The thing that makes me enjoy the game after I’m satisfied with my first character is trying out new builds that may or may not work out. But the respec cost is such that if you want to do this more than once or twice, it’s really restrictive. I ended up bouncing between ideas on Paladin, then FG, then back to Paladin, and at this point I kind of feel stuck. I want to try things again in other masteries, but it costs too much to swap and I’m not interested enough in continuing to play my previous successful builds and the experimental builds that didn’t work out aren’t really going to do much for farming gold.
Perhaps it would have been prudent to have all my ideas lined up in order so I got all the ones in one mastery done first then moved on, but that’s just not how I play the game and has some additional practical issues. I don’t know what idea is going to captivate me next and I also don’t always have the gear lined up to try any given idea at that time.
I kind of feel like the ramping cost per level kind of has it backwards as far as what it’s disincentivizing. If you don’t want people to just have one leveling build per class then swap, then having it be lower earlier doesn’t address that and we see that the build sites have basically just gone for having one guide per class now for leveling anyway. If someone plays a character enough to get it to a high level, they’ve probably gotten their satisfaction out of it already and would be swapping more to experiment or get variety than to min-max some advantage.
Possible solutions: Personally I think the need for a respec cost is silly in the first place, but assuming it was something they feel they need to keep to discourage some kinds of min-maxing:
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Level off the cost curve so it doesn’t increase so much. I don’t know the exact right number, but it should reflect approximately what a CoF player playing an average or bellow average build could reasonably farm in the time it would take them to get bored of their build. That’s not precise, but it’s something to keep in mind while tuning the numbers.
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Maybe have the cost decrease as a function of time from the start of the season. (and in turn there would be no cost on legacy/offline.) So at the start when there are some people who are sweating it out to compete, it’s costly enough that it isn’t worth it to them, but once you get further out, the only people who are going to be doing a lot of swaps are people who are slower at the game or like a lot of variety like me. I don’t really see why the cost needs to be high for that use case.
I know the theory (which I disagree with in the first place) is that things that slow down how long it takes to do things will keep retention high, but for me it’s the exact opposite. I stop playing these games when I get too exhausted by them to get over the hump needed for the next thing I want to do, whether that’s further upgrading my character or swapping to a new build. I’m already basically at that point with this season. I have a bunch of ideas rattling around in my head, but almost all of them would require me to respec or re-level and this is across multiple classes, so that time adds up. So I’m reaching a point where the likelihood that I’ll do any of them is rapidly diminishing.