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I didn't have any issues with the arena last night running the 64 bit client

In general AoE attacks do a lot less damage in PVP vs PVE, so nova, torrent and explosive blast aren't too great. Your best attacks will probably be snipe, power burst, and strangler. While frozen armor gives some elusivity, for survivability you're better off taking an epic pool with a resistance shield instead of a defense shield the way Diminishing Returns work in PVP. Paragon wiki has a good summary of differences in PVP vs PVE. https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Player_vs_Player#PvP_Gameplay_Differences Also phase shift and hiber both cause the NoPhase timer so you may want to only take one of them (though there's a case to be made for taking both).

FYI regular kickball on Wednesday isn't happening for the holiday season due to variable schedules and multiple PvP teams having things scheduled for the same time. But, impromptu kickballs at random times have had a lot of success getting going lately so keep an eye on the #arena discord channel and arena-chat in game for when things pop off.

Hazarding a few guesses Lots of people get busy and have different schedules during the holiday season 2 teams scrimming on the same night means fewer regulars to show up With teams having multiple scrims a week people are probably less interested in multiple kickball nights (either for match quality or burnout reasons) Retention of new players seems to be low - it's much harder to jump into these matches as someone trying PVP out than it was 5 months ago It's an awkward time for a weeknight (imo)

If you missed it there's some functionality with the pvpbot on the PVP discord and this spreadsheet, more info here. You can also generate a test server popmenu with all your enhancements using the bot and a Mids build file; example of use here.

For anyone who missed it or isn't on the PvP discord here is a spreadsheet of all the mids/pines builds that have been posted to the #build-discussion channel >>spreadsheet link<< Note that a lot of the builds are from people asking for advice which may not be the same as the builds that regular zone/arena PvPers are using. So don't necessarily use the builds as-is, use them as a starting point to make your own builds. There are some more notes on the second tab of the spreadsheet.

I want to add: everyone has very different versions of what's fun, so if you have a viewpoint or suggestion that you haven't seen mentioned be sure to voice it.

@CoHSlothbear4 Sure this is a good point, arena is not really accessible to new players and getting new people into it and giving them opportunities to improve is important. While we want to get new players involved that last note people were discussing is more addressing that we’re losing regulars at kickballs due to match quality issues and drafting limitations related to the large black team sizes. By splitting kickball into sort of 'regular' and 'competitive' sections you would get people only showing up for part of the night which would 1) allow people to choose which part of kickball to attend that would be more fun for them, 2) probably reduce average black team size if people are waiting till later to show up, 3) hopefully incentivize people interested improving and more competitive play. It could be done like only 1 night a week, or adding a 3rd night or something; just a discussion point from discord I wanted to loop in on the forums. And there’s also been talk by some people about a newbie friendly arena night which could be a better intro to arena than regular kickball.

I don't expect many 5v5s to be need to be run with this change, but if a second no-emp match/thunderdome is run at the same time the idea is everyone still gets to play every round if they want. Part of the issue is that if there's 25 people and only 2 emps (which I believe was the case on saturday) that would lead to a massive black team where not everyone gets picked anyway. Ideally we could run 2 games with healers at the same time and no one would have to sit, but that hasn't happened in a while. As long as a player has shown themselves to be vocal, on target, and survivable I think most people will pick them on weird-stuff, provided it's at least somewhat useful. But if you're coming in as a new player to kickball it's not unreasonable that a captain won't want to pick you on a Warshade, for example. There's a balance to strike between people the upset about matches being not competitive/fun and the people concerned about inclusivity/too many rules/accessibility that we're trying to find by trial and error with these changes. No changes to the emp drafting phase @Glacier Peak

Good feedback and discussion in the discord yesterday. Reading through and talking I got the feel for a couple points that seem to be the general consensus so we’ll make changes to the KB rules based on these. Solo emping in 8v8 sucks for both the emp and and their team, and the solo emp rule doesn’t to do enough to make the matches more fun for either team Matches actually with healers are more fun than those without, but there have been fewer people playing emps recently despite kb attendance still being high Running a match with a 1-emp team vs a 2-emp team usually results in imbalanced games (doubly so with the solo emp rule) So we’ll run with the following kickball format changes tonight (and probably moving forward): There’s no more "don’t target the solo emp rule" If there’s less than 4 healers limit match size 5v5. If there’s a large pool of people not picked they can run a ‘thunderdome’ at the same time, no black team afterwards Hopefully these should result in fun matches more often and incentivize people to switch/try out emping. Remember the mez changes are not on live yet so those rules are still in place. Some other points came up that might be worth further discussion here and on discord if you have thoughts, but no changes to kickball on for these yet. Allowing incan use on healers could partially address how high damage is right now as well as make it so they can be healed through 1 AP Only run the black team draft for part of kickball nights (e.g. only the first 2 hours on 1 night of kickball). This would keep KB inclusive for most of the night while also enabling some more competitive matches later on and be good incentive for people to looking improve their PvP.

Clicking on the link should download an .mxd file which can be opened in Mids.

Kickball is a pick up group-style arena night we do Weds and Saturdays on Indom. There's more info in the kickball forum thread as well as a primer I wrote up. Check out some of the stream vods on the channels linked at the bottom if you're interested in getting an idea of how it works. Organized PVP is based around calling targets so multiple people are attacking the same enemy and roguing is basically people purposely not attacking your team's target.

They're exchangeable enough that I wouldn't worry about having both. If you go defender I'd go /Ice right now since you can slot range bonuses in BFR and freeze ray. If you're playing in zones or smaller arena matches the play style starts to move away from spike damage and towards sustained damage where the extra ~15% heal value is nice. Also, having a better heal other sometimes means you can stay out of AP more often which can work in larger matches too depending who and what you're playing against. Plus you can slot BIB for damage 🙂 Larger matches if you're playing against a team that consistently targets you if you AP then having the dimension shift on the grav/emp is very useful for survival.

Seems like most people with both controller and defender emps are switching between them depending on the match/night, either AT works depending on where you'll be playing mostly (zone, kickball, scrims, match size, etc.) though grav/emp does seem to be the current trend. For range>heal you have a lot more leeway for your own+your target's positioning and you're more likely to be in range to heal people when you need to be which is important since heal timing is much more important than heal amount for most matches. A lot of the time your heals will be bringing your target to full too where extra healing bonuses wouldn't help. I haven't really run the numbers or anything, but I don't notice missing a little bit of healing bonus but I did notice switching to a higher range build. Usually it works better for people to set their team's target caller as waypoint rather than an emp.

We ran a PvP event on test tonight (~23 people for 3 hours) and having the fixed mez durations was great to have.

Congrats to Poned, Chris, and MJB on the win with the 6-1 record! Thanks to the 8 teams (~23 people) who came out and played and all the people who made their characters last minute.

Looks like Ethereal Shift is partially fixed to obey the NoPhase timer on test server. It now is disabled from being used after the initial 30 sec of the NoPhase timer, however you can activate it before the 30 sec is up and still get the full duration of intangibility. E.g. if you activate Ethereal Shift at 29 sec in Phase Shift you will get an effective 59 seconds of intangibility per NoPhase cooldown instead of the intended 30 seconds. (not a PvP specific bug, but probably doesn't impact PvE). Probably a trickier fix since it's not a toggle like most phase shift-like powers. The temp power jump packs are still working in arena with temp powers disabled, if it's trivial to implement this would be a great fix to include with the mez duration fixes.

TEAM LETHAL LOTTERY EVENT SATURDAY OCTOBER 5, 9 PM EASTERN (6 PM PT) OVERVIEW 6v6 arena matches where each round your team of 3 players gets paired with another team of 3 players and will face off against another randomly paired 2 teams. The number of rounds played during the group stages will depend on the number of teams signed up. Finals format is to be determined based on number of teams attending. You play as one of the 2 the characters you signup with. We're looking at running the event on test server which has the PVP mez duration fixes and allows people to bring different characters without leveling up new toons. This means using the test server commands to level up and slot your characters prior to the event (it probably takes 20 min if you have a build ready); see the popup menu utility for an easy way to do this. Vote in the poll if you're for/against running the event on test. edit: test server won the vote, event on the test server PRIZES Reward merits temporary PVP Discord Titles more? SIGNUPS Sign up as a team of 3 in this thread with one player posting your @players and characters (ATs and powersets). You can edit in the characters you're bringing later, just do it before the event. Feel free to enter with a team name if you want. Be sure to read the rules below. While it’s encouraged to sign up as a full team you may use this thread to sign up solo or a team of 2. You can use this thread or Discord to join or form teams prior to the event -be sure to update your posts with changes. Before the event teams of 2 (and teams of 3 with no-shows) will be filled with the remaining solo-signups with early signups having priority (late signups may not get on to a team). If there are enough solo signups they’ll be formed into teams of 3. There's no guarantee you're get to play if you don't sign up with a team, but we'll try to get everyone in if possible. RULES AND FORMAT Default arena settings (10 min matches, small insps only, no TS, no heal decay, arena temp powers only) Ties settled in sudden death Banned powers (pending test server changes): electrifying net arrow (blasters) and telekinesis. Limit 1 poison (any AT) per group of 6 (and only 1 of your 2 characters may be a poison). late rule edit: AT limit of 3 stalkers You determine your lineup each round in your group of 6 before being matched with an opponent (i.e. no counter picking for team comps). Alpha only incarnate powers. Other incarnates to be unslotted for the event. Group stage maps will be randomly chosen from a pool of the following: Sky, Steel, Outbreak, Striga, Atlas, Lab Finals maps will be chosen from the same map pool. Length of event will depend on the number of teams, but we’re aiming for 2 to 3 hours like the previous events. New players are welcome and encouraged to come out and get a taste of some arena PVP. Feel free to ask any questions about the event, builds, or PVP in general here on the forums or on the PVP Discord. You can also PM questions to the admins and mods on the PVP Discord. The event will be run from Discord and voice channels will be available to use for communication, be sure to check beforehand that you can get Discord working. This event will be run instead of Saturday kickball.

FYI for anyone that missed the last few weeks, we're doing an emp draft phase prior to black team draft now. More info and discussion in the #arena channel in discord.

Looks like some good fixes, thanks to the devs and also Dan Petro for reporting a bunch of the broken mezs.

I only follow the true father of beams, the Naturalizer Thanks for putting together this list, Pale

Mallex brought up that in PvP storm's O2 boost is incorrectly granting the PvE stun protection in addition to the PvP stun resistance. This may not be a bug as I don't know the intent, but several temp powers are usable in zones and arena (with temp powers turned off). I'm mainly thinking of alignment powers (Call to Justice) and P2W powers including the 2 jump packs and mystic fortune. Based on temp powers that are disabled in PvP I'd imagine for consistency that these powers aren't meant to be enabled. I can edit this post later with a better list of powers if someone doesn't beat me to it. Edit (to add more if I think of them) : Steam Jump Jump Pack Mystic Fortune Call to Justice The P2W temp power Ethereal Shift is still usable when you have the NoPhase buff. More of a general bug, but I've seen people use it in PVP to stay unaffecting longer than I think is intended.

FYI Pines should work on Mac thru Wine, try searching for the Tools section of the forums for info.

I don't think so, it's been posted a few times in the bug section though.

The invalid target thing is a bug on Homecoming - either on your end or the invalid target's end. I think the bugged player needs to relog to fix the issue. This doesn't happen too often though. Exemplaring was changed at some point so you have access to powers +5 your exemplared level. So in SC you get your 35 power, in Warburg you get your 41 power, etc.