I've been around the Minecraft world for many years. I played on a lot of the original hardcore pvp servers and I've thoroughly enjoyed fighting in Minecraft. I think that while a lot of people's gut reaction to 1.9 was negative (although I think a lot of people on /r/Minecraft love it!) there are actually a lot of hidden gems in the update, especially as they relate to pvp.

The last two-three weeks of my life I've been trying out 1.9 PvP and working on how to rebalance it for a server that I admin on. If you don't want to read about how I go to my conclusions, just skip down to the bottom for the TL;DR. For this entire discussion, I am only talking about top tier tech tree fights. Prot 4, sharp 5, strength 2 (no god apples).

Let's start with the good things:

• Shields are great. It's a good concept and helps balance out the buff bows received.

• a built in CPS limiter is great. We were going to code one ourselves for 1.8. Everyone, and they all deny it, but everyone in the top levels of pvp autoclicks. As long as your autoclicker or triggerbot is setup for reasonable 'human-achievable' settings you won't get caught. There is no reason not to, and it saves you from getting carpal tunnel. By putting in an actually reasonable max, you'll make sure that everyone is on the same footing.

• A lot more things in 1.9 pvp can be customized. The new attributes are fantastic (http://ift.tt/1p7vX8A)

• New arrows are cool and make bows relevant again.

• The new changes to the crit system make sense.

• I don't really feel any way about the new sweep attack. Pretty useless in PvE and 1.9 has nerfed group fighting already so much that it's fine to give something useful back.

Now let's get into the bad…

1.8 damage output was pretty high. It made fights go pretty fast. You'd run out of health pots and then die. By the numbers the DPS in 1.8, in completely perfect conditions against an opponent in prot 4, is 3.42 (roughly 1.5-2 hearts). With strength 2, you can get up to a DPS of 8.892 damage per second, which is almost 4.5 hearts. This made strafing, combos, split second decisions, inventory management, and knowing when to pot much more important.

In 1.9, surprisingly due to the armor nerfs, your DPS without strength gets you 2.304 DPS (1 or rarely 1.5 hearts), but once you add in strength, due to the new strength nerf, you're only dealing 4.79232 DPS (barely 2.5 hearts).

That is a huge nerf. Basically cutting damage output in half, and that's only in a 1v1. In a group fight, 1.9 damage output is basically nothing.

The worst thing about 1.9 is probably the new health regeneration. If you have a stack of golden carrots you basically can't die in a fight. As long as you keep your hunger bar topped off you'll just sit there regenerating health all day long.

If you played any sort of pvp server on 1.8, 1.9 pvp feels so incredibly slow. The CPS limiter is way too low. You can attack 1.6 times a second. A player can take damage 2 times in a second. Technically it's close to the max amount of attacks you can land in 1.8, but in reality, in an actual fight, it feels just so painfully slow.

Now, I mentioned above that in 1.9 a lot of things can be modified, one of those is an individual sword's attack speed and damage! (you could even use a command block!). For our server we created three new classes of swords:

Broadsword (+13 base attack compared to the normal +7 on diamond swords, and -2.4 attack speed)

Long sword (+6 base attack and +3.2 attack speed)

and Rapier (+1 base attack and +6.4 attack speed)

Something interesting I found out while creating these weapons, when I increased the broadsword's attack damage up to +13, the weapon's attack speed actually increased. We had to add a negative attack speed to actually make it swing as fast as a normal diamond sword. The other swords didn't seem to receive any changes to their attack speed with reduced damage.

These three swords essentially let you pick between 1.9 style slow pvp (but with increased damage), 1.8 style pvp with the Rapier and reduced damage, or a sort of middle choice.

We've been live with these changes for about 2 days and so far the players are enjoying it. Even one of our players who complained about upgrading to 1.9 is now using a broadsword and did well in a fight against someone using a rapier!

I'm interested in seeing where 1.9 pvp will head, especially now that people are beginning to take a closer look into the actual minecraft code that handles pvp interactions. I don't think vanilla pvp will be staying the way it is, and already there is a certain practice pvp server that is planning to release a 1.9 pvp plugin that will probably be a de-facto install for faction servers and other pvp dependent servers. I think it's up to the community, not Mojang, to decide what they want pvp to become. I think it should take a lot of the new things from 1.9, but also speed it up and make it more interesting, but it'll be up to the community to decide what they want the defaults to be, at least for pvp servers.

TL;DR: Some stuff is bad, some new stuff is good, but ultimately 1.9 allows you to easily customize the speed of attacks and attack damage on swords, so it's actually a pretty cool update, just a pain to deal with.