I would love the option to spend ingame-farmed gold to create a Class (i.e. Marksman) with random, but locked-skills.
Sometimes I play with a friend, that does not have much time. And I don’t want to, like, be always over-leveled then him. But I also want to keep leveling my characters.
I would therefore propose and love the following:
One can spend a certain amount of ingame-Gold or Currency to create, lets say a Void-Knight level 50/60/70 which has random Skills, and these Skills cannot be changed. (Maybe on Level 100)
This kinda gives enough punishment and freedom to allow for such a thing to work. It would give me the advantage of starting out quite fast and use my existing gear to level with my friend together, but also locks me into some kind of mini-game, where I have to figure out how to make my skills work.
Maybe one could reroll a Skill, but for huge amounts of money.
The lock could be lifted at level 100.
Uh, I don’t know… While interesting and intriguing, I really don’t think EHG would like it very much… Imagine how all these guys asking for them to allow free Class change would then just turn to spam character creation until they find what they wanted to change their former character to.
Maybe you could choose a character to be your friend’s duo. As in, you would only play this character if your buddy is partied with you. This way you’ll never be ahead of him, and if he’s not online, you can play all other characters solo. Would also add a layer of immersion to the whole thing, IMO.
Let’s start with the elephant in the room : outside of special events, EHG isn’t going to allow you to start above level 1.
I guess I could imagine what you are suggesting as special events, like an event where you have limited attempts (to avoid players just creating new characters until they get something good), and you need to work with specific restrictions.
A question that comes to mind : how do the passives work, then? Are active skills locked until you spend enough passives? Do you have a set of pre-set passives to unlock the actives, and if so can you switch them if you don’t like them? Are the actives always available no matter how much passives you spend in the trees?
Now, the issue is that you need to make sure that the experience remains interesting. It could easily prove frustrating to find yourself having to play with Shift/Smoke Bomb/Dark Quiver/Dive Bomb/Aerial Assault (I am supposing you can’t use the last two without using Falconry too).
It should also be noted that if it’s truly random you risk ending up with no damage skills at all. Imagine rolling Flame Ward, Teleport, Focus, Arcane Ascendance, Enchant Weapon. You can’t really do anything with it.
Personally, I feel like the fun in ARPGs is creating your build. Having a random build is the realm of vampire survivors and its clones.
I think a fun idea to build off what you said is to have a special arena with set builds (skills, passives, the skill nodes, the gear, etc), in a way like the Monster Hunter arena works, then you’re challenged to use that setup to clear X waves and a boss fight and get ranked on the Leaderboard for that specific game mode.
