It was balanced enough for me to spend 13 hours straight in a single pub duel game every week meeting tons of new people and learning how to play better, to become more aggressive or become more passive. I learned a lot from diablo 2 pvp and to say it's not balanced is ridiculous. There was GM and BM, even in public games. But whether you chose to GM or BM, it was always possible to find someone that was truly exciting to fight, even though you just met them.
This is what is dead now.
Vast majority of what you call "gm dueling" was actually just people being polite and not actual gm rules if it was in a public game. From what I've discovered, when people did pub dueling and called it "gm dueling" they just mean people saying go, not nking and not being a dick.. which is not GM. That's just being polite.
Actual gm duels has a giant list of rules you have to follow and is done in private games usually in teams.
Also, pub dueling is boring and garbage to begin with and no, dueling in this game has never been balanced. You can completely invalidate multiple builds and even an entire class by using absorb items. They have mentioned they did not balance this game around pvp and the only reason pvp even works even a tiny bit is because of lots of changes made over the years and still leads to dueling without community made rules to be boring and repetitive against unskilled people. You get to a point where you're basically bullying people who can't even name lock someone.
You experienced pub dueling which is like 1% the fun that fpking and actual team 4s with rule sets can be and is where all the good players duel at. If you had that much fun doing pubs you would've lost your mind doing team 2s and 4s and fpks.
This post was edited by Emiliaaa on Apr 7 2026 08:12am