Hey there everybody. I’ve been following this game off and on since kickstarter and thought I’d chime in with my 2 cents for whatever it’s worth. The fundamental problem, as in most games of this nature, is the opportunity cost of having more lateral freedom. This is something that needs to be looked at from a player AND developer point of view.
For players, having to reroll a new character is a lot of time to reinvest on something they may or may not like. The positive side is that you get to feel like your choices matter and that picking a class is a meaningful decision. Developers get to have their content recycled up to 14 times, which is fantastic for them!
Conversely, having free mastery respec makes mastery class choice relatively arbitrary and negates over 95% of the reason to ever relevel the same base class. Players with little free time love it because the game becomes super accessible. Players who have more free time and want a more impactful experience are kinda left out, but at least they don’t have to spend as much time grinding levels for alts. For developers, that sucks because it massively eats away at the replayability of their game.
To address the ultimate issue of having to reinvest the time necessary to relevel a character from scratch, there are a few options:
First, you could have free mastery respec up to a certain level (like 50 or 60) and encourage experimentation. When you hit that level, you tell players that they have to make a solid choice before they are able to level up again. This is a fairly tame and reasonable compromise that will have minimal impact on developers (aside from coding, testing, and implementing it). It is a solution that benefits casual players the most and has little to no effect on the more hardcore players.
Second, to mitigate the time spent rerolling the same base class, you could allow for a Veterancy bonus which gives an experience multiplier specific to each base class. A lot of MMORPGs institute a similar function and restrict it to your highest level character. Here, it would be the same except on a per-base-class basis. For example, you can make a level 78 Marksman and if you don’t like it then you can reroll as a Bladedancer and get bonus exp (like 50-100%) until you hit level 78. If you go for the third mastery (i.e. Falconer), you can the bonus twice based on the max level of the other two masteries of the same base class. So if you have a level 60 marksman, level 50 bladedancer, and start a falconer then you get (100-200%) exp until you hit 50 then (50-100%) exp until you hit 60. If you start a different base class, like a mage, you begin back at 0% exp bonus and begin the whole process again. This takes some work coding on the back-end, but is a compromise that allows players to NOT feel that their time was completely wasted on a mastery class they didn’t fully enjoy, while still retaining the strong impact of decision-making. Devs will probably break even with this since they will lose some total playtime from hardcore players, but will likely gain total playtime on the casual audience. This option involves some give and take from everybody, but allows for a middle-ground compromise.
Third option is having open “free” respec. This heavily eats at decision-making impact and actually hurts developers the most. Instead of having 15 classes, this effectively reduces it to 5. Why on earth would you relevel a brand new character to max when you can just hit a button, swap out some gear, and have 3 mastery classes at your fingertips? I mean sure, some people love the leveling up process and see it as an adventure, a few people have severe OCD and will max each mastery class, but the vast majority of RPG players I have encountered are relatively opportunistic. I have fun leveling, but I’m not going to level 10 more characters to max when I don’t have to - that’s just silly. You can put restrictions on swapping mastery classes endgame, but they would have to be incredibly heavy to maintain the importance of class choice AND incentivize you to revisit the same content with the same base class two more times. I like freedom of choice and respeccing is a fantastic convenience, but I’m also pragmatic enough to know that I and others would openly abuse this system for the sake of efficiency. I mean, you would literally have access to all 15 mastery classes with only one third of the time and effort. The only remotely reasonable tradeoff that comes to mind would be something like a stupid amount of some resource and/or half of your current level. It would also need to be an increasingly heavy penalty for each successive iteration - otherwise it will eat too heavily into the idea of releveling the same base class for a different mastery class. People would be substantially more likely to just pick their favorite of the 3 options then never touch the other two. When you relevel a class from scratch, it suddenly become a daunting task that is significantly less meaningful when you think to yourself, “Why am I doing this when I could have just hit a button and maybe lose some gold/exp/etc.?”.
There are, of course, some other clever ideas out there. A lot of the ideas will be different flavors of the same basic concepts. The ideal solution is one that addresses the fundamental problem of decision-making versus limited time and is a compromise between players and developers that maintains balance for both.
Also, for those wondering, no - I have not played this game. I have been between jobs and have to manage my finite resources amidst rising costs of living, so I’m hoping for a good black friday or Christmas sale. I have put THOUSANDS of hours into similar ARPGs (POE, Marvel Heroes, Grim Dawn, Titan Quest, Diablo 1/2/3, Torchlight 1/2, etc.), so I kinda know what I’m talking about in general, yet I can be relatively unbiased enough to have an outside perspective. I hope this helps, even in some small way, and I wish everyone the best!
