How PvP is balanced

This is a first pass, and it is meant to be argued with. Every number below was measured on the live server, but numbers that survive a spreadsheet do not always survive a week of players. If something here feels wrong in play, say so — that is worth more to us than the table was.

If you only want to know how to fight, read Fighting Other Players instead. This guide is about why a fight goes the way it does, and what each thing you can buy is actually worth.

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What we were aiming at

Four things, in this order:

1. Trojan > Warrior > Fire Taoist ≈ Water Taoist > Archer in killing power, with the Trojan only narrowly ahead of the Warrior.
2. Gear has to matter. A fully enhanced player should beat a nearly-enhanced one decisively — not merely more often.
3. Nobody in matching gear should die to a single blow. A duel between equals should be a fight, however short.
4. A caster should not simply be a slower fighter. Its answer is reach, not toughness.

Everything below is what those four demands cost.

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The ladder: what one rung of +N is worth

Two Trojans and two Fire Taoists, identical in every respect except the enhancement on their gear — same class, same tier, same attributes, same super quality, same gems. This is the honest measurement, because only one thing differs.

And what that does when they meet:

Four rungs is the difference between winning and not being in the fight. That is deliberate, and it is the single sharpest edge in the game.

Two things in that table are worth understanding

Defence climbs faster than attack. Four rungs buy the Trojan 1.38× the attack but 1.61× the defence. This is why the gap looks so brutal from below: the higher-geared player is not only hitting harder, they are also taking much less. Both effects multiply.

A caster's ladder is shallower — but its magic is steeper. The Fire Taoist needs 2.3 blows to the Trojan's 1.5, because a spell's damage is its magic attack plus a large fixed number from the spell itself, and that fixed part does not grow with your gear. Yet its magic attack alone nearly doubles across those four rungs (1.90× against the Trojan's 1.38×). A caster in poor gear is much weaker than a fighter in poor gear; a caster in good gear catches up fast.

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Battle power is a fifth of the fight, on purpose

Your battle power is a score of the gear you are wearing — quality, sockets, gems, every rung of +N. The gap between two players swings the blow linearly: 2% per point, reaching at most 200% and never falling below 40%.

Between our +12 and +8 characters the gap is 28 points, which means the +12 hits for 1.56× and the +8 for 0.44× — a 3.5× swing, on top of their raw stats.

★ This is intentionally weaker than the classic rule, which multiplies by ten. One gem must not decide a fight.

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What each purchase is actually worth

★ Bless and Tortoise together are the most underrated build in the game. They stack until you are taking a tenth of what lands (the cap is 90%). Such a player takes about four times as long to kill as a normal one — while their own attack build, spent on defence instead, does about a third of the damage. Whether that trade is good is exactly the sort of thing a week of play will answer better than we can.

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The two limits you will notice

A skill can only multiply a blow by 150%. Some skills are written to hit for three times a normal swing. Against a monster they still do; against a player they are capped. Without this, one button ended every duel before either player's gear mattered.

Attack buffs can only double you. Intensify, Stigma and Superman stack multiplicatively and together used to sextuple a blow — which is the real reason two players once killed each other in a single hit. Against a player, the whole stack is worth at most 2×.

A bow is also divided by three against a player. That is not a penalty aimed at Archers — it is what buys them the reach and the rate of fire nothing else has.

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What your gear does to a person

Everything it does to a monster - as of 25 August, when the last of these was built:

• A freeze takes a player's controls for up to two seconds, and cannot be repeated for four more. Both limits exist because the alternative is a lock rather than a fight: a bow firing twice a second with a freezing quiver would otherwise hold you still until you died.
• Poison and fire burn for five seconds, and a burn that finishes you is a kill for whoever laid it.
• Reflect turns a player's blow around exactly as it turns a monster's, in melee and against skills alike.
• Dash charges a player, stuns them and shoves them a step back.
• An Archer spends an arrow on every shot at a player, and a Penetrating arrow ignores armour there too. A poisoned weapon poisons a person.

What still deliberately does not happen in PvP

• Lucky Time is one-way - no double hit and no moment of immunity against another player.
• Single-target casting is unreliable when the client's own aim is: the fallback looks for monsters, so a spell can land on the wrong thing in a crowd.
• The Arena costs nothing — no loot, no experience, no PK points.

These are choices, not oversights, and each of them is a system we would have to build rather than a number we could change. If one of them matters to you, it is worth asking for.

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How to argue with this guide

The most useful report is not "class X is too strong" — it is what you were both wearing and how many blows it took. That is the same measurement we tune from, and it lands straight in the model.

Two things especially worth telling us:

• A fight that ended in one blow between matching gear. That is the rule we most want to hold.
• A build that felt unbeatable. Especially a full Bless and Tortoise one — we know where that can go and we would rather hear it from you than find it later.

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Where to find them

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