Costs to respeccing/Insta-kill mechanics are a bad idea

To be clear, I mean both the gold cost when respeccing passives, and the point cost when respeccing an ability tree. Get rid of both of them.

I understand that some devs are going to protest about gold sinks and choice weight, and all that other drivel, but let me tell you why both of those are bad reasons: They’re not fun.

In both cases, and Goddess help you if you’re suffering BOTH at the same time, you’re limping along with a half-assed build until you’re back up to par, and that’s IF you know what you’re doing.

For a new player that can’t be bothered to go look at build videos or do a deep dive into the wiki, they see that cost and think to themselves, “Is it worth it?” which immediately turns into, “Is this game worth my time?” which is something that you want to avoid AT ALL COSTS.

Other games in this genre have free respeccing, and even swappable build templates. Do yourselves a favor, and drop this outdated concept of respeccing costs while you’re still in beta, and can still make balance changes without people bringing out the torches and pitchforks.

While we’re on the subject of things that are not fun, insta-kill mechanics on bosses. I consider myself a patient person. However, when I have to dodge no fewer than three insta-kill mechanics on Lagon and Majasa, I’m tempted to throw in the towel. Is this Dark Souls? Dark Souls can get away with insta-kill mechanics because they don’t have to deal with lag, and they market themselves to masochists. Get rid of insta-kill mechanics, and replace them with simple hard-hits, like, I dunno, 75% of your health or something. At least give your players the option to panic-drink a potion, and think, “I better dodge THAT next time,” rather than make your players think, “WTF was that? Do I really want to bang my head against this fight again or should I play something else?”

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Everyone can have its own opinion and give feedback and recommendations to the devs. I do not agree with your opinion and just want to tell you my view on some of your ideas. Feel dree to answer or ignore me :wink:

This of course is true. Different games, different approaches. I like that every game plays differently.

On respeccing for skills:
LE is unique about the skill system. It is balanced around only being able to use 5 skills (with some exceptions) and the skill points you can allocate. Considering this they balance their game. If you would allow free respeccing (of skills) without the “downgrade” you could easily adapt your build for each excercise: Single target for bosses; aoe for echoes; survivability for high arena; …

First it sounds great but as soon as it is an option poeple will work out “optimal skill-swaps” which are required to be good or be competitive. Even if you have build templates at some points it should be done to get the best experience resp. highest efficiency. But swapping builds or respeccing is not “playing the game”. I think the devs want us to enjoy playing and creating one build which can manage all content (or at least the content we want to play) decently while not being able to do everything optimal. There must be an opportunity cost! (again: my opinion)

But I think they should improve the respeccing at lower levels. Players want and should try a build there. Maybe a faster grwoing minimum skill level or something like this. For endgame I like it that you have to do one or two monoliths to get back to your peek performance. You can even reduce the disadvantage when you do a exp-echo beforehand.

Everyone simply would run low health + endurance with leech as recovery to insta-heal after every hit and wouldn’t have to care about any mechanic. If I remember Lagon only has one really big hit which insta-kills most (but not all) builds. The others can be tanked with decent gear.

Most one hit mechanics are highly telegraphed in this game. Avoid circles wherever possible :smiley:

Again: Just my two cents. Feel free to have different opinions. Discussions are always important to improve games!

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With respect, you not liking a thing does not make it objectively bad. Both the gold cost & xp cost are also trivial at high level (& TBH, the gold cost is trivial even at low level). Also, some people do like their choices having weight, not everybody is of the requiring instant gratification mindset.

Fortunately it really doesn’t take long to get back up to speed, a couple of monoliths & you’re done, there are several mechanics already in play to make it easier to get back to higher level skills much quicker (minimum skill levels & increased skill xp gain at lower level).

Some do, yes, one of the main 2 does, the other doesn’t.

With respect, please no.

No, and the mechanics really aren’t “Dark Souls” level. Lagon’s 3 one-shot (in monolith, only the sweeping eye beam is a one-shot in campaign) are all easily avoidable. Majasa is harder but difficulty/challenge is a good thing. If LE had no challenge you’d have more people complaining & leaving than vice versa.

If LE is lagging, that’s your pc’s issue. Some builds are worse than others but you can still easily do the more mechanic heavy bosses even with minion or proc-heavy builds.

If the attacks didn’t one-shot you you’d just leech/life-on-hit/regen back up to full hp within a fraction of a second & the fight would be reduced to just sitting there spamming your attack/rotation. This isn’t a game that requires fast reflexes but if the big telegraphed attacks were reduced then they’re remove even that level of skill.

Like the potion you can use if you take a big hit?

You are welcome to your opinion, as I am mine.

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Nope, Wolcen lets you use five skills for the majority of the game, and you can select which effects they have. Free respeccing, except for skills you haven’t invested in, but eventually, if you wanted to, you could have a character that can do it all.

The weakness that Wolcen has, is that after three deaths, you’ve failed the Expedition and you get nothing except the loot that was in your pack. I like that LE doesn’t have a death penalty, and have beaten some enemies just by zerg-rushing over and over from the respawn point.

If LE is lagging, sometimes it’s because the game’s not optimized, sometimes it’s the ISP’s fault, and sometimes it’s the PC. Either way, it’s on the devs to optimize the game to run on as many PCs as possible/provide stable hosting servers, because the more sales, the better.

My money, my time, my opinion, that’s true.

Mmmm… another popcorn thread.

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Haven’t really played Wolven to be fair. I like that you have to make descisions and get some advantages as well as disadvantages. To have some cahracter which can do everything should be farely expensive and at best never be accomplished. It should be asymptotic trying to reach an poe like aura-stacker which does everything fast and smooth.

Ok. Seems you are not in monoliths but still in the campaign. Am I right?
In monoliths you will not get a reward or stability (used for quest progression) if you die in an echo. You still can try it again but it is a fresh start of the area without the loot-reward from the node itself. Just random item drops stay.

They try. It far from eprfect now. But still remember it is early access. But it seems from your posts that you are aware of it :wink:

The topic on respecing costs seems to be a popular one and appears in many threads on the forums. Maybe write in one of the currently active threads instead of creating a new?
Here is one from the first page of the Feedback and suggestions forums:

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The game doesnt run on servers (yet)…

In my opinion, you seem to be discussing the lack of clarity on boosting in the campaign phase, especially the survivability requirements
Before lagon, LE’s current difficulty setting basically didn’t require a defensive affix (yes it helps, but it’s not “necessary”), but lagon does and must, so when you get insta-killed, the problem is that the game doesn’t teach you to pay attention to your survivability up front, and then suddenly gives you a high survivability challenge

I think the problem is that there are too many kinds of defensive attributes needed, and the pressure on survival is not that huge in the campaign phase, while few shards and drops of low-level equipment make balancing attack and defense very troublesome and pointless, the optimal solution is to increase the damage value as much as possible and hopefully with some defense
In the first few or ten hours, you are taught that “defensive attributes are not necessary”, but lagon, its mechanic is stressing your defensive attributes so hard

If there’s one thing you can’t blame for lag in LE (at the moment), it’s your ISP…

If you’re a “skilled” player (ie, you can avoid the waves in the second phase) you can do campaign Lagon with zero resists (I did, took ~3 attempts to not be stupid & one shot by one of the waves).

If everything get’s removed someone think it is not fun the world will be an empty place tomorrow not to speak about this thread or forum :p.

Gold is a joke in this game no reason to remove it because it’s almost only usable for chest space and respeccs.

Respeccing skills is crap in the beginning and easier in the lategame. i already mentioned it might be better to make respeccing easier in the beginning and make it worse later on when you should know better and level skills up much faster.

While the same genre this game != other games. There are some different approaches to different systems… some people might even call this different ^^. Yes there is kind of a shitty hack and slay meta right now that got intoduced with D3 but that was the worst way the genre was able to go. Just to throw in a different oppinion :).

These are telegraphed well and you might die one or two times untill you get what is going on. I’m no elitist but no pleb either but if I’m able to wrap my heaviely medicated head arround this everyone is able to. Right now I can always identify what killed m toon and in most cases the problem was between screen and chair. I feel more terrified by trash mobs because at some point these hurt like hell and an overlooked arrow makes a lot of dmg all of the sudden.

Bosses are fine even when some mechanics prefer some classes that have an easier way to dodge screenwide AoEs for example.

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Haha, I wouldn’t expect any user “should” reach the “skilled player” level you mentioned … I mean, while I don’t have any problem with the current design. But I can totally understand if someone in the lagon stage gets killed in one hit and is upset, the damage and “skill” need of lagon are much higher than all previous game processes, and since it takes a relatively long run to see lagon, users won’t think “return to other map to upgrade their level and equipment” as their first choice

It is & the devs are aware of the, overly spikey, nature of the difficulty & will give the entire game a balance pass to make it smoother. That said, it’s now (a good year or two after Lagon was released) pretty rare to see people complain about Lagon, the OP is the first thread I can remember in a while. People complain about Majasa being too hard, but not Lagon.

I don’t understand why there isn’t a portal before Lagon, since it’s not as if people are going to be farming campaign bosses for loot.

The only thing “not fun” about respeccing, is having to hit the confirmation button after each point.

But, that’s almost countered by the assertion in this thread that Wolcen is a game to be copied. PoE and Grim Dawn both have respec costs, and they are 2 of the most fun/popular out there. Never would have guessed Wolcen would be brought up… what’s next, should we copy Loki or The Slormancer as well?

Great idea! They should introduce Slormreapers that level with you as you progress. Not so sure if we need a shovel compass, though. Changing graphics to pixel art style could solve performance issues… :thinking:

:laughing:

Edit: There’s respec cost, when I remember correctly.

On topic: Wolcen is eye candy. Gameplay feels great, graphics are nice. But the game failed in so many other categories. They have one if the most boring skill systems that almost is a carbon copy of D3 where you can instantly respec any skill at will. All conversions and different build options are just 2 clicks away. That feels bland to me.

I like LE for its skill system where choices have some weight. Yes, during campaign it’s not good if you respec all you lvl 12 skills at once. But there is some space for experimentation (maybe it could be a bit more throughout the story/ early game).

My money, my time, I want an actual challenge.

I’ve played PoE, Grim Dawn, D2, and D3. I don’t need LE to be a game where I can faceroll across the keyboard and win.

Character design is the part I have most fun with any aRPG. And there has to be a balance between how many builds can work. Too many, and there is no weight to character design. Too few and everything becomes cookie cutter. And if there is no permanence to character build decisions, there are no builds. Everyone is amorphous and is whatever they need at the time.

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