ARPG communities are their own worst enemy. Just musing and laughing, feel free to ignore

General
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Any change, at any time, in any era of an arpg…the community seems to be the best and worst thing about it.
Why the worst? People literally used slurs against me and other rude names and got a whole thread shut down because I suggested we unlock mastery or make it a toggleable option like all the other play-styles.

The developers then unlocked mastery, and then the fans as a whole (aka not everybody, but mostly everybody) really loved the new change. But just two weeks before that, “I was the dumbest most ignorant and uninformed ARPG player to ever exist in this timeline or any other” and other such nasty attitudes.

The developers are always locked into being afraid to change something for fear of having their heads ripped off by the fans, just like happened to me, except instead of a few dozen people against me, it would be thousands of people against them.
Every new idea in every arpg I have ever played gets called dumb and ignorant, until the developers do it and then suddenly it’s the best idea in the universe.

Any idea that dares to take flight will only crash back to the ground. The gravity of the negative masses is too strong.

But then the fans also make some amazing fan art, some amazing discord content, discussions, and all sorts of other things. It’s almost paradoxical until you remember that almost none of these two groups have any overlap.

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You are projecting.

Do we know, through any kind of objective data, that most people liked being able to respec masteries? No.

(IMO, I think most people liked or didn’t care, but that’s just a guess, I have no reliable data to back it.)

In the end, ARPG communities, like any other community, are made by a bunch of different people with different opinions. You’ll have the fanboys, who love everything the developers do and hate everything players suggest; you have the haters, who are pretty much the opposite; you have people who love the status quo and hate any kind of change; you have people who get bored unless a lot of stuff changes; and so on and so on.

In the end, the developers have to decide who they want to cater to, knowing their playerbase is very heterogeneous and everything they do will please some people and bother others.

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I still don’t like it now that it is here, but it’s a change I can simply ignore.

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Why are you against the mastery respec? Have you got any rational reason to dislike it?

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Yeah, people tend to take a more myopic approach to evaluating the suggestions of their peers. For whatever reason, it’s threatening to have something comfortable change, even if it’s ultimately going to open your world a teensy bit more.

I mean, who doesn’t want their time respected?

Just try to let it wash over you. Kneejerk reactions aren’t the total sum of a person, even if when it happens it leaves the recipient feeling ran over. More specifically, don’t let people stop you from sharing your opinions. No matter how much effort you put into being exact, openminded and considerate, or inclusive, someone is bound to try and insult you.

Definitely can feel that way sometimes. Thankfully, those feelings don’t stop people from pushing through. We have our game after all. On the other side of all of that negativity are the people who don’t let it drag them down. Still affected mind you, to carying degrees I’m sure. None the less, still fighting to make dreams into reality, helping others along the way. Might not be the status quo, but there are enough people trying to make a difference. That change brings us some of the coolest stuff that has ever existed.

You never really see projecting used as a term to describe positive experiences. Interesting you would go as far as to lead with that statement in the first place. Everything else you said was so well constructed, I wish the tone wasn’t set with such a pointless thing. I can imagine most people would appreciate the ability to swap masteries as it’s just more control over your experience. It’s hard to picture a large group of people saying “No, I hate that. If someone wants to go from a level 100 Marksman to a Falconer they should be forced to start from scratch!”

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Just the preference that I generally like playing characters from start to finish as close to the final result of the character as possible.

Switching masteries or even full respecs inside a mastery to do something entirely different doesn’t satisfy my needs as a gamer.

And if switching builds is too easy, it’s always one step towards what I really dislike in ARPGs - specs for different types of content that you switch between for reasons of optimisation.

Some people will love exactly that. So it’s all but objective.

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This is all I want. From any entertainment that I ingest. I want creators who have a vision, listen, but go with what they want it to be ,ultimately: sink or swim. I’d rather watch/listen/play something that fails and has heart than was made in committee, no matter what things I may agree or disagree with.

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Yes, usually because it’s a diverse group of people.

Personally, I know that every time I’ve been banned it’s been absolutely nothing to do with me, my behaviour has been flawless & I’ve never said anything that anybody has ever found objectionable (aka, being a dick).

No, not always, quite a lot of the time they have a particular vision or view of how they want to make their game. You seem to think that devs in general are spineless & afraid of their “fans”.

And you are such a brave little sausage, this thread & the other one have brought a tear to my eye, they really have.

Ok, you keep thinking that, because people who disagree with you are evidently ignorant creatively bankrupt troglodytes, while people you aree with other people are interesting & capable of being artistic & stuff.

I think that there’s definitely room to listen to other people & change, but if they change “everything” then you get a game made by a committee as you say & that’ll suck. There is a middle road.

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Because it hurts identity of the weak/strong points of characters.

The class typical fantasy trope “Wizard vs fighter” in dungeons and dragons. The fighter at level 5 is way stronger then a level 5 wizard, the level 5 wizard will run out of steam quickly and then have very few spells, Casters are weak early game, squishy, run out of mana etc etc.

But then at max level wizards can just insta kill any fighter by sending them to hell in a massive portal or teleporting them into 20 feet of rock, or what other creative ways you can kill someone when you can bend reality

Same in normal rpgs, the fighters take a back seat or focus on fighting singular targets vs mages who can call down a meteor storm etc.

So when you go “oh well I am going to play a wizard, but first im going to start as fighter so I dont have to do the bad parts of wizard, then when fighter falls off, I will swap to wizard”

You have now just defeated the weakness of the class archetypes.

or joke classes that start off extremely weak and scale to monsters by end game, but you have to figure out how to get there.

All these designs just cease to exist when you can delete the bad parts and only take the good parts.

The suggested leveling meta has shifted, now all leveling guides on maxroll just assume you are going to level as class X and swap to whatever build you want at 70, because leveling up as a build that takes time to bloom is just objectively stupid when its so easy to change.

Again we must echo a core reality of video games “Restrictions make games better, not worse” if every chess piece can move like the queen the game becomes so much worse.

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Every decision made for convenience for some have to be balanced against in the future. Some people want things because they are short sighted thinkers. They don’t think about the long term effects it has on other areas of the game. Mastery respec may have come at the cost of some really cool gear in the future that now can’t happen because people can respec mastery.

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I highly doubt it. Cook up a scenario that justifies this seemingly unwarranted reasoning. I’m definitely not going to be persuaded by some blanket f.o.m.o. brought to bare using that logic.

Other people shouldn’t forgo convenience or be pressured into pulling back their opinion because other’s preference. An arpg isn’t

I don’t think so, especially not in an ARPG. Character progression in ARPG’s are based on gear. Using the logic of defeating the weakness of an archetype as an excuse to not be able to respec masteries doesn’t hold up in the face of the fact that your build is maybe 20% of your overall power. The only way you’re getting more out those choices is by integrating it fully with synergistic equipment. That stuff doesn’t just magically sort itself. The only point in time that would apply would be in a fresh start scenario where you can’t just equip yourself with gear that has unethically powerful affixes.

How is someone going to have 1 million gold at the start of a new cycle? So in what way is anything you said ever going to be relevant? Now fast forward to a max level character. Lets say you go from a spell blade to a sorcerer, how is swapping going to make you more powerful because you have access to spells or vice versa? Unless you spent hours grinding the gear to make you as powerful as the character you were investing your time in, it will absolutely reduce your power. DnD is a terrible example to use when describing any situation in this genre. All allowing people to respec is going to do, has done, was save them time. At no point is the crossover exploitable because you can’t utilize the stats once you switch. Suggesting it is responsible for some unforeseeable negativity is silly.

Drawing an interesting image with creative wordplay isn’t a justification. It’s just your preference. Nothing wrong with not liking it. You don’t even have to justify not wanting that feature. I personally am glad it exists.

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Well yeah there is no such thing as an objective truth in video games.

So you cant hand wave either side of the argument away.

Saving time isnt a good thing imo.

This is exactly way the game is being review bombed with negative reviews “I beat game in 3 days ez bad game”

Because saving time means the most efficient players and even those who wouldnt normally be so are told by guides to ruin their own experience in the name of efficiency.

its a symptom of modern gamers and modern gaming, where the end result is what matters and players have 0 care or interest in how they get there.

I dont really care either way, I dont use it. I just think its funny that everyone bitched and moaned about saving time, now the number one complaint is that the game is over too quick.

So what is it, saving time is good, or is saving time to remove hours bad? The collective cant seem to make up their mind.

Again ill just say, Restrictions breed complexity and strategy. And there is some loss of that in the leveling/early game portion by being able to remove the downside of having to lock in as a spellblade from level 15 when the class does not get good until 50.

if you dont see that as mattering thats just your own personal opinion which is fair.

But there is a reason the devs pushed back against this very idea for a long time. Personally think the devs have given in a bit to much to certain feedback that comes from players that dont really have longevity in mind.

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I for one definitely do ahve a rational reasoning.

The game currently is starved for content and it’s a live-service game.
To keep a live-service game running you need to keep people long-term in it if possible, unless you have a very massive amount of people coming and going regularly… but in a steady way. And even then it’s extremely risky to not have the long-term engagement happening as it can dip over at any moment.

While mastery unlock doesn’t directly reduce the overall needed time to reach the end-line substantially the majority of players are shorter-term players which invest 20-40 hours into a character. The shift allows them to bypass roughly 5 hours (which will be what is commonly needed for a second playthrough by many people) of those. And that’s a substantial amount of time for what they will experience rather then what the game has in total to offer potentially.
And more importantly, it reduces the mental barrier to allow switching to another character and hence re-doing the content comparatively to pushing on and reaching a higher goal.

This causes problems in several avenues.
One, a significant amount of people are not mentally proclined to re-do things, for them it’s a ‘one and done’ thing. Doing a second character substantially leads to mental fatigue for some of those, which can cause a earlier stopping of the engagement with the game - bad enough - and even worse sustaining that fatigue over to the next Cycle and potentially skipping that.
The second is that it actively reduces the long-term value of the game in the current state. Build variety is for some odd reason regularly praised while it’s the lowest (without counting D3 and D4 which are near pure ‘tourist’ games) in the whole genre, including single-player games of the same setup-direction. You simply ‘have seen it all’ and EHG is not really quick with their meta-shifts. You run in danger to simply have nothing interesting to play anymore which actually is enticing for you.
The third is that limitation of choice provides a psychological weight to said choice. It’s a general thing with limitations, much like the experience of gathering materials in a survival game like Minecraft and building a nice great looking home there is far less valuable when you clobber it together in creative mode. Effort and struggle - if provided at a reasonable amount - does enhance the experience for the end-result.

Mind you… with more content variety it’s a absolutely feasable and even reasonable thing to do.
It’s just that EHG did it prematurely, they’re absolute masters in ‘doing the right things at the wrong times’.
Sadly they also sprinkle it with a bit of ‘doing the right things the wrong way’ on top of that :stuck_out_tongue:

Projecting is neither positive nor negative, it’s simply a behaviour. It’s more worrying that you imply it being purely negative.

Also yes… it is projecting since it’s not based on factual information but subjective experience. This causes to ‘project those experiences’ into the reaction.
That literally is what ‘projecting’ is.

Projecting can enhance your personal experience, ‘wearing rose-tinted glasses’ is a prime saying after all which directly relates to that. The negative is removed and the positive is the only thing experienced for the person, which is a subjective state as the reality is a different case. But for a entertainment product this is a net-positive thing to happen for the customer.

Especially in an ARPG.
Look at what happens in ‘Dwarven Realms’, you switch between builds without any form of downside. This makes every single way to play feel ‘generic’ as the contemplation of limitations, hence upsides versus downsides falls away. It’s solely about the most efficient way and not ‘making something you’ve already invested in work’.

That’s a substantial amount of the enjoyment players derive from this genre.

The important part from the devs hence is to ensure balance is not too outrageous, hence stays within a limit to not cause non-optimal choices to feel utterly awful and optimal choices to feel mandatory.
That’s one of the biggest aspects LE struggles with anyway, which makes it seem viable to use the workaround since it improves the experience by avoiding those pitfalls.

The reality is those pitfalls shouldn’t exist and the limitations hence enhancing your experience rather then being a detriment.

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It has a psychological definition that you are taught in the DS-M 5, that in this specific situation was adapted to be used as an insult, this applied through context. The original definition of the word is not used for positive emotional situations by people regularly.

So pardon pedantry.

Thanks for immediately acknowledging the original term and how it is used.

This only further supports my reasoning. There is a distinct difference between projecting and delusion. That colloquialism is a reference to delusion, not projecting. If we’re to argue semantics concerning behavior, it’s best to respect the reasoning behind developing such a complex language to describe such intimate nuances in behavior.

There is a gold restriction in Last Epoch that I would say helps to incentivize committing to a build in a fresh economy scenario. Most other scenarios I would personally say are subjective to the user, where the value in a argument to support or not to support this feature reflects the personal preference of players. Rationalizing why it shouldn’t exist doesn’t make it more valuable to not have any more than the opposite is true.

I completely agree with you. It is their responsibility to ensure that those pitfalls do not exist, and they absolutely do exist, and the more I play, the more apparent it becomes. When the power creep reaches such an insane level that baseline for a more committed player is established far above what a “normal” build can achieve, a dynamic tends to exist that saps the fun out of playing anything that isn’t optimized for unethically crushing content.

Let’s take for example our current meta. We have what could arguably be considered the most braindead build to have ever existed (I am currently making an iteration myself) involving a new Primordial item, Thicket of Blinding Light. It can easy perform in content above the 1k mark with minimal investment. You literally walk around starting from level 35 on anything but your very first character and watch as the screen dies. While builds that took much more investment were nerfed to do player preference. Something to be expected, as it’s apparent in any game that when large percentage of the population chooses one thing, the nail that sticks out so to speak, gets hammered down.

Then we move to Rogue, an archetype that has held the top position for countless cycles. Somehow it has had it’s newest skill, Heartseeker, seemingly slip under the radar. with yet another minimal investment build capable of crushing content. With investment, easily going over 3k corruption. Ballistas, was performing above to the 2k corruption mark before the global buff to minion damage and introduction of minion focused items. Now, with investment can easily ascend to 4k.

We both know there are more new arrivals and oddly cosmetic enhanced skills to be mentioned. All this while well known skills dramatically underperform, some struggling to hit a 500 corruption benchmark. With the entire system in place, I wonder what the true benchmark is. Is it 300 corruption? 500? 3k? If there is an answer, then why the disparity? I can hardly see the effect of being able to swap masteries influencing this situation. So please pardon my opinion, we’ve just got much bigger fish. Way mo huger fish to fry.

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No, psychological projection is taking your feelings/beliefs/etc & projecting them onto others.

I have no idea what the words you’ve put together mean, sorry.

Not projection.

Exactly.

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Fair enough, I can concur with that vision. But what if at some point, you realise that you don’t enjoy your build that much and think about switching masteries? Would you do a new char to achieve that goal, having 2 of the same classes, and as a result keeping your first “depreciated” character?

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I get where you’re coming from with the class identity thing but this is not a classic RPG, this is a hack 'n slash. In LE, most of your power comes from your gear, not your abilities or class.
This is not D ‘n’ D either, which is a party board game. In D ‘n’ D (from the few games I’ve played), the emphasis is put on your class, your party, your base stats and your abilities / passives. There is a gigantic amount of abilities and as some of them are shared between classes, class fantasy is a tad diluted.

Now you mentioned the leveling experience and how you can now avoid weak builds, leveling in the most efficient way instead with mastery respec.
Again, I don’t find the comparison with traditional RPGs pertinent. Why? Take a game series like Dragon Quest. You have your party, class identity is distinctly defined, okay. But the leveling / story / campaign takes up 90% of the game. In LE, the campaign is the tutorial and represents only like 10% of the game. Not to mention that it is, IMHO, meh in terms of narration. So it makes sense to optimise campaign / leveling to solely focus on the endgame (90%). I don’t find that ludicrous TBH.

As for your last paragraph, agreed, well-thought restrictions may improve a game! And by that I mean restrictions which purposefully serve the game, not only designed to artificially increase the game length.

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Yeah, I have no problem playing multiple characters of the same mastery, keeping the respective specs. I do use respecs on a character’s journey since I like to experiment with different combos, but it’s more incremental changes rather than looking up a build guide and making a 180.

I enjoy playing the campaign over and over again, often in semi-ssf mode, so that is not an issue. My only problem with this is the fixed maps lessening my enjoyment, I always preferred randomized maps for repeated playthroughs.

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Not really? The most powerful skills have the most multiplucative multipliers. And this definitely wasn’t the case in the past when Lizard killed the Dragon Emperor nekkid except dpr a belt (for health pots) & boots (move speed).

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The comparisons dont have to be 1:1

Yes its obviously less important then in DnD or a more typical rpg.

But its still important.

if class didnt matter, why have classes at all?

Seninels cant put axes in their off hand, but primalist can

Spell blade can dual wield but sorcerer can not.

And if you didnt play before 1.0, there was better introductions to the classes. There used to be specific story cutscenes for each character. The acolyte is the student of the mage, their journeys and stories are interconnected. The sentinel defected from Rahyeh’s army which puts him where he is.

Again, Im not saying you cant have respec, its whatever. it fits narratively too, the subclasses represent different yous. Previously you would go to an area to pick mastery and see three “Sentinels” who would explain a bit of the lore of them before you picked. Void knight is a timeline where the sentinel got corrupted by the void. Because we have the epoch would could in theory choose different paths of time etc.

All that being said, to me its still a slight loss, even if its only 3%, a loss is a loss.

I feel what you describe makes perfect sense for say PoE, there is no classes really, they share a passive tree, and they share access to skills through gems. So really your class is just your ascendancy, and where you start on the tree. You can have a fireball elementalist, or a fireball coc sab, or a fireball inquisitor, etc.

Here only mages throw fireballs, so there is more class identity even if its not as much as a traditional rpg.