-physical resist
Sling ring +arach allowing for 40percent slow with few tradeoffs
Warlocks entire kit
Warlock spells charges on rings
Possibility of more -resist on charms

Still seems like best scene for pub duels is expansion. Only issue is trying to level up since PvE is mostly on RotW.

This post was edited by chudman123 on Mar 12 2026 08:35am

Pvp balance is not important to them, because they know that no matter what they do or how little they do the community in this game will create our own GM dueling rulesets.

And if there's no way to make dueling with warlocks fair, then gm dueling will just ban warlocks and things will continue on as usual. Same thing goes for sling and new items. As far as needing the community to balance it, it's not like regular pub duels are exactly balanced with stuff like absorb being stackable and other abusable stuff, so they basically NEED the community to decide how to make it fair. Just as an example, think of how insane rising sun + Hotspurs is as a combo. 2 items and you've completely eliminated all fire damage. Lo+Ber or Lo Cham coa/diadem, + tgods + wisp and you've eliminated all lightning damage. And you can stack a crap ton of 20 life 11 res or 20 life 5 all res small charms in your inventory. It's never been fair.

This post was edited by Emiliaaa on Mar 12 2026 08:50am

Very true. Sad for us pub players though because they added all these hidden things such as -resist on charms and sling ring that are harder to notice than previously bm things that were easier to notice and call someone out.

Maybe pub dueling picks up after the pve dopamine fades

I cant find it, but there is a video interview of one of the Diablo developers and he basically says "We hate the pvp community".
They will take literally ZERO input from the PvP community. Blizzard has made it clear that D2 is about PvM and all content moving forward will focus on experiences for PvM players.
Keep in mind the only content that RotW has is a new character, so they will obviously make that character OP and amazing. They likely wont nerf anything until next ladder season, and it will be nerfed to PvM standards, IE so people don't dominate the ladder. Warlocks will still dominate PvP for the distant future.

@op, yes Expansion is the best spot for PvP if you want balanced public duels.
Unfortunately, lots of people are playing RotW and Ladder right now, so Expansion SCNL is pretty quiet. I think it will bounce back some in a couple months, but probably never be as active as it was. Ive been able to find duel games and if there isnt one I make one and it fills up quickly.
The problem i have is leveling, there just arent enough quality baal, chaos, cow, or TZ runs to be able to effectively level a character.
I tried starting a nightly TZ group, but my post on JSP got zero responses. The best solution I found for leveling above 95 is to piggyback off of cow runs, they take 5+ min which is enough time to clear most TZ levels and the folks doing the cow runs are usually happy to have another filler as well. Chaos and baal runs are usually to fast to be able to clear an entire TZ.

If you still have PvP characters on expansion I would highly recommend waiting a couple more months before deciding to convert anything to RotW. Also, should check out the RotW PvP scene on NL. Once Warlocks get full geared up and people develop detailed builds, they are going to be even stronger than they are now.

This post was edited by Spartikis on Mar 12 2026 08:58am

No we need loot filters for the people who play twice a year for a season start

Balance from pink/blue hair devs. What a good joke.

Blizzard would probably never want to admit it for whatever reason, but pvp is what kept this game alive for 20 years before d2r. Yes, people played for fun etc and played to gear up characters... But the mass amount of botters etc were still running to help gear up pvp characters at an affordable rate. Without all of them constantly exploiting the game, none of us would have affordable characters and only the rich players would be able to experiment with builds and have fun.

And oh, I'm aware they hate pvp, otherwise they would've left stuff like whirlwind frames, wsg, fhr, stuns, mindblast etc alone, because that was the dueling style everyone liked and everyone was familiar with.

Pvp definitely isn't the reason d2 has been alive for this long. 🤣

You can see the massive spikes at the start of every season and it slowly die again. If anything it's all the mods, season restarts and people on jsp working for pennies.

Pvp and trading for items for your pvp characters was the only thing to do in this game from 2012-2020, at least if you played online. And people were not taking ladders seriously, especially because a certain item selling website used to have a contest every ladder from 2011-2017 where they'd pay you to get them the first level 70 and level 75 sorceress and paladins on accounts they made for you and my friend group and I would do this for several years in a row. When we would check ladder progress while leveling there would only be like 5-6 other teams and then the rest of the ladder would just be "skdjksjdjd" "soduisjdian" "oshsosjaldn"... And we would always be the top leveling team and we were just random people not even taking it that serious, we just wanted to make some easy money. The bot leveled teams were not fast at all compared to human players, so the fact that bot level teams stayed in the top 100 since the start basically proved ladder was not taken seriously at all.

So maybe I could've worded it better, but pvp was absolutely the reason the COMMUNITY for this game survived this long, especially after 1.13 came out.

This post was edited by Emiliaaa on Mar 12 2026 09:33am

Ya for sure leveling is the biggest challenge. In the past I would always join cow games and solo TZ. A lot harder to find games now.

And ya pub duels on RotW non ladder are pretty bad so I'm doing the same and waiting.



This exactly. Honestly I'd be fine with a small monthly cost to play so that people who play besides just ladder start get some dev work.

I realize that could be an issue for people in other countries but $2/month or whatever is not much in USA