Pendles clearly built for PVP

Its complicated with BB since its a medal with 2 sides.

What GBX told us so far is that the upcoming SeasonPass DLC content is focused on PVE, and as I understood these “operations” will be highly challenging singleplayer-missions with changing objectives.
They won´t be new “missions” but a new mode ,more geared towards PvE-gamers.

First will evolve arround Attius and the Thrall rebellion on Tempest.

As PVE-main I´m very excited and hope my SP will work until then >.<

He’s totally geared for both, his helix has a extra DoT with increased duration of his Smoke Bomb DoT and Flurry of Blows to passively increase his attack speed and Sweet Spot/Backstab for increased dmg from behind, I can see him tearing NPC’s and bosses a new one along with enemy BB in PvP.

I’m just gonna be totally honest here: EVERYONE on the internet knows, PvP playerbases are difficult to please, while at the same time get bored easily and have - let’s say a tendency towards aggression (that sometimes even contributes to their skills).

So, I’m ok with the fact we got new PvP Maps before the first Story DLC. While I - in no way - want to diminish the work GBX did on those maps, it’s still just a fraction of the work needed to be done to produce a story DLC.

Since the release, especially in the last few weeks, we have constant updates on what is coming next, what the devs would eventually like to do, etc.

I understand your desire for a full release date schedule for every bit of content, I even sympathize but it remains a practical impossibility, given the structure of the creative process behind it.
Nobody at Gearbox is qualified to give you a release date on content that’s still being worked on. :wink:
Once they consider it done, they may set and announce a date.

I can’t really help you with that. Other than encouraging you to play some private Bot matches. I’m not a big PvP gamer myself, but I find I enjoy both Incursion and Meltdown.

To be honest, I wouldn’t go as far as @lmoore0621 put it, but PvP is a major part of this game. For some, it’s the main reason to play. There is even a number pf people who feel exactly opposed to you: With most Legendary Gear pieces dropping from Story Bosses, those PvP players feel a strong bias towards PvE. (Some lore challenges add to this as well, most of these are arguably easier to achieve in PvE)

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Trust me, I know that but im speaking gearbox perspective as well as genre. Yes people play only PvE, that all cool, but PvE players will ALWAYS get the back seat unless they completely separate the two and I doubt they would do that. If there is an OP character or gear in PvP. They WILL change that character/gear without a second thought as that’s the main functionality of the game.

Now if those same characters/gear are bad in PvE but good in PvP… Trust they wont change a thing about that.

We knew they were coming long ago, this isn’t some new bias, it’s what we were told will happen and they’ve delivered. We were also told that there would be five new story missions before release and one has been partially revealed.

Naturally, if there’s a character imbalance in PvP it needs to be addressed. The majority of complaint posts on these forums have been about OP or UP characters in PvP, these imbalances don’t impact PvE nearly as much. One of the first hotfixes increased the health of defense points in PvE, and the recent event which was extended was PvE-oriented. As for the recent patches to legendary gear, they equally impact PvE and PvP, some are actually beneficial to PvE players while “nerfed” in PvP.

Guess I’m still stuck on the game being advertised as “many ways to play” rather than a more accurate “a combination of many ways to play.”

+1

…Nearly 700 hours Advanced Story on Steam and I feel that.

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My whole point was that it doesn’t need to be like that. I have always considered PvE and PvP modes two sides of the same thing.
Although I mainly play PvE from a statistically objective point of view, I personally enjoy PvP in this game so much, I consider myself playing both modes. :smile:

Also, if the upcoming story DLC includes new Legendaries (which could require multiple playthroughs to get - and with increasing difference, from what I’ve heard so far), this whole situation might feel a bit more balanced.

I feel like a lot of characters, like Kleese and Ambra and others, were made more for PVE. This one was just one made for PVP.

the PVE portion of the game is an afterthought,

It’s why you get maybe 6 - 8 hours of PVE gameplay max,

The meat and potatoes of the game is the PVP combat… The Story missions are there to give the characters some backstory, add in typical Gearbox humor and provide ways to get decent loot without having to worry about the RNG gods by buying packs…

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Deande sucks in PvE? My fastest clear times are with Deande… Her life steal owns up PVE and Pendles has the same thing.

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What is Pendles built for? Sneaking and killing. PvE, PvP, doesn’t matter. Either mode he’s going to sneak and he’s going to kill. How he goes about it may differ slightly but he’s still going to do it. I feel so sorry for the stupid AI in story though. AI, why you so stupid? He’s right behind you! Right behind… nevermind. Hey, uhm… someone want to clean that up? Ugh… that’s gross.

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I’m really interested in seeing his lore and hearing his dialogue in game

I’m curious how this could possibly have been a surprise of any kind when the guy who designed Pendles said…

They straight up admitted he was “primarily designed for PvP” a week ago. He’s also a stealth assassin, which is a skillset that’s pretty much only useful in PvP, when the most dangerous things you’ll face are single hard targets that are roughly as squishy as you are.

However, this also means that they checked to see how he performed in PvE before releasing him as well. PvE was a concern and, if he didn’t perform well enough in PvE, you can be damned sure that he would have been tweaked so that he was good enough.

What’s important for people to recognize is that PvE and PvP have completely different balance paradigms. In PvE, for a whole plethora of reasons I could get into but don’t feel like at the moment, characters just need to be “good enough” (e.g. can they complete all content); the only way for a character to be poorly designed for PvE is if they’re incapable of completing content. PvE requires a minimum level of competency/performance and there isn’t really a ceiling. PvP, on the other hand, needs to have all characters balanced against each other within reasonably tight parameters because, if they’re not, any side that selects that character is going to have an unfair advantage (or, from the other perspective, by not picking that character, they’ll be at a disadvantage).

It’s just a fact of life: balance requirements for characters are much more stringent for PvP than they are for PvE so, in a game with a mix of PvE and PvP, characters/classes tend to get balanced with PvP in mind.

What a lot of people don’t seem to realize is that the amount of effort to balance classes/characters in PvE is actually pretty easy: you look at max dps, survivability curves/values, and just use some heuristic considerations for stuff that can’t really be numerically quantified without a lot of work and abstraction. For PvP, on the other hand, because you’re facing off against players who have a massive amount of behavioral and tactical variation and don’t follow simple accuracy formulas (for an example of this, consider the generally accepted necessity of jumping around and strafing all over the place in PvP in order to avoid getting hit compared to the generally accepting stupidity of this same behavior in PvE because it can very easily kill your accuracy without actually making you harder to kill), balance really doesn’t follow the math particularly well. There are some mathematical guidelines, but a vast majority of PvP balancing is actually done through observing play (both through analytics as well as direct observation and feedback) because stuff gets really complicated in PvP.

Now, on the other side of the coin, where content is concerned, PvP is actually really easy to design for: maps are absolutely tiny in comparison, you don’t need any story, dialogue can very easily be reused, and “balancing” a map is as easy as having it identical on both sides (which is what GBX has done; I’m highly curious if they’re going to create an asymmetrical mode with a defender and an attacker at some point, which would be much more complex to design). PvE, on the other hand, is highly intensive to design content for: you have to create new bosses, new story, a whole slew of additional dialogue, new drops, etc.

As such, PvP tends to look like it gets a lot more attention if you only look at output: characters get tweaked much more often/heavily to moderate and balance their performance in PvP because, as long as those changes don’t make it impossible (or, at least, “too hard”) to complete PvE content, they’re fine; PvP content, on the other hand, gets released a lot more because it’s really cheap and easy to design.

Even if, on the back end, the developers have an exactly even split between development for PvE and PvP (which I seriously get the feeling that the GBX devs are going for) the output is going to appear lopsided in favor of PvP, no matter what, for all the reasons I’ve previously brought up. You can’t just count up tweaks/additions for a specific area of the game to demonstrate that the devs care more about PvP than PvE (or vice versa) because those tweaks/additions are not created equal. Any content additions for PvE are going to be way more developmentally intensive and complicated than content added for PvP; balance tweaks for PvP are basically necessary for that area of play to remain viable while having negligible effect upon PvE, in practical terms (yes, it might make it harder to win with X character, but being able to win is all that they really care about).

So, no, I’m not the least bit surprised that Pendles seems built more for PvP than PvE. The devs outright told us and his kit and “class” type exist pretty much to make him good at it. This doesn’t mean that the devs don’t care about PvE or that PvP is the only thing that matters.

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…Check out my Steam profile, nearly 700 hours Advanced PvE. :sunny:

I see what you mean with Kleese, his territorial nature comes in handy in many of the Defense scenarios in PvE. Ambra however, I believe was also designed with PvP in mind, as she can be a very scary chaser, if played right.

Sorry, but I believe this way of thinking is too user-focused and not about what a game ‘truly’ is.
Sounds to me like you could calculate the hours of ‘fun’ in this game in advance, which would make me sad.
(Not really want to make this as philosophical, but you mainly describe what you want and get from the game. That however, has little to do with what the game actually offers.)

Yeah, not saying it’s true. But it’s a thing. I actually had PvE games with 3 players dropping after I selected Deande :rolling_eyes:
My whole point is that only people who haven’t played her, or can’t really play her good could come to this assumption. So it’s just a bit too early to make such assumptions for Pendles.

Your missing his point hes saying overall in one playthrough

Exactly my point, but imo this game wasn’t made for the PvE. I honestly feel like that was just an extra to have.

Woah, woah, woah, woah, woah… woah… okay, I’m… WOAH… good.

I know this is a bit off topic, but did Gearbox say these were going to be single player or is that just your interpretation and you could be wrong? If yes, could you throw a brother a link? Maybe one to the past? :wink:

By that same logic, you get even fewer hours out of PvE: a full PvP game takes about 20 minutes on average (30 max), there are 9(?) PvP maps, which means you get roughly 3 hours of gameplay doing a single playthrough of each map.

The entire point of all of those hours that people get is replayability. You get replayability out of PvP maps by running against different groups. You get replayability out of PvE maps by farming for gear and running it with different people, different players, different enemies (because spawns are random), on different difficulties, etc.

And you’re missing my point exactly. Go back and reread the post that you, quite obviously, only skimmed.

The very fact that there are 8 PvE maps in game and the devs plan on releasing at least 5 more demonstrates that PvE is not an insignificant element of the game. If it was, they wouldn’t have spent so much time and money on it. Just because you prefer to play PvP and dismiss PvE doesn’t mean that the devs do.

If you want to gauge the relative importance of PvP to PvE for a game, don’t look at individual tweak to stats or what have you. Look at the amount of content released; if it appears even remotely even, the devs place high value on PvE because PvE content takes a helluva lot more work. A single PvE mission is going to take about 4-5 times the resources of a single PvP map. It’s completely ridiculous to regularly release new PvE content if it was “just an extra” because there’s so much work involved in creating that PvE content that it cannot simply be “just an extra”.

This is my entire point. If you look at the amount of content released, it’s patently obvious that the devs care about PvE just as much as they care about PvP (if not a bit more, given the relative amount of work required for each).

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