While I generally disagree with the punishing style of “earn back your points” for skills when you can respec passives with no penalty aside from a tiny amount of gold, I get the idea behind the implementation. However, having points get randomly removed from skill allocations when changing equipment (even if it is the SAME equipment with the SAME +skills), is incredibly annoying. If we could instead specify something like a “point allocation order” via a template that just auto assigns points to my desired skills in a desired order, and removes them in that order when points removed via equipment change, it would be a huge QOL increase.
It is a very poor design decision to require players to constantly reference external notes to spot check and figure out which nodes had its points removed just to get back to the previous point allocation.
It’s not random. It’s always the same points in the same order. It will remove first the highest assigned node that doesn’t break a connection. Meaning that if you have a 5/5 node and a 4/4 node, it will remove from the 5/5.
The system is done to prevent free respecs and/or switching +skills gear to change a skill from AoE to ST, basically.
Lots of threads about this already, from both points of view.
In the offline client it shows the removed node(s) in red, but this stopped working in the online client some time ago. I understand they’re trying to fix it.
Thats all well and good, but you still have to play “find the node” every time the game perceives a skill allocation change. It is one of the most baffling design choices in this game, perhaps only surpassed by the bazaar in inconvenience.
