Find a path to change/respec mastery.
Wonât happen, demanded or not. Goes against the design philosophy in a major way.
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The devs have put it like this when they were asked about this topic: âNo!â
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Actually, Mike once said âMaybe when we have 5 masteries per class we might consider it. Until then, I donât see a reason for itâ. Paraphrasing but it was something similar to that.
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you get to pick pretty early, itâs not a big deal to make a new character
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Especially if youâre in MP & cadge a lift from someone to the end of timeâŚ
Gosh. What a novel thread. Iâm so glad we have a new one rather than posting in any of the other ones. Especially when a new perspective is brought to the table in the OP.
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yeah if it was like a lvl 50 thing iâd be more sympathetic, but now, its like a few minutes of play 
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I remember when mastery picking was in chapter 4 before it changed to chapter 2.
Way better now than it was before
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I donât think itâs completely off the table. Iâve sent this as a DM to OP already when I deleted the several duplicate versions of this topic. I think more persuasive feedback would be in the form of âwhen x happens, I feel y.â
Iâm personally on the fence about it at the moment. Doesnât mean Iâm right or that anyone agrees.
What do you think the benefits of adding it would be? Are there any issues it could create? Are there ways to mitigate those issues?
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I remember when you didnât even have to choose a mastery, you could just put points in the trees as soon as you had the points available.
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Personally, I think the benefits are mostly for altoholics that donât have enough character slots.
It will also be good for people that just want to respec into anything without having to make a new character (like in D3 where you have a single character in each class).
I donât know if it outweighs the loss of character identity for those that like it.
Allowing a simple mastery respec will pretty much discourage making more characters, even for altoholics. It will change how players view the game identity. At least in my case.
It will also be one less important choice you have to make in the game, which is also important for some players.
Even players that like making new characters will feel like they have to use mastery respec in order to be efficient, which isnât good.
So it depends on how you do it. If you make it so that it has a hefty cost (so you canât just respec mastery like you respec your passive tree) or a relatively long quest associated, I think that the people against it wonât oppose and would still rather make a new character than to change mastery.
Basically, if the effort/cost of changing mastery is significant enough that it outweighs the need to use it to feel efficient, then those that want one have one and those that donât want one wonât feel forced to use it. Although no solution will please everyone, so youâll still have people that want instant respec and some that want it gone.
But if you make it as easy to respec as it currently is to respec your passive tree, then people that care about character identity and an incentive for making multiple characters will probably leave.
So the bottom line, as itâs always been is:
What type of players do you want playing your game? 
Because you definitely canât please everyone (please donât be Blizzard 
), so youâll have to choose.
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I donât think it would really HURT anything, but youâd need some lore or quest so it made sense to do
The post is my final judgement, critically. Trust me, whoever is preventing Last Epoch to have mastery respec option, you are destroying Last Epoch in long term, critically.
As I said in my post, itâs not about destroying LE. Itâs about what type of players they want playing.
If they implement a free instant mastery respec that has no cost, some players will leave. I know I will.
If they donât implement a free instant mastery respec that has no cost, some players will leave. I know many already have. You probably will.
Any point in the spectrum between those 2 extremes will simply change which players stay and which leave.
EDIT: So what you actually mean isnât âyou are destroying LEâ but instead âyou are destroying LE for me (and others like me)â.
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Critically, I assuredly believed that mastery respec option would hugely bring more buyers, more players, more gamers, more customers, and more consumers to Last Epoch, inevitably. Critically, mastery respec option would also bring Last Epoch higher competition scores, too, assuredly. Every skill can be changed/respecced in Diablo II Resurrected, Diablo III, and Diablo IV. In Diablo II Resurrected, Diablo III, and Diablo IV, you do not need to create another/two same class(s) to try every skill that a class can cast a spell. Goal/Objective is âa class can try every mastery skills without having to create other two same classes again for trying other two mastery skills.â
Changing LE into a game like Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, etc would bring more of all of those things, but it wouldnât be the type of game that EHG want to make. More popular is not necessarily better.
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Thanks for answering in here!
So since itâs not 100% off the table I wanna put my thoughts into as coherent sentences as possible, so itâll be a slight read likely.
So to get into those:
- Benefits:
The benefits of changing masteries would definitely be more flexible testing for characters, as well as the ability for players which havenât put much time into the game to enjoy other types of playstyles as well, without re-doing the campaign.
While yes⌠picking the mastery at Act 2 is a good thing and happens early nonetheless to realize how it works one needs to unlock the skills for it still, as well as nodes for those skills to get the respective behavior and at times even some specific uniques to cause the interactions to fully shine.
Thatâs a decent amount of time investment which often gets oversimplified by saying âBut you can just re-do it by Act 2, it doesnât take much time!â but⌠it definitely does take time.
- Issues:
Loads and loads of different variety.
The first and foremost issue I can see is that we currently have 5 âcoreâ classes. The ability to respec mastery would mean that those are all which exists. You need 5 characters and youâre done.
Given that Last Epoch is a life-service game and while - luckily - ever further they move away from âkeeping people playing endlesslyâ this doesnât mean that long-term choices which will need a while to switch between are unnecessary, quite the contrary.
Because⌠what would me have come back to the game unless I can experience something at least mildly ânewâ? And thatâs for many people to try out another class for a new cycle. No more classes left and it becomes a detriment to people actually engaging in the game I can imagine.
The next issue it would create is that it actively reduces character identity. Which ties heavily into the issues for itemization progression currently though, Iâll get shortly into it.
But first, character identity is important for quite a few people, some more then others, and it plays a big role in how people perceive âhow deepâ a game is. A prime example for a game to showcase this issue is âChroniconâ, which is a SP diablo-clone. It has a good amount of content but since you can fully respec every aspect of your character with basically no limitations you donât ever get the feeling that the game offers variety, switching builds is a matter of minutes at times. Hence⌠everything feels kinda âthe sameâ.
Which brings me to the itemization issue which plays into that. Last Epoch has a âbackwardsâ power progression system currently. Tier power gets higher exponentially with each tier. A single T4 modifier is stronger then 4 T1 modifiers, this causes power-progression to be âfrontloadedâ and hence makes power disparity at the later stages immense.
This leads to singular lucky item drops causing a player to find more power for a potential new build then their current one in one singular step, and with each progressed item the time investment to improve the current build over another potential one - if solely for play variety - becomes massive.
In comparison we can again look at the competition of the genre (or adjacent), 3 prime examples there again: Chronicon provides extremely swift and easy item progression. You can finish outfitting your character quick⌠and then you just grind for points. This makes it very repetitive as gear is procured in moments. Dwarven Realms provides a more varied approach already, but âlocksâ you into a build direction since you can permanently improve stats⌠but you have to choose which stat to improve. Using fire will mean you other elements are worse off, and catching up is a very very long-term task.
And last but not least we got PoE which approaches itemization the other way around then LE does. Which is to frontload immediate power but enforce - through their content balancing - to upgrade all gear equally and gradually. Higher (or lowered numbered there) tiers are not as important individually, but since the disparity between a T2 and a T1 is lower then between a T3 and a T2 a âbalancedâ itemization is enforced, the limitation not finding items through sheer luck but instead on picking which upgrade you want to invest into nest⌠be it through the market or through crafting. Last Epoch lacks this method in a very extreme measure given the rather broken state of MG as well as the limited approach to crafting itself.
- Mitigation:
Thatâs extensive in terms of work but easily said.
To alleviate the issues coming up thereâs 2 potential ways to go about it. The first is regular short-interval updates of the game which provide substancial amounts of content. Similar to how PoE provides it. Which is simply not feasable for your company as the in-depth framework for testing and âcontent churningâ isnât established, and itâs a constant catch-up situation which simply canât be won against such a monolith on the market as theyâre already quite close to the peak in terms of efficiency there.
Which only allows the second option, which would be broad balance changes to core systems. Everything which enforces long-term time investment into the character to tackle a growing amount of content, hence âalways having another possible goal aheadâ. And that doesnât mean âendless contentâ but distinct challenges like Abberroth, which was a great start in the right direction!
This includes reduction of power increments between tiers, increasing the affix count on items to allow players to have a higher chance to get a planned âmiddle groundâ of power early on⌠with effort needed to acquire upgrades after⌠as well as increasing the ânumber of times a characters changes gear until the end of progressionâ.
Next up there also needs to be taken a look at the crafting system in-depth, neither the old system with the instant fail-state nor the new system with a nigh guaranteed upper limit is optimal for the long term. Incremental power improvement of items to their upper limit⌠with exponential need of resources invested is a viable way to go. Last Epochâs system is far away from that.
As for things people have wrote before me and after you here:
- The âaltoholicâ aspect:
Yes, that one is important. Currently Last Epoch provides no option to give people playing long-term the ability to play a variety of builds in a variety of masteries. As someone falling into this category as well I personally have a mental conundrum of âI want to play dozens of buildsâ which gets countered by âI only have 25 character slotsâ which immediately is off-putting and actively stops me from trying out a variety⌠and hence makes me stop playing.
This gets even worse since the changes between factions are massively punishing for - in my eyes - no sensible reasoning there. I canât switch from MG when the market crashes⌠and it is a constant crash⌠and I canât find reliable upgrades after dozens of hours of playing in CoF since rare exalted mods on the right base are a unicorn and not remotely reliable to get. Could be after 1 hour⌠could be 1000. Not fun simply if thereâs no goal ahead to âwork towardsâ.
I wanna play a game and progress, not play slot-machine non-stop for everything in the game.
This is a prime example as well, which is why I actually quoted something.
The âcasualâ versus âin-depthâ style of player. Which position does Last Epoch want to go with? Casual like the Diablo Series has become? Or in-depth like Path of Exile provides.
I would argue the middle-ground is the best option there as the others are already filling the market, with monoliths of companies which are hard to compete against.
Which brings me to the question: What position does Last Epoch actually try to put themselves into? Because plainly spoken the progression in the different systems are a hot mess there. It caters to everyone at some point⌠which causes it to cater to nobody properly.
What I want to hence say directly to you @EHG_Mike is: Decide on a core audience and stick to them. Primarily balance with those types of players in mind, let the others be a positive afterthought.
The game had a massive success at launch but fell off heavily again, still sitting at a healthy playerbase but in the current state with no chance of recovering. Long-term single-character progression is a chore, so those players arenât fully happy. Casuals canât get through the game and re-visit it regularly without pulling the slot machine to actually get through⌠so those arenât catered to either. Variety players which want to try out every possible build canât do that properly because of the character limitation, hence they arenât catered to either. It does give everyone âa bitâ but not the full experience, hence why from 100k+ players we now donât even have 10% at a major patch anymore.
Where do you get this from? LE only had one major patch so far, with a 75k peak. Thatâs more than 25% of the 1.0 peak of 250k.
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I personally donât understand the âdemandâ for Mastery respec when you can have one of each Mastery and then respec within that Mastery as much as you like.
Identity in a game is important. Many will cry about not being able to do one thing or another regardless of how itâs done. Not doing this will not âdestroyâ the game.
I for one like the fact that there is a difference and making the Mastery respec possible just erases the identity of a Mastery in the first place for me.
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Totally forgot about that. So long ago