Only if you never used that skill gem before. Once you level a gem, you can swap them out at will.
It seems you also decided to conveniently ignore the part I mentioned about switching skills at will for boss cheesing.
Personally I find the idea of switching <whatever> on the fly to maximise your performance against the next challenge, boss or otherwise, not so much cheese, but skilled and informed play. Whatâs wrong with doing that?
Well you are ignoring my point. If I remove a level 10 gem, it remains level 10 and is still level 10 when I decide to change back to that skill. If I respec my level 10 Fireball in LE, when I change my mind and spec back into it, it is now level 2.
Thatâs loss of progression.
Thatâs why LE respeccing (of skills) is worse than PoE respeccing (of skills).
I donât recall an APRG which has per-skill skill trees, should they not be part of the game either?
Honestly the only 2 gripes I really have with the Respec system is that I cant reset all the passive points at once⌠It is so annoying that I have to reset one by one, and some I cant reset because other passives ahead in another tree have point in them. You should be able to mass reset the whole passive tree and change it then confirm. If you donât confirm and pay a fee then no changes are made. And also when adding points into a skill and mistakenly click on a point you didnt mean to hit you get punished if you remove it. There should be a confirm button on that as well.
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Ah, thatâs actually surprisingly tricky to answer but has been found out.
When you play a game you get into a specific âgameplay loopâ mentally. This allows you to engage with the situation at hand and ignore everything else around. This holds true for any well done gameplay loop as afterwards you look at the clock and think âAh damn⌠whereâs the time gone?â
Now, for LE this is obviously enter instance, kill stuff, dump stuff off after, the dumping off part being the short âbreatherâ meant to pull you out of said loop.
The skill change does introduce a instance of where youâre pulled out of the loop though, which is generally bad. A dev never wants to pull a player out of their loop for too long, thatâs âtediumâ for the human mind. It needs to work, it doesnât want to work, it wants to relax and release dopamine.
PoE has hefty issues as well, like the trading messages you get during running content, it grates the nerves down, the skill switching does too, as does the switch-up in maps through interacting with mechanics that clearly arenât the core gameplay loop.
Itâs one of the main reasons as to why people âburn themselves outâ on games like this earlier.
Despite less content the earlier leagues of PoE had a better retention rate over the course of a league then the moment things like Incursion temples, Blight, Harvest or Expedition where implemented. Breach or Legion for example are fine since they keep the âstyleâ of the core experience completely upheld⌠anything else then reposition, slaughter, pick up stuff isnât helpful.
Loot-based ARPGs are fairly simple-minded games in that regard.
This is why you wanna avoid such mechanics.
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I think the respec system is fantastic. Best ARPG respec in the industry. Just the right amount of barrier so that you are not respecing for every monolith and boss, but low enough I never think twice about trying out a new build.
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I saw the guide you mentioned. You can skip parts of the campaign, not all of it. But it will save you a lot of time. You will still need to go back and do quests to keep get your idol space and extra points.
I think this was the one I saw.
Thatâs the very problem. You CAN fully respec before a mono or boss right now, if you are high level. At level 100, a FULL respec of all your skills takes one echo. In fact even less. About 30 seconds.
It is low level / new players (who are just trying to experiment with their skills) that get punished by this mechanic. If you are level 30 and respec your level 10 Fireball, then change your mind, it takes over an hour to get FB back to level 10.
The people the mechanic is designed to deter are absolutely unaffected.
We all agree that low level respec needs balancing. However, the system does prevent you from build switching just for bosses. For example, it prevents you from doing that in dungeons. You canât just rush the dungeon part and insta-switch for the boss.
Also, because it has friction (meaning no loadouts), you have to manually switch your skills, then go do an echo with boss killing setup, kill the boss, then manually switch again to echo farming. Itâs enough friction that discourages this mentality while not preventing true experimenting.
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Thanks for the very informative reply.
I will say this⌠the fact I can freely swap my gear before a boss or whatever is going far more down that path that the devs are deterring than respeccing my skills could ever be.
Take the trivial example of resists. I often donât even bother capping them all. But I carry additional items around that allow me to to cap my low ones if I need it. Eg I swap in heavy Void resist on a slot or two before fighting Rahyeh. Idols are particularly useful for this.
Why is that completely fine but respeccing a skill isnât?
Because youâre giving something up for it. You replace a piece of gear for another for higher resists, youâre losing on the better affixes of the gear you removed. If the one you use for that was better, youâd be using that in the first place. So thereâs still friction.
Well yeah, though Iâm mostly replacing 5% or 3 Vitality resist idols .
But outside of idols, I am talking about gear that is more or less as good as whatever I replace. Example, they both have different resists, but everything else on the items is more or less equivalent.
I am also giving up <something> if I respec a skill.
Plus the very fact I have no need to cap all resists frees up a heck of a lot of slots for juicier affixes. It is kinda OP.
You are so out of the loop with this logic Im confused with why you even asked this question that doesnt make any sense.
100% agree to thisâŚ
It became even more noticeable how smooth the respec system is when I started doing all my builds from scratch, without following any leveling or building guides, actually reading and evaluating every possible next available point before blindly assigning it. It really adds up to the whole gaming experience.
I think the main reason behind this might be people feeling they need to min-max everything at level 30~50. And worse, they try to min-max at low levels without even planning ahead.
This situation you describe shows what I mean: Yeah, it will take a while to level up you Fireball back to level 10 but you will do the job just fine with the 5 minimum level Fireball for being a level 30 character.
But then, why would you want to despec FB just to instantly regret and spec it again? No planning ahead maybe? What was wrong with it that made you want to swap it out for another skill entirely? Whatever reason, Iâm sure the problem will not be fixed nor get worse, just because Fireball is now at level 5.
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It isnât, itâs an oversight leading to the same slippery slope.
The whole topic of player retention and gameplay loop is a whole section of game-design by itself which tons of devs actively work on⌠as well as psychological scientists actually. Itâs a massive thing and the smallest most mundane little things tend to have huge effects and not every dev knows all of them.
Itâs like in a grocery store. Why do many stores place something right in the middle of your path when entering the store? You have a âwalking speedâ outside of stores and a âbrowsing speedâ which is far lower. That hindrance there leads to you slowing from the walk to the browse situation and causing you to be more likely to buy something.
Sounds odd, hilariously so⌠but thatâs how our brain functions, it learns new stuff which exhausts it to then create subroutines (a sort of âtranceâ itâs even called) taking over after which needs vastly less energy. Thatâs also why the new player experience is so ridiculously important as the energy investment for players is so high in comparison to just keeping at doing something.
Nah, if you simply switch out 2 pieces of identical gear with only a singular res as a difference that doesnât exist.
Itâs a design-oversight simply.
Personally I donât enjoy the ability to outfit my character âmid battleâ either, would prefer it to only be able to do it at a âsave spotâ so to speak.
But thatâs another topic by itself.
When becomes stuff too limiting and when too tedious? Itâs a while science there.
I actually disagree on this. The system allows you to do this because doing it is, in itself, friction. Yes, you can have 2 exact pieces of gear and one has void res and the other has necrotic res. But then you have to remember to switch the gear to fight the boss, which is something many will forget and only remember after they die. And then you have to switch back after killing the boss, which is something many will forget until they die of necrotic damage.
Most people canât be bothered to keep track of items they have to switch according to the situation. Itâs too much bother and too much friction. So most people wonât do this.
Besides, you have absolutely no way to prevent this, other than making it like in D3 where you can only switch gear in non-combat zones, which doesnât really prevent it anyway because you just switch the gear before entering the node.
No system will ever be perfect. The goal is to try to make a decent compromise in order to please the target audience and try to broaden it without displeasing it.
I am all for making low level respec easier while making high level respec harder. Not sure what the ideal mechanism could be, though.
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Personally, Iâd just increase the minimum level earlier to be ALMOST on par with what you should have without the respec. This would adjust values during the campaign until you reach the max minimum level we have now.
Then I would get rid of accelerated XP.