lol you’re all good.
I am a fan of current method but if EHG decided to implement testing mastery before choosing, what would be cool is if we get to fight each of the masteries separately before the choice (damage adjusted). Each using only their mastery-locked skills and perhaps not win-able. I prefer that method of sample tasting than a testing sandbox room. Call it mentoring from future selves if you will. Fits the current theme of the shadow self fighting the player too.
(the following is sarcastic and meant to illustrate a point)
Waiter: “Can I take your order?”
Me: “I’d like to taste everything on your menu first before I decide what I really want.”
The difference is that Wow doesn’t make you level new characters again if you’ve already got a max-level character.
I know it’s a bit late, but from the devs comments, that is what the first ~20ish levels of gameplay is supposed to provide before you choose your mastery, a small taster of the available types of gameplay that the masteries then specialise in.
I think it is better leveling up a new char, even I desire for the respec masteries sometime. Here r the reasons, it is better for me to understand the base of a mastery skill that I m planning on using, how it will go; leveling is not hard, the harder part is to go over again & again monoliths for blessings; gears are not suited, I hate changing them betweent my vault, also hating in replacing possibly all my skill trees and passive nodes. I would rather leveling up a new.
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So just to weigh in a bit on this topic;
Back in the day in World of Warcraft you use to get random whispers from people complementing you on your gear, titles, mounts, ect. There’s a multitude of reasons for this, but this is no longer the case. ‘Boosting’ probably being chief among them. Nobody knows whether or not you actually took the time yourself to get these things or if you just paid somebody to carry you through the content.
Grim Dawn has a big culture of people posting builds, but it loses it’s awe factor when you know that most of the builds are using items that were generated using an external program. Items with stat rolls that you probably wouldn’t get even after a 1000 hours of farming. I’ve heard it said that some posters will neglect to post their builds for fear of it being nerfed. From the developers perspective, a decision likely made easier due to aforementioned fact and perhaps doubly so from hysteria that ensues whenever one of these builds does get nerfed, depending on your personality traits. Keep in mind we’re often talking about reducing the damage a few percentage points of just one moving part of dozens or even hundreds.
Everything is a give and a take. If you allow the respec of masteries you may find people will just go to some youtube guide to find out what is ‘meta’ and roll with that. A lot of gamers nowadays already do this to be sure, but now you are in effect fostering this type of mentality in your community.
(Example Only) You know that forge guard sitting in your character menu that you haven’t touched in 3 months because the community perceives it as weak? Better to just make it a void knight instead. Or maybe one day you’ll give it another go again and see if you can’t make it work for you.
People will say it doesn’t effect you. It does, just in indirect ways. From one person to the community, from the community to the developer, from the developer to you. Anyway… that’s my take on it. Now back to leveling my multiple sentinels 
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I miss that time when you didnt have forums or youtube where you could watch everything. You had to play the game and maybe just maybe you could ask from your friend some advice if he owned the game too.
IMO re-rolling to another mastery doesn’t take that long. Besides pretty much every mastery has some nice builds + EHG is constantly adding some new skills/ Items or rework which gives more playability.
So maybe your first mastery which you didnt like it because you didnt know it was ”that bad” may change to be best ever. You never know.
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xD you mean the time where you needed to go into a store and buy a gaming magazine to get said infos? If you want information you get them if you stay away from them you can play the game and find out everything yourself. Long gone are the days when I sprinkled LeChuck in Malt had fun with Day of Tentacle or beat Zak McKracken while other people read guides because thinking more then 1 minute was to much for them ^^.
Right now we get fresh stuff every now and then but after the game is live for arround a week everything is widely know to everyone who googles it.
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That’s way too much simplified. Today every game is disassembled the moment it releases. If you have games that have open betas or early access this even happens before release. Weeks before New World release there were guide how to maximise progress speed regarding leveling, trade skills and PvP tactics. If a game comes close to release, youtube is flooded with “Whatch this before you buy” and “Complete Guide for [whatever]”.
This affects everybody playing the game. If you don’t follow a guide and don’t participate in theorycrafting that’s ok. But you will be confronted with that stuff everywhere. Just the pure existence of that stuff creates pressure. It suggests that you play ineffective if you don’t use any possible source if information. If you can live with that personally that’s fine. But if you then participate in an online / multiplayer environment, the people that play with you will most likely expect that you have acquired all available knowledge. And if they realise you don’t have, they might not want to play with you as it is “not effective”.
This adds more pressure. It’s not a “you” problem. It’s today’s gaming philosophy and player sentiment.
Here’s a great vid about that topic:
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You are right to a certain extend. For example New World. I never touched a guide, read a forum, talked about with others, never took a look at the discord. I wrote my bug reports in the betas and that’s it. I found everything myself and the only thing I looked at was a ressource spawnpoint map because I was to lazy to look for verything myself.
You can simply take a step back from everything if you want to and you’ll be never confronted with it. For LE for example… disable the chat and stay away from the forum and the discord and you are good to go.
If you want to take on the game by ourself it don’t matter if you are effective or not because there is no preassure if you do stuff your way and ignore “what if” scenarios.
if you care about others or want to play in groups and don’t want to be “dead weight” things are different but you can take a step back from every information if you want to. Sure it’s harder then getting infos on certain topics you are intrested in but then again some “very informed people” who “read everything there is” about a topic like the Life Staff in New World for example can’t even tell why they skilled like they skilled because it was in a guide and they followed it and press random buttons.
It’s always a you/me problem no matter what kind of game you play. i don’t go for world firsts anymore what was a big “me” problem I don#t need to do the hardest hardcore roxxor eletist stuff anymore and rather take a chill pill. all of the sudden all my “me” problems have been gone and I can have fun with games rather then “working” my way through it. I play with equal minded persons and poof all gaming troubles are in the past and all drama is gone.
I take a different approach for example. When I started to play Acolythe in LE I tried stuff for myself untill i basicly understood what I did and then I asked someone who knows the class far better to pan out my last build flaws i overlooked. I try to understand at least the basics and what a class/build/skill does untill I theorycraft with people.
Then again that’s just me and I don’t give a crap about the progress other people have and don’t make myself crazy about it while I have a very good idea about the work involved with it :). A lot of people here on the forums put in a lot of heart and brain into their builds and the community and this is very impressive and I don’t want to make this a small effort :).
Btw I haven’t watched the vid I’ll take a look at it later when i got more time but yes I get your point but I think it’s easiely possible to stay away from anything if you want to :).
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His video is specifically about how this impacts games where you’re constantly playing with other people, and that other peoples interaction with the game effects yours because you exist in the same game in the same way. His arguments don’t apply to a game that will have limited trading between players, wont benefit people playing in groups over those playing solo, and doesnt even have those things yet because multiplayer isn’t done.
While your argument does work for mmo’s, especially one’s like new world, it really really doesn’t apply to Last Epoch in the state its in, or the state its intended to be in when multiplayer comes out (based on what the devs have said their vision is).
Alongside all that, ssf will always be an option in the game, as well as a non-online version of the game, so if you don’t want to be impacted by other peoples engagement with the game, you will literally have the option to play a mode that doesn’t have anyway to interact with anyone else in anyway.
There’s so much in this video that I directly transfer to LE. But I don’t want to argue about this.
Imho every game that has a multiplayer components like coop or PvP creates this kind of pressure where the player has to decide whether he wants to have a pure experience without any guides or maximise efficiency right from the start. Many people feel the need to be most efficient.
People that want to have a pure experience aren’t necessarily people that don’t want to interact with anybody else. People might want to play coop but not be kicked out of the group when they play an apparently inefficient skill combination.
Maybe people also hesitate to participate in coop because they fear they could expose themselves as noobs and being laughed at. Because they know they could learn all the stuff before even starting a game for the first time. I’m very certain that there are people that like interaction with others and competition in games, but don’t have a fable for theorycrafting and learning.
Having all the LE guides availible alone raises the question “Should I just play the game? Or should I follow a build guide? Would I waste time if I play without guidance? Or would it be more fun to discover it by myself?”. When people start a game they often don’t know which way would be the “better”. And it could happen they choose the wrong way. But how will they know?
Back in the days before YT and “how to…” videos people didn’t have that choice.
I’m in no camp and do not prefer one method over another. It’s just an observation and I find this topic very interesting.
This topic needs to die. You can already re-spec your character entirely. You just can’t turn it into a different character. Nor should you be able to.
Chill dude! We aren’t discussing about respec anymore 
If someone doesnt want to play with someone who’s going to make their use of time less efficient, they shouldnt have to. Thats all that argument is.
Interesting topic (if a bit heated at times) 
Probably suggested before, but how about a one-off chance to respec integrated in the campaign?
Like, at lvl 25 or so you reach the end of time and pick a mastery. Then, when you finish the campaign and start the monolith, kinda permanently getting out-of-time-and-space, you get an optional quest to change it? And after that it is final?
Just an idea, I wouldn’t want to respec mastery myself, I like having one character of each style, and once you know the mechanics levelling becomes pretty fast.
This is a neat idea buuuuut not now. People should start to play the game first and this might be something for an expension/DLC whatever you want to call it. Imagine D3 starting with adventure mode… 2 days tops until people leave the game because they are “done” with it. Fast leveling or switches are a bad thing for “new” or not even published games.
About the Video… He’s comparing veeery old games from the stone ages of the internet as an example for 2021? If you wanted informations back then you had a far harder time then today. It a bit apples and oranges from my point of view because today it’s totaly normal to find everything you look for on the internet. On the other side you can experience stuff the way you want but you need to stick to it.
To me this is a bit like reading forums. When everyone is crying constantly I instantly leave such forums because unconstructive whining ruins my day ^^. Yeah I might have a hard time to stay away from such a thing but it’s possible.
Now you are discussing peoples knowledge in relation to whether or not they will get accepted as part of a group in an online game who potentially has no time for newbies because the game is paced in a certain way and therefore people get left behind… but the issue is its purely the developers fault for fostering such a shit environment in their game to begin with - this game isnt turning out to be much better. The ironic thing is to KEEP up with the developers intentions a Respec is probably required
If you have a 95 Druid and you liked partying with people but EHG just released a new patch nerfing Druids. Guess what no one wants you in their group anymore due to the whims of EHG. You want to be a Beastmaster now…guess what “haha go reroll a Beastmaster from level 1 you idiot you made a Druid. Thats your fault” - zaodon 2021
EHG is going to perpetuate it with this simple rules:
- Infinite scaling
- Optimised 4 person party consisting of ‘xx’ classes. If you arent one of those classes you dont exist to others
- Balance patches
Doesn’t there have to be at least ONE meaningful choice in LE or not? Re-rolling a character doesn’t take ages at maximum within 4-5 days you’ll be 95lvl and that is solo. With a help of friends / clans you’ll level up even faster. Once you hit 100th monoliths your experience gain is very high. Don’t make a drama of it.
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