EverQuest II Producer's Letter
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Further, putting PvP into a PvE game also complicates the issue of what people's expectations are for their roles are in PvP. A person who is a support class in PvE will likely also be primarily support in PvP. Our goal in this is to make PvP fit into the world of EQ2 in a smart way, which means PvE roles will carry across into PvP. We're not aiming for a world where everyone can compete one-on-one or completely redefine classes based solely on which type of combat they're participating in.
With that in mind, our plan for PvP looks something like this:
Step 1: Dueling. We've made it available on Test Server with the current state of the PvE abilities for those who wish to give it a shot.
Step 2: Balance larger scale PvP fights. Do casters dominate? Do melee dominate? Is there something fun and useful for everyone? What do we do with power regen on casters vs. the autoattack power of melee? We've been testing these kinds of fights internally for quite awhile now, and we need to make sure that we have the ability scaling and effectiveness (using the system I described above) in a place we think is solid. This is the step we're on right now.
Step 3: Release Dueling to the live servers once the first round of PvP settings have been fleshed out.
Step 4: Beta for Desert of Flames and Arena Champions, in which we'll be getting a wealth of valuable information on our progress so far, since Arena Champions exercises different kinds of group PvP combat.
Step 5: Launch of Desert of Flames and Arena Champions.
Step 6: This is when we'll begin discussing our longer term plans for servers based on a PvP ruleset, and will be able to get into more details.
