Sorry if this has been said before, I didn`t know what to search for in the forum.
When you unequip any piece of equipment that has +x to skills the game seems to remove a point from a random node. If it removes from a node that we want to keep we have to manually respec and after leveling it up again put the point in the correct place.
This is really bad when we are trying to find out the best gear.
The solution here would be to only remove the points that we have used from the equipment and leave the normal ones alone.
It is not random and determined by an algorithm. With the same skill setup it will always be the same point.
That is exactly what they are trying to avoid here. To avoid exploiting this system to your benefit.
There are countless of discussions about this here on the forum.
And while many people dislike how it is, nobody brought up any good points in my opinion.
Regaining skill points or reallocating points is so fast, that with or without this system it doesn’t really change much anyway, but without the system the best strategy for many skills would be to determistically unspec certain keynodes for better Aoe vs. Single Target dmg.
The only thing that currently does not work anymore, but it did work previously. Is a clear indication of what skill point was removed when you open the skill spec tree of a skill that lost skill points due to changing gear.
Here are some examples of thread where this ahs been discussed before:
And finally here is a pretty old thread, that still holds true with Mike, one of the senior devs explaining the specifics of why its exploitable:
The only real cumbersome situation I personally encountered is endgame WW grind, where you regularly switch WW items (the relics give +1 to all skills) after leveling them for a couple of minutes.
That was actually kinda annoying. This maybe could be something they could improve/change: When you replace an item with the same amount of + to skills, that no skill points change at all.
For regular leveling +X to skill affixes/items are relatively rare and you really don’t change out these items on a regular basis.
Only exception would be if you are leveling an alt and manually craft +X to skill on new base types as they start dropping, but that really is a luxuary problem anyway.
So cumbersome really isn’t the word I would use to describe this.
Cumbersome is the perfect word to describe it (in English). Especially when the red flash/highlight for which nodes have had points removed is gone/not working. I know why it’s there but it does ellicit a sigh of frustration every time.
Thanks for the answers. I read the other posts and I can understand their reasoning,
This is exactly the situation that prompted my post, and your idea would be an improvement. I`m trying to find a Knowledge of an Erased Mage with +3 disintegrate and this item has weavers will, so I have to swap it every 20-30 minutes making me reallocate points over and over again.
To be fair, when you equip something what the game does is unequip first and that’s a separate method that runs whether you equip something else or not. That is, it will run:
-Unequip boots
-Equip new boots
And neither of them, in a vacuum, will know if the other had any +skills or not.
That being said, the game is supposed to be tracking the removed points. There was a feature (not working for a long time) where the nodes that got points removed from unequipping gear should glow red. Which means that the game has a way of knowing that.
So when you equip a +skill of the same or higher value, it could automatically fill in the previously removed points.
That would be the most friendly solution and it would actually prevent what they want to prevent, which is free respec, which the current method doesn’t really do.
This is just a classic example of “dishonest” people ruining a game for everyone else. Though I use the term loosely because it simply doesn’t line up with the developers intent for the game. I hope they can come up with a creative solution that meets both parties needs because the current system IS cumbersome for everyone who has used it, even those NOT trying to exploit or abuse the game mechanics.
Well, what I find most perplexing is that the current system, as it is, actually lets you respec nodes. It only lets you respec specific nodes and in the order they’re coded, and only up to a certain point, but you can do it.
The fix that would be most user-friendly and actually prevent this is simply what I suggested to refill the removed point. This way you can never actually cheese it.
Baring that, simply fixing the red flashing on nodes that were removed would already be a big help.
I dislike their philosophy about this sort of thing. Best case this mechanic feels needlessly annoying, worst-case it feels opaque and anti-player.
‘anti-player’ is definitely a hyperbolic thing to say. But after the tenth time of quick swapping an item to see if another is better, and forgetting about skill points, yeah, in that moment, it feels anti-this-player. Note: not the same item ten times, but after having this, “shit, what did I have?” moment ten times it gets old.
My opinion is, “this is a pve game with no boss rush competition, and no long-lasting consequence to skill choices. Adding short term annoyances (or medium-term, if you are a low level player) to all users to prevent an imaginary user base from cheesing boss fights IS anti-player, even if not intended. If EHG wants to prevent boss-cheesing, they should implement a system that targets skill-changes + bossing explicitly.”
The problem without the system is, that people would always feel like they should play a certain way and use these systems in unintended ways for maximum effeciency.
Needing to juggle gear around between bosses and echoes is something I personally deeply, deeply despise. Any game that does not combat system exploits that result in players needing to juggle in multiple different menues/systems (during regualr game play, that interupts playing) is a game that from my point of view doesn’t care about the players and how they might feel forced to play in this way.
So having these systems in place to combat this, even though they come with their own little annoyances is very very much worth it.
So for me its the exact otherway around. NOT having a game systems in palce to deal with these kinds of exploits would be annoying.
This is my biggest gripe with Titan Quest’s gearing. It’s very difficult to max your resistances in that game so many people would suggest you keep a “general set” with decent resistances for clearing, and then swap to the boss resistant set (i.e. Lightning Res for a Lightning damage boss) when you got to the boss. I literally said “nope, not worth.” and just tried my best to cap resistances and dealt with lower offensive stats XD
Can you come up with a decent idea of how such a system should be designed in a way that does not open the path to new exploits? Sounds like a great thread for the feedback and suggestions section.
Edit: and is not cumbersome in itself and annoys the players with a different kind of flavour.
I’m happy to suggest what I think makes sense. That said, I really feel like anyone who isn’t conversant with the codebase has zero clue about what does and doesn’t make sense/what is and isn’t a good suggestion. I think the best player suggestions are the very abstract, ‘how about something like X, and here’s why’. Also, software developers and architects have large egos… like many humans.
MY CRAPPY SUGGESTION
Change the skill slot to remember two arrays of values for skills instead of just one. Let’s call them ‘CurrentSkillSelections’ and ‘RealizedSkillSelections’.
So, for skills that are completely leveled up, you can make any skill selection you want at any time and that is stored in CurrentSkillSelections. RealizedSkillSelections are what you would have if you were to immediately go into a boss fight (i.e. some skills nodes are not yet active). The skill tree would have to be enhanced to highlight those nodes that have unrealized selections. If we keep the system the same as current, the player is going to need to do non-boss activities until the unrealized nodes have been activated (paid off, by gaining experience).
In the case of removing and then re-equipping an item with +skill points, the game should remember what you had selected, and re-select those nodes. Now the nodes are unrealized and you need to do non-boss play to pay them off again.
Game should warn you prior to going into a boss fight if you have unrealized nodes.
You have a skill levelled to 20, giving you 20 skillpoints.
You equip a +3 item, bringing you to 23.
You place those skillpoints in what we call configuration A (just for clarity, not for a loadout).
You can freely change to configuration B and use the skills immediately, except for bossfights? You can only use them in bossfights once you earned enough EXP to pay off the debt?
But we elaborate on (re)allocating skillpoints manually, each time an item with +skill was swapped, added, or removed? Or does the system remember where those additional skillpoints were allocated and just re-allocates them in the same way?
What should you do if the player first removes an +item and then manually re-allocates skill points? Or if the skill-tree was dependent on multiple +skill items. Re-equipping the items with +skill might try to allocate nodes that aren’t even possible now. So you need to program exceptions, maybe priorities, etc.
That still sounds cumbersome to me. More confusing even, quite some programming work that needs to be tested and is prone to a myriad of new bugs, with very minor benefit for the user.
Edit: that would still allow for a bosskiller build and then immediately swap back to the AoE build, solving only half the problem.
I think you have the spirit of the design - let the user make changes to the skill tree at any time, and immediately use that against non-boss fights. Only gatekeep boss fights.
Do some QoL to make unequipping/equipping an item with +skill less painful (i.e. remember what skills were last applied, re-apply them. basically when an item with +skills is removed, remove the last X nodes from the skill tree. this implies that CurrentSkillSelection is a vector).
Yeah, I explicitly do not see this as a problem. I think putting a (at high levels) small speed bump in front of folks for non-boss PvE content is anti-fun/anti-player. There are always going to be players that do extreme things because the ‘fun’ they are getting has little to do with playing the game, and has more to do with getting attention*. I don’t think it’s worth spending a tremendous amount of time, up front, and creating a weird design to prevent something that this game may never have the numbers to see actually happen. Which is what EHG seems to spend a fair amount of time doing. Someone should tell them to focus less on preventing strange behavior they may never see, and more on what is easy to use, easy to understand, fun to interact with. For me, this part of the skill system isn’t at all fun.
*It’s probably going to bother some people that I’m saying it like this, but the reality is that being #1 in a ranking is about getting attention. I suppose that if the game is popular enough, being #1 in ranking, for a streamer, has some financial aspect to it… but then you aren’t playing a game for fun, it’s your job. This is a new/weird space that we’ve entered into with our leisure time activities over the last decade or two, definitely worth it’s own thread.
This is something they’ve always said they don’t want to do, since that was the main reason that lead to the whole “this system leads to free respecs”. Though the current one also does, so…
I don’t have a problem with them removing them from other places, but reequipping should put the point back. Unless you’ve already spent a point somewhere else in between, in which case you have to assign it again.
The problem isn’t the speed bump. The problem Heavy and others (including myself) have with this type of system is that it will lead to less build diversity (as seen in D3) where you simply have a boss loadout and a map clear loadout, rather than having to make a build that considers and caters to both.
Without a system like loadouts, you have to make choices and sacrifices in your build. It’s more meaningful. Do you want to focus on clear speed and bosses are slower? Or the reverse? Or a balance between both?
Having loadouts removes this choice because you simply make a build that is all in on single target damage and another that is all in on clear speed.
