I started just removing the whole tree while spamming the enter button to accept and then do it from the ground up. Turned out to be faster.
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Just make it outside of combat, having to go to town is annoying. Some of us want to try and test new things and having to load every 10 seconds is not a good way to do it out of combat is fine.
Premise:
Not allowed to switch between AoE and single target builds on the fly.
Hence this can’t be done. The ‘bother’ to go back to town is a necessity to avoid that from happening.
This is a intentional design choice which has positive aspects for build diversity and character identity, removing that would go against the design-philosophy of the devs.
But… a proper testing environment is something which could and should be implemented along the line. Definitely not the highest-priority thing currently but something which is definitely very wanted and liked if it happens.
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There are other ways of dealing with this situation, like removing the free points or capping them. The entire leveling system after changing respecs prevents this from being a practical issue.
In other words, its not practical to change in combat and if you add a hard lock (no respec in combat or for x (~5) seconds after being in it) you can solve this “in combat respec” issue. Out of combat respec is already in the game regardless of the purposed change and the argumentation against it is subsequently invalid.
Clear area before boss → switch to single-target.
That’s also not allowed to happen.
Any ability to switch in content of any kind between builds is to be hindered. That’s the philosophy behind it.
It’s of no meaning how long or short it is, it’s to make it so that you have to make a build which can tackle all content from start to end of a section, be it campaign, monoliths or dungeons to remove the ability to simply tackle individual challenges with swiftly tailor-made builds which are superior in those contents.
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Alternative take for this:
- Makes builds that are strong only for ST or AoE useless and makes only the few busted builds that are good at both “meta”
It’s an intentional design choice that is pretty misguided, let players play around with their builds. You could say the same for having different items on your inventory to switch when facing certain enemies, bosses or to improve certain aspects of your build.
It will happen, you just make it harder for the weaker builds and new players to do content and ‘burden of choice’ everyone into following guides and meta builds.
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PoE went with this direction.
It led to reduced player retention because of equipment swaps and gem swaps which build guides made mandatory to use and many followed.
You might now say ‘yeah, but that’s their own fault, isn’t it?’ and you’re right! Absolutely so!
Hence in the eyes of a developer it becomes warranted and even needed to take measures to hinder such behavior, reduce our choice freedom and instead present a specific framework without absolute free choices in which we can navigate.
Sometimes they turn out well sometimes they do not. Adjusting those is also a part of a dev’s work. The current framework is that the mistakes which PoE made on that topic have been instead removed, with the downside of giving us the respec system as it currently stands.
If we instead talk about early game respec problems then it becomes a whole different situation where we can argue about speed of skill leveling or how far apart towns and hence the ability to respec passives are placed (albeit the second is solely a portal away at any time).
But the baseline of it has been chosen and unless something really really severe comes up also very likely adhered to.
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The game lost player base because they scaled everything to infinity and made content hard as hell to clear while also having an economy based on drops of said extreme hard content.
People don’t stop PoE because they can make a lot of different builds and change stuff or equipment for a fight. They quit because they can’t ever beat Maven for their voidstone on their own and can’t get bossing gear without playing for a lot of hours and each try of a boss has an economic cost associated with it that makes it easier to just buy bossing than to do it on your own making engaging with the game actually the worst thing you can do.
The problem is not optimization, the problem is that optimization became a requirement. Spreadsheet-the game is what that is. You spend as much if not more time on PoB than on PoE. Saying that “ease of respec” is the problem here is absurd specially with how impossible it is to change things around on early game.
What breaks PoE is the economical cost associated to everything and why so many people switched to play SSF. But when you play SSF you also stop engaging with a lot of systems with the game that is focusing on trade mechanics like high RNG/Variant unique items like Shako, That Which Was Taken, Timeless Jewels, etc…
The game is complex for the sake of complexity and playing the market is more important than playing the game.
These are not issues here, the problem here is that if a new player is in a monolith and starts to take damage they should be able to remove some points on damage passives to get some more health and keep playing the mono instead of having to go back to town and go through 4 loadings screens and a terrible UI to keep playing.
That just becomes a hassle and following a guide becomes the solution.
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You are arguing against a qol issue because you dont want them to do x, but x exists.
Btw, if you swap either now or with that system you dont have all the skill points, meaning you have to farm. Your point is double-invalid.
There are many ways to address an issue. The current iteration is not the only one. I also think you are making a big deal about this when its not. I can do exactly what you dont want now, with the exact same outcome. Thus, the QOL is a valid addition.
I dunno, for me it’s actually quite the opposite direction. Sure if we would go ‘back’ to the old days, where no respecc at all exist, or is such an huge time investemtn (which in case of LE is just not) and you get pretty much punished to start over a character because you misplaced a single skillpoint in the wrong skill, or put every point in every skill to check out what they do, then i would absolute understand your point and even agree with.
But it also goes with the exact opposite direction, in a genre like ARPG’s where one core-concept and main-appeal is to put some work and effort in your builds, being thoughtfull with tinkering around with the points you get which defines build… at the point where you can change everything on the fly, with not a real friction about it, it feels like the game doesn’t respect my time which i want to invest because everything is completly meaningless anyway.
To give you an example: Besides leveling up a character for each gender, i never had the itch re-level any character in Diablo 3, because it feels unfun and worthless. The Leveling-Process, despite how fast you can abuse it, is one of the most unfun which i’ve ever had in any ARPG. It might’ve been for the first time because you unlock them in a very linear process and have (almost) every level something new to play with, but as soon with the 2nd Character it’s the exact same process. So there isn’t any Value in Leveling itself, and similiar goes for it once you are max-leveled, because it also feels meaningless. Why should i put any effort, thought and time into a character, when every decision, every choice, anything at all which i do make is such non-existend because i can easily swap it on the fly with no friction at all. So in the end it neither does encourage me to do alts which was an important aspect for me in an ARPG for trying new builds and define new characters, it also feels like not respecting my time i want to invest into such a game because a lot of it feels a waste.
And as highly i praise / enjoy D3 in other parts, like more of fun Slasher Action-Game, it did fail me in terms of longelivety, buildiversity, character-identity/choices etc. Like everything which made ARPG’s great to begin with (!for me!).
Which would be the understandable and the case, if there was really no way to respec - or a harsh penality behind it to begin with. Because than you geniunly just count skill,- and talent-points and one mistake - and it can make your character worthless as well.
But that’s just not the case for Last Epoch and that’s really over-exaggerationon how some people try to pin it in that regard, often by people who are pretty early on and not’ve seen (and for that you don’t need even to be super into the endgame) how fast you actually can re-level skills. It’s enough friction that it makes feeling choices meaningfull and give a character identity and adds to the build variety… but isn’t enough to actually kill experimenting or fixing builds. So to say characters are in LE ‘disposable’ is just such an overstatment IMHO.
And i also about the Attatchment thing in general i would hold a bit against it(which kinda shows different perspectives / opinion about it i guess). Because being able to swap anything on the fly or the ‘penality’ of it doing so is way too tame / forgiving, makes a character a blank paper where you draw something on, but if you want to draw something differently you rip it apart and draw something new on it. It doesn’t give your character a build and with so a ‘identity’ - it’s just a blank of nothingness which you can reshape everytime you’ve the itch for it. Adding some friction and penality to it however, gives everything some weight and identity and can encourage you to start over a new charakter with a different build in mind. You can have two sorcerers - like one → Balrog the fire-starter and another one Thor the thundergod… but this only works because there is some weight and friction to you building them up. If you make it to easy to swap or just be able to do it on the fly, it kills both of this identities because balrog (in that example) can effortlessly be anything you want anyway. Why do you need to make Thor, when you shift balrog to something else and kill it’s identity. And i don’t know - again PoV / IMHO → i’m more attatched to characters which do have an identity than something which is super bland and doesn’t feel like i put any effort in.
And some people wondered why I said more changes to respeccing was a slippery slope when they didn’t realise that we were already part way down the slope.
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Respeccing skills was significantly slower back in the day. There were no minimum skill levels & lower level skills didn’t get accelerated xp.
You gotta get the source right there. It’s not me personally advocating for that (albeit I see the clear reasoning behind it, and I also agree with it since I know the alternative from other games) but it’s the official stance of the devs.
So no, it’s not a ‘personal’ thing, it’s the design philosophy. That’s a whole different ballpark.
As EHG describes it it’s part of ‘character identity’, creating a character which can’t be shifted around too easily but is what it is and has to solve all the content the way it is.
Agreed! There’s surely solutions out there.
Go ahead and provide them without the basic premise EHG provided us which is the following:
- There is no situation allowed which allows for switching from an AoE build to a single target build without severe downsides.
That’s it. Work around it and all’s good. Simple as that.
Yes, I know of all those named issues and more. I have a vast amount of time in PoE.
I also named regularly that ‘core content’ (Maven) behind gated behind roughly 150-200 hours of progression is not a feasable thing to expect from a 3 month cycle. All on your side there and I hope EHG will never go this route as it’s a setup for failure long-term.
Which doesn’t mean that player retention isn’t influenced by other things. A lot of them in PoE visible.
You see, a game is generally a place to provide fun through some sort of challenge, exceptions apply by story-based games but in general… you get something to do, you overcome it, you get lovely dopamine. That’s the gist.
Psychologically that challenge is interpreted by our mind with the main task connected to it. In PoE it’s ‘kill stuff, get loot, progress through content this way’. Hence why we enjoy when something nice drops or when we kill a hard boss we tried ourselves on a few times.
All obvious up to there, self-explanatory.
The part where it ‘drifts off’ though in general understanding is that it also means any frustration which is not derived from the immediate challenge hence causes the will to keep up with it to wane gradually.
Those include everything not inherently adhering the the core gameplay loop. And with that I mean every little thing.
A game which makes you enjoy it long-term provides a pacing of high focus engagement intermissioned by short downtimes to let the brain recuperate. In the case of ARPGs it’s generally been what’s gradually progressed towards the speed in which town-to-town segments are done, things like maps in PoE, monoliths in LE… those things. There’s a range which is a general ‘sweet spot’. The shorter the content the shorter the downtime in-between… which is why PoE gets away with itemized maps and LE never would, monoliths are just too short to allow it.
Other such situations entail for example… the variety of content presented. If you need to stop and think about something suddenly it pulls you out of your game loop, you loose the mindless trance… that’s nothing our brain likes to do commonly. Hence mechanics like Blight, Expedition, Harvest and the sorts are all detrimental to player retention when put into the core loop. The same goes for - you guessed it - gem swapping or equipment swapping. The same way it works on the psyche.
You might not even personally perceive it as specifically frustrating, but even without actively acknowledging it it’s been found out over time how player retention and gameplay loops work. The reason why PoE works despite it is that it never in its whole existence had a single competitor even coming close to its level. It has a monopoly. People hence put up with it since nothing else is available to sate the urge for those types of players… which are a lot.
This has changed with LE, they’re desperately trying to avoid all the found out mistakes their competitors made over time, screwed a lot of it up as well since they’re first time devs but clearly did their homework on how player retention in ARPGs work. Their positioning is flawless, just below PoE in terms of complexity but quite a lot above D4, a great uncontested sweetspot.
They took the affix system of diablo-clones and made a straight-forward but potentially (in the future) in-depth mechanic, it’s a great framework to go off from.
They took the passive point system from Grim Dawn and made it more user friendly and intuitive to work off from while keeping the D2 and PoE class-selection screens well known to players up.
I don’t know from where they got the skill idea but it’s a good one as well.
Overall a lot of variety and many old kinks of the systems of other games ironed out.
Along the line they also took care of providing not a single thing which rips you out of your gameplay loop. Dungeons are constant from start to end, giving the same breathers as monoliths do. The pacing is fantastic to keep the same style upright. Monoliths have not a single mechanic in them which pulls you out from the loop either. The only situation when you’ve got a different feeling is bosses, which clearly makes a clean cut between ‘this is common content’ and ‘this is special’.
The would be fairly stupid to throw that away to introduce it by allowing people to rip themselves out of it. Which is why I also expect EHG to implement their future mechanics in a way it either goes parallel to the existing systems or directly goes in the same line as their core gameplay. For PoE those mechanics are for example Breach and Monolith. They are minimally invasive ones staying at ‘kill stuff, loot stuff’ and no further major interactions.
So yes, it definitely has an impact, and as someone who’s interested in what devs need to do to make a game working and popular it’s something I can only say ‘kudos to them’.
I have never seen the devs say this, and more importantly, the pseudo-philosophy is bad. IF the players can circumvent the intention of design. This is definitely the case. I can just equip new gear and swap builds.
Either way, you and/or the dev team is wrong if this is the intent, as people can already do it.
Was quite a while ago when the topic came up.
And yes, with gear it can be circumvented. It’s one of the exceptions where they didn’t found a way to provide a reasonable downside without utterly messing with the play-feeling.
Doesn’t invalidate the other parts though, it’s just a necessary evil so to speak which is leftover.
If you got a good suggestion to handle that though be free! Would be very good.
You dont need the gear. IF your passives are + elemental damage, it dont matter if you swap from lightning to lightning, or meteor to static ball. Its all the same + dmg in the end. There is no reason to not change it this way.
Also when we respect passive points we have to check ‘‘Are you sure?’’ question for every point. it’s so boring and wasting our time.It wouldn’t be bad if there was an option to “don’t ask this again” after asking once.
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Just in case to clarify: What i meant with back to the old days was ARPG’s in general, not related to LE (that’s why i kinda excluded LE here), where respec just didn’t exist or was, if at all, a huge mass of grind.
And yes sure, in the Beta days i remember for the few hours i played back then that it was quite slower thanks to the stuff you mention, but even then it was still better than nothing.
I dunno - i personally find that - maybe except the early game as people here mentioned where there might be the neccessity of some tweaking, that respeccing is quite on a sweet spot… esp. skills. I got a new skill today and shifted one spec to that skill and with one mono/echo run (one map not the whole mono) i pretty much leveld it up to almost max (and i’m not even at 100 with or corrupted with that character) → it’s fast enough to not feel like a real penality and allow experimenting, but gives still enough weight so it doesn’t feel meaningless or whatsoever. It does give me the itch to play at one point another sorc (as example) while playing one right now.
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Thanks again for all the replies, folks!
I disagree completely. In fact, I disagree so completely I literally don’t understand how this is possible, because to me it’s the exact opposite. To me, build diversity and character identity are both completely squashed when you have respec penalties. Respect penalties mean you will follow a guide instead of experimenting so there’s no diversity, and character identity is gone because you’re on “generic warlock #3” because it takes longer to respec than just start over.
I hear people keep saying the opposite and I understand that it must just be a difference of opinion, but at least for me, I still don’t see it. I’m trying to see it though!
This I don’t know and can’t speak to, but if there’s a place the devs have explained that, I’d love to read it.
I think this is true. I also don’t even understand how it could be true. But again: I am sure I am missing something.
That would be the case if it was like PoE where you have to farm a lot currency and spend a lot of time on it.
However, in LE the cost is actually quite low. When you’re doing empowered monos you can usually fully respec your skills with just 1 or 2 echoes. And you already made more than enough money to fully respec passives several times over.
It’s a little more punishing at early game, but early game offers no challenge, so you can still progress easily after respeccing.
Overall, the system makes it so that it’s easy enough to respec, but it’s annoying enough that you won’t be respeccing every 5 minutes for an extended period of time. But if you want to experiment with your skills at endgame, you can respec several times with just a small attrition.