At Grinding Gear Games, we take PvP combat very seriously. Many of our staff have a background as hardcore gamers and we are going to take every opportunity to make Path of Exile’s PvP metagame as competitive as we can. We strongly believe that a vital driver of long-term play in online action RPGs is the quest for the perfect PvP character and the immense amount of item acquisition required to achieve this. We expect that a large portion of the game’s economy will service PvP players who are looking for every advantage over their competitors. While it’s always possible to fight monsters using substandard gear if you are painstakingly careful, other players rarely allow you this opportunity.

In addition to the obvious tactical and micromanagement play-skill required to succeed at PvP within an individual encounter, a large portion of PvP success relies on designing a character’s build correctly for a certain metagame of what other players are playing. For example, Chaos damage bypasses an Intelligence character’s energy shields entirely. If you expect to play against a lot of players with Energy Shield, it makes sense to load up on Chaos damage. Of course, this weakens you against normal players (and against Energy Shield users who have equipped Chaos resistance to foil your plan). A competitive player with a good grasp of the current tournament climate (and many spare items at their disposal) has a large advantage over players that are forced to play the only character they have. In an online game designed to reward knowledge and economic power, this is a desirable outcome.

The emphasis on randomly generated items also helps keep powerful builds from spreading too fast – even if you know how to build the best character, you’d still have to find or trade for the items required. Because this makes it hard to just copy a competing character’s PvP build, we mitigate the problem of powerful builds instantly spreading across the community and dominating the PvP metagame. The end result is a PvP environment that rewards play-skill, build planning and clever trading. Competitive PvP players have a lot of scope to be better than each other, while casual players can enjoy playing against each other in scenarios that are less punishing.

Almost all of our PvP modes take advantage of our random level generation technology. Players never know quite what to expect, so the ability to quickly plan strategy around arbitrary terrain (and randomly scattered features such as shrines or fountains) is an important skill for PvP participants.

We’ve planned many story-based PvP options that are embedded in various areas of the game world. These scenarios generally have more interesting goals than the standard free-for-all or team-annihilation modes, but are designed for slightly more casual play.

Players in the optional “cut-throat” leagues will get to experience a more intense form of PvP – the ability for players to invade their instances and kill them, taking their items. Of course, only a hyper-competitive type of player would ever choose to play in this type of League in the first place, so they’re relying on and expecting this danger to amplify their enjoyment.

Although not strictly PvP-related, another competitive aspect of Path of Exile is the “ladder rush” effect of Leagues themselves. We intend to frequently open new short-duration leagues to allow players to show off their leveling abilities on the ladder. While some players may specialize in killing each other at PvP, it’s also perfectly valid to hone your abilities at playing through the PvE content faster than other players.