Ladder Resets

[Kevin]

Certain skills will most likely be made entirely null in PvP, I would imagine Serenity would be one of them, as would Giant Toad for WD. Much like how in D1 PvP you couldn't stone curse people - that would be way too cheezy and abused by everyone. Very powerful skills, like Wrath of the Berserk or Archon will probably be cut in half, based on either their duration, actual damage or even both.

There are plenty of easy ways to balance skills in PvP, but then again it is Blizz, and they can't even balance Inferno properly so I don't have too much confidence in them being able to balance PvP, even if it really shouldn't be that difficult.

Have you written a line of code in your life? Easy concepts are not always easy to translate to code and depending on design your base set-up may not be designed to handle it. This whole "it's easy" is not always easy and we have years of examples from WoW, Rift, Warhammer online, Guild Wars, and many other games that had RPG style classes and PvP how balance is not nearly as simple as people like to think and how changing skills to work with PvP, if the game wasn't designed for PvP from the ground up, can be a pain or affect the PvE game and some of those games were designed with PvP in mind from the ground up.

Let's take your example of monks can't use serenity at all, but can a demon hunter still use vault? So now the monk has no PvP escape skill but the demon hunter does? So that is balanced how? If you take a skill away from one class you have to take a skill away from ALL classes or you now have a class that has fewer PvP skills they can use.

In D1 since every class had access to all the skills every other class had (though yes because of how attributes worked the classed played differently but a warrior could still cast a fireball just like a sorc could) balance was A LOT simpler and doing things like making players take half damage from other player skills was simple from a coding stand point because it wasn't actually changing the skills it was changing something on the classes since it applied to everything not just certain unique skills.

There is a reason why most of the successful and popular PvP games don't have a lot of real variation in the "classes" at least in the shooter world. The difference in damage output of attacks are minor compared to the variety of damage and effects that are available in something like WoW.

As I said depending on how the engine and code base was designed changing something that seems small could require rewriting a lot of the code.