC, prevent them from being inflicted with another stun for at least 3 seconds entirely. Being chained with various forms of CC infinitely until you are dead is unbalanced and unfun.
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Remove ammunition from the game, especially with Mutations coming which will add a 500 + gold cost to running them for ranged players. Add the damage boost from ammo to the rarity of the weapon used, with higher rarity ranged weapons having a higher damage multiplier.
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Increase the Thrown Weapon perk for hatchets to 120% weapon damage instead of the like 95% it currently is. Likewise change one of the perks to increase the damage of Thrown Axes by 25% for each consecutively landed Thrown Axe & or Throwing Tree Skill, making that tree actually viable. Make dodging attacks boost the damage of the next Thrown Axe or Throwing Tree Skill.
- Hitboxes & Collision Boxes
Summary
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Make hit boxes larger. For specifics:
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Make the crawling skeleton hitbox larger so you don’t need to look down to hit them. Same thing for all skeletons laying on the ground.
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Make all Dog / Wolf / Lynx etc. (insert dog like enemy here) hitboxes larger. During the grit attack they have wonky hitboxes that make most of your hits miss. When they dodge they cant be hit during the animation. You can see this easily when using Spears & Hatchets, which make these enemies harder to hit than almost any other enemy in the game.
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Large enemies like Bears and all reskins of them have a collision box that extends to far in front of them. This means trying to hit these enemies head on directly in front of them will cause all your attacks to miss, due to the collision box preventing you from getting close enough. Your weapon is definitely to short with the Hatchets, and even with the long Spear, you still can not hit them head on. A bear standing on its 2 feet during one of its idle animations makes this clear, as you can not even stand directly in front of them.
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Enemies larger than bears also have some overly large collision boxes, work on those.
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As for PvP, you can have very poor hit detection with ranged weapons, particularly when aiming for the head. I have seen arrows for example go through heads and not register, or sometimes even through the body. I am almost entirely sure this issue is due to ranged shots not being centered, and instead coming from the right side of the screen. This means at certain angles arrows can fail to land, especially as enemies get closer to you. Just in general however a larger player hitbox would be nice for ranged gameplay, as landing shots on moving targets with bows, muskets, or thrown hatchets is already difficult, especially with the weapon drop (excluding muskets hit scan).
@ApricotScarf responded recently to a complaint about bow hitboxes as possibly lag. However that is not the case for everyone. I personally have 50 ping on my server, with nearly 1GB download speed and I experience issues with arrows passing through enemy hitboxes, and not registering at all, all the time in both PvE and PvP. An easy target to test this on is dogs. It is not difficult to shoot one of those enemies in the head from its left or right side, and it literally does nothing. It is not only annoying, but a waste of money in the form of lost ammo.
- OPR & Kills
Summary
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The player who did the most damage to a player who is downed should be rewarded with the kill, regardless of who ever kills a downed player. We don’t need players running around waiting for someone else to down someone so they can swoop in and steal the kill and then run off. If someone else kills a player someone else downed, they should be rewarded with an Assist.
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I am at least optimistic about the future of OPR with the changes suggested by @Chardis
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Players who are not actively participating in combat, attacking, or defending should get kicked from the OPR and be given a temporary ban from participation in future OPR’s for a period of time, with repeated behavior resulting in a ban from participating in the activity at all.
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There should be a level 30-59 OPR with damage scaling lowering the damage of higher level players to those lower level than them. Currently there is no way for players to participate in PvP really until max level. Flagging in the open world for PvP for leveling players is like asking a level 60 to kill them for a free trip back to town.
- PvP Gearing
Summary
- Players who participate in PvP activities exclusively have no way to gain expertise and reach a gear score of 600. Players who participate in successful wars / invasions / defenses of territory, along with winning in OPR should receive a new currency which allows them to buy gear, or patterns for crafting gear which can get them to GS 600. If PvP and PvE are to be equal, you should be able to make equal progress across the board if you only enjoy one or the other. This higher GS gear and patterns could be obtained from their Faction Representative, and the currency could be Infamy Tokens or Infamy Reputation.
- Animation Locking / Infinite Animations
Summary
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Multiple changes by AGS over time makes combat more clunky by preventing animation canceling. Many Skills have long animation locking. These are unfun mechanics.
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Being hit in the middle of multiple animations causes a plethora of problems.
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If you are swapping weapons and get hit or CC, your weapon will swap in the bottom right, but your weapon stays in your hand and is never actually swapped.
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If you attempt to eat food for a food buff and get hit, you can get stuck in the animation for as long as you keep getting hit, meaning you are stuck in that animation until you eventually die.
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If you attempt to jump or climb something, then get hit, there are a plethora of animation bugs that can occur in that instance, from the climbing animation, to the falling animation.
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Somewhere I saw a change that intends to make using skills when your weapon is sheathed impossible. IMO this is terrible and should not happen. I feel bad for all the rapier and great axe users who are going to cry if that happens. On top of that I don’t even see the point of the change.
I am not sure really what kind of combat style AGS is going for. No one wants clunky combat. If anything we want as smooth and fluid of a combat system as possible. We want the fluidity of combat in games like Black Desert or Elder Scrolls Online, even Albion Online has better combat . . . .
- Skill Trees
Summary
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All skill trees need to be looked at. Every single weapon has a superior side to use, and a significantly inferior alternative tree that no one really cares about and if anything they only take passives from.
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Diversity should be opened by adding options, passives, and perks that synergize with other weapon types you can swap to.
- Casting Times
Summary
- Casting times for skills should be instant, with smart casting when possible for skills like bows rain of arrows, and other ground targeted effects. Many games have smart casting for skills, the option here would be nice.
- Stat Benefits
Summary
- Some stats give some pretty mediocre rewards at certain thresholds. Especially con which is often heavily invested in by players who use weapons that stun. However since stun is trash in all situations except 1 v 1 scenario’s any benefit around stun is essentially worthless. Increased durations of stuns is pretty useless when in all situations that stun is instantly canceled. Slows and roots are generally short and as such this increased duration is negligible. I would much rather see 300 con users, players who are Tanks, get a flat reduction in damage received which will allow them to effectively tank like they are supposed to, especially with mutators.