Loadouts and how to make them work with LE's design philosophy

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I’m trying to sleep and inspiration hit me, so bare with anything I miss and feel free to give feedback on how to improve this idea or opinions on why it’s terrible and should never be added lol.

So the idea behind a loadout is to quickly save a build and it’s items and swap between them on one character. The problem for that in LE lies in one main areas: EHG doesn’t want players to be able to swap between a clearing loadout and a bossing loadout. This is partially resolved with requiring players to only be able to swap loadouts inside town instances, something Guild Wars 1 implemented back in 2007.

So that’s the first requirement solved. Next! To keep it in line with a standard respec (manually going through and despecializing and respecializing your skills and passive points. Saving a loadout will store all of your skill and passive nodes in their current states, but reapplying that loadout will set it to the minimum skill level by default locking any points it can’t reach until your skill is leveled up and they’re unlocked automatically. This can be done by doing something like the LETools “record” feature where you can store the minimum points that are always loaded, and then set the order the remaining points are unlocked as it levels up. Problem 2 resolved.

Giving it a cost is the third problem I’ll tackle. Respeccing passive points has a cost to them, and EHG has already implemented full respec (thank you!) so the first logical step is requiring a cost to change loadouts to match the current number of passive points spent. For example it should cost more to respec FROM you loadout with 20 passive points than it would to respec FROM your loadout with 10 passive points. Adding an additional fee for the convenience would help work as a gold sink and to decentivize swapping too frequently.

I lied, the last problem I’ll tackle is how to decentivize swapping too frequently. Putting the loadout swap on a cooldown, maybe 5-10 minutes?, would prevent players from swapping too often. It may not be necessary though.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now, what do you guys think? Could we improve this? Is it even necessary?

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What happens if you switch gear with +skills (or without it)?

That depends on who you ask. Some feel it’s necessary, some don’t. The main problem for those that don’t want loadouts, and which you didn’t adress, is character identity. Feeling that your options matter.
There are already people that feel the current system is already too forgiving as it is. But even for those that are fine with the current one, loadouts are yet another step in losing that identity (and getting closer to D3).

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I didn’t consider this, but since the loadout would be saved with the gear equipped, i would assume the skills spent would stay the same as when they were equipped when saving the loadout.

Yeah, that’s a fair point. I’m not entirely for or against loadouts tbh. I’ve just played a few games with them recently (Godfall, Vermintide 2, and Monster Hunter) and thought about my Necromancer and how I’d like to try new things even if I have to relevel skills but wanting an easier time going back to my current spec than doing it all again manually.

Edit: I think part of why I don’t really get the character identity standpoint is that any game with a “build” that I’ve played, the build I’m playing is what matters, not the character it’s tied to. And being able to keep a character and try new builds is more important to me than “well my Assassin Oglethorpe Ringthief uses bows and poisons, so having Oglethorpe suddenly specialize in daggers and bleeding enemies dry goes against his identity!” but I get why people play that way lol. Edit 2: of course, within reason. I absolutely do not want to be able to change classes/masteries. I’m talking within the restrictions of the class. One of my favorite games of all time, Guild Wars 1 let you pick a primary class and a secondary class, the secondary classes could be change but your primary class couldn’t and dictated the armor, appearance, and exclusive attribute that character had access to. Made build making loads of fun when my Assassin could go from Assassin/Warrior to Assassin/Ranger and have an entirely different playstyle. There’s no equivalent here aside from being able to change your 5 specialized skills, your gear, and your passive points. But there’s still almost endless build variety inside your Mastery and being able to access different “versions” of that character more conveniently is nice. Definitely not required as all my idea is doing is taking about 10 minutes of manual respeccing and gear swapping and putting it into a button click

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The main problem that I see is a lot of shifting loadouts to match the endeavour in the game you are going to undertake.

Abberoth - loadout 1.
Julra T4 - loadout 2.
Arena Push - loadout 3.
Echo Rush in Black Sun - loadout 4.
Not yet existing new mechanic (for PoE vets - blight) - loadout 5.
Net yet existing new mechanic 2 (delve) - loadout 6.

While I do respec characters to try out other stuff and builds, I hate an extensive loadout meta. My personal loadout meta ends at switching one or two items to adapt here and there, or to change unspecialized lunge for unspecialized rebuke on the skill bar. My 1.0 Pala either used dual-wielding for fast clear or shield/1-weapon for bosses. But I had specced my passives for this hybrid style.

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I get that, and completely agree. I would hope that the fact that my version of swapping loadouts wouldnt impact this as it’s not changing anything other than how long it takes a player to change. You still need to re-level all your skills and swap all your gear.

As it stands, nothing is stopping me, or anyone, from doing exactly what you described assuming they have all the necessary gear needed for the specs. They’d just have to do it manually by despecializing their skills and resetting their passives (now available in one click) and then swapping their gear.

I guess the convenience of doing all that in one click would help make it more accessible, but honestly not by much.

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Yes, but one of the things that might happen is that you get better gear for the “other” build. So you switch the loadout and swap gear. Which might have +skills. Or might replace gear that had +skills.

Yes, and that’s fair. Obviously many people don’t feel the same way. I mean, many people even want mastery respec, so it’s obviously not a universal thing. And there are the D3 players that would like instant loadouts like they get in D3.

But some people do feel that way. If they have a Shield Bash FG and want to also have a Forged Weapons one, they will make a new character and keep both separate. It’s a system targetted for altoholics, which seems to be the main target playerbase for EHG.

That is why we have the current restrictions for respecs. They’re not restrictive enough that you can’t change builds every once in a while and they’re just annoying enough that you won’t do it all the time. Which seems to be a sweet spot in regards to sort of pleasing both sides.

Personally, I think respec as it is now is good except for early leveling. It should be less restrictive in early campaign, so people can just experiment what they want. Not that it makes too much difference (I’ve fully respec lots of times when playing the campaign and still had no difficulty finishing it and catching up), but it does leave a negative impression on new players.

Personally, I would just like to see arena dummies area turned into a free respec zone where you can fully inta-respec skills, passives and even mastery or class just to try things out. And have it available at the very start before you even create a character.
I have asked Mike about this idea on his stream, though, and he said it’s not something they would likely consider.

Yes, but that annoyance of having to do it manually does deter constant respecs and, thus, the loadout meta Horus was referring to.

Right now it doesn’t take too long to fully respec your build from AoE to ST, since you can do that by simply switching a few pieces of gear and a skill or two. It takes just long enough that it’s usually not worth it and most players can’t be bothered to do it. Your system would make it just a little easier, but that might be easy enough that many more people would start doing it.

Maybe if you imposed a really really big timeout on the loadouts, like 24h+. But honestly, I’d rather just see the character limit increase.

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In this situation you’d just need to resave over the previous loadout, as you would in any loadout where you replaced gear. In theory the loadout swap would remove all your Specced skills, passives, and gear, and then re-equip your other sets Passives, skills, and gear with the baseline “minimum level & +X to Skill” points invested.

I understand your points on character identity, so I’m skipping that part.

Possibly, but I can’t imagine the 2-3 minutes saved for swapping a few pieces of gear and a skill or two is that big of a deterrent. I think the game is designed well enough to avoid the loadout meta by not incentivizing you swapping JUST for Aberroth. It’d be much better to have a build that can do multiple tasks and if you wanted to have a second loadout to change up the gameplay on that character it should also be able to do multiple tasks.

I do agree with more character slots though

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The suggestion for loadouts is basically just a easier method of switching between specific gear and/or skills.

In that case it could simply be that the gear is switched out (which is fine to make easier after all, no downside intrinsically to that) outside of combat content. As for the passives, outside of combat content that’s also fairly fine, we already can do that, so no chance actually.

As for the skills though… those would absolutely need to be reduced by level as is currently the case, which would be the ‘inherent’ cost of the system.

Hence it only being used as a method to alleviate the hassle to do a build switch, not any actual functional aspect would be fine.
Currently we have ‘only’ 25 character slots for 15 classes, but there’s definitely more then 1,66 builds per class available :stuck_out_tongue: This way we could experience more variety without it becoming utterly clunky, which is especially the issue in Legacy still.

Yes, but you can already fully do that… given your equipment and passives are everything you switch.
It’s just more of a hassle.

Skill switching would still incur the major penalty of reducing the levels there and hence make your fights harder, so you basically still play ‘the same build’ as before.

If it’s solely focused on speedier item switching (and not having the frantically search inside tens of tabs, or define a single tab solely for the gear) as well as passive points then I don’t see a big problem there currently.

Adjusting it inside that ‘loadout’ directly without switching would take care of it. Also it allowed for a extra method to ‘progress’ in the game, for example having a limited amount of loadout space available (let’s say 2 so you can ‘test it out’) and then having to unlock more slots for the specific character. Since that’s also not account bound like stash tabs they would be incurred for every character again and actually work as a mediocre resource sink.

A system which caters to me specifically as that’s what I like to do.
And then which utterly hinders me since I can’t make enough alts to do it :stuck_out_tongue:

We’re currently working with the severe downsides of 25 slots after all, which is the limiting factor. Without that downside I would say ‘you’re 100% right! We don’t need it!’ But since that’s - sadly - not the case I’m actually in favor of such a system.

Yes, it also deters me from playing more characters of the same class as I would need to delete old characters to allow for it since I’m lacking slots to do that.

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Yeah, but I’d say that currently respeccing is easy enough to do it when you just want to do a legit build change, but the hassle is enough to remove the incentive to do it all the time and try to cheese content.
So reducing that hassle might lead to more people doing loadout metas. Not saying it will, but it might. It’s a fine line as it is right now.

Yes, that’s why I said I would rather see the character limit increase, rather than loadouts.

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I mean… more character limit would be nice… 50… 100… something around that area to really really be able to get into builds.
But as EHG stated that would cause severe issues with their database overall seemingly, having not the capacity for it… which is why the last raise was ‘only’ to 25.

It would solely make it easier on the database (since less stuff would need to be saved, it’s still the same character after all, hence all the quest states and so on wouldn’t be needed) and not really take away from the experience. A sort of ‘fake’ character slot you could name it.

As for the cheesing… I really don’t see how that would be done in any meaningful way if you can only do it in town anyway.
It then has less reason to be done then switching gear before a boss-fight even… and that’s also not done since it has so little impact currently.
Since skills would nonetheless de-level it wouldn’t be cheesable in the first place, and since it can’t be done during content it would remove the ‘on the fly’ switch as well. I don’t see any further even remotely meaningful cheese happening. All that’s left is so miniscule - or rather I haven’t seen anything meaningful mentioned yet - that it would be comical to even take into consideration.

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The thing is, you can already do it. You can go to end of time, respec your tree, change gear and respec your skills, then go do an echo, which at high corruption is pretty much all you need, then go kill that mono boss+harbinger.

However, doing it manually is a huge hassle. You have to manually remove the points, place them manually again, change your gear and skills, then go do the echo and then do the same thing again to get back to the old layout.

But with a loadout, even if it still delevels your skills and you need to relevel them, you just need to port to town, click a button, go do an echo and you’re done. You’ve removed most of the reason why people don’t actually do it.

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I think good points are being raised in both camps. One the one hand there is a potential for it to open the door to people making a loadout meta with it being less of a pain to swap builds. People would be more incentivized to have a build for the specific activity they’re looking to tackle which can impact character identity.

On the other hand, it’s only taking away the upfront time investment of manually swapping everything, so a determined player can already do what the first point is talking about with even less effort than before now that EHG added full passive respecs being a single button press. I think it’s 2 presses to despecialize a skill (Despecialize and confirm), so that’s 10 clicks and then 2 more for passives is 12 clicks total for the skills and passives (18 if you consider right clicking the NPC for your passives and 5 clicks for the individual skills) Assuming all your gear is changing that’s another click for your inventory key and 11/12 clicks for your gear (11 for 2h weapons) so assuming max inputs that’s 31 key presses and mouse clicks to completely remove all skills, gear, and passives. Then it’s another 13 clicks max to put on new gear, 114 clicks (113 passives + 1 click to open the menu) for passive points, and a minimum of 60 more for your skills, (2 clicks per skill on the Specialize button and the skill itself + 10 clicks for the minimum passive points, plus one more to open the skills menu: leading to a grand total of 188 clicks to reassign everything to the new build.

This is a total input counter of 219 keypresses/mouse clicks to swap builds. If we assume 1.5s per input on average, that’s 328.5s or roughly 5 and half minutes.

Edit: based on that 5 minute timer, adding a 10-20 minute Cooldown to loadouts could decentivize swapping to do specific content. I mean, if I swap to a build that can nuke Abberoth in 2 minutes + 3 for an echo to level the skills, but them I’m stuck on this build that’s not great for echoes for another 5-15 minutes, then I’m likely not going to swap them just to kill a boss.

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Not just character identity. It also removes build diversity. Right now you need to make a build that can tackle both clearing echoes and killing bosses and harbingers. You need to make decisions so that your build isn’t lacking in one of them. You might lean more towards echo clearing or towards bossing, but you need to balance it so you can do both.

But if you can simply have a loadout for bosses and one for clearing, then build diversity goes away because each loadout will simply go all in on its purpose, be it clear speed or ST. So you actually have less choices to make because you don’t really have to make them.

That is the point. The hassle of doing that manually is so great that only very determined and meta players will ever do it. If at all. It’s not really about the time investment but the attrition of having to do all that.

Sure, a timeout on switching might make it so more people don’t do it, but they can simply line up a bunch of monolith bosses, change, spend 30 minutes killing all the bosses and harbingers and then switch back.

The point is that it’s not so much the time required to change that is preventing loadout metas, it’s the actual annoyance of having to do that manually all the time and remembering how each skill/passive tree goes.

EDIT: And, on the counterpoint, the hassle isn’t so big that if you legitimately just want to switch a build, you can do that.

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Loadouts

Pros

  • Ease the pain of experimentation because you know that it will be easy to return to a load out you like (but maybe are bored with, or isn’t reaching the corruption level you want)

Cons

  • Is enabling of build switching to a targeted task - e.g. farming versus boss killing <— let’s talk about this. Is this even a real thing in LE?

So LE has a max of 25 chars, and, other than getting through campaign or deeper into endgame, there isn’t a specific benefit of using any particular character/build because item drops are not character specific (like in D3/D4). I think maybe idols are an exception to this?

So, in a very real way, LE already has build switching, you just switch to a different character.

Now for pragmatism. LE needs to 1) create more content, 2) enhance the engine, 3) fix bugs, 4) find some time to do some degree of balancing. I personally would like a loadout, I just think realistically it’s not happening for at least two years, and only if they change their headspace on character identity.

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They are not. Drops in LE have a slight weight towards your class, but overall you get drops for all of them, idols included.

Except this doesn’t work for mono bosses and harbingers, since each mono web is character based, not account based.

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So other than Abberoth (spelling?), they kind of have loadouts already. So, pretty sure we aren’t getting loadouts anytime soon.

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I still don’t see - in the current situation, it can definitely swiftly shift depending on what EHG does - how it would be a severe downside.
Currently the strong builds already combine single target and AoE together into becoming nonsensically strong, leaving everything else behind.

Other builds have basically no option to go AoE anyway… or no way to go properly single-target as they have in-built size for their skills. So it depends a bit on the chosen skills as well.

And even if you’re lining up bosses - which by itself would be a massive chore - the time investment into killing a boss doesn’t warrant it commonly anyway, it’s nonsensical both with and without a build loadout.
And if you can’t handle a boss without switching then even currently it’s your only option anyway :stuck_out_tongue:

Yes, creating builds which specifically work on switching gear around for single-target or AoE would be a issue… though to take into consideration: If you wanna do that you need double the equipment amount… or remove it all from your current build, leave only the pieces in that loadout which will get changed, switch over and then put the equipment back in, which can pose to be quite the hassle as well.

As said… if we had more then 25 character slots I would be 100% against a loadout. But until we have that the price to pay is small in comparison to the upside it would provide, allowing to experiment with character builds since we have no other choice because of limited character slots which are barely above the classes available.

  1. yes
  2. They can’t enhance Unity, the can solely make ‘modules’ beyond the engine, which would further and further alleviate them from using Unity as a end-result. Which would be good.
  3. Oh yes… how about proper testing environments and not introducing some of the major ones we’ve seen? That would be nice.
  4. Good luck with that, I don’t trust EHG to handle that with what they’ve shown us :stuck_out_tongue: That’ll take more then two years.

Slight he says :stuck_out_tongue:

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Pretty much every mastery has acess to a more ST build and a more AoE build.

That would be true in 1.0, but harbingers do change this.

The point isn’t that your build can’t do it. It’s that currently you balance so you can do both. But with loadouts you don’t do that because you don’t have to. You just make a boss killer and a map clear build. You don’t have to choose because you can have both.

Yes, but the solution is to make it so we can have more character slots. We currently don’t because of performance issues. So those issues need to be resolved, especially because it would solve a lot more than simply being able to have more characters.

Investing time into a new mechanic that goes against the game’s identity just to plug a hole and which will become obsolete once that hole is fixed is not an effective solution.

No, but they are currently working on upgrading to a more recent version of the unity engine which should come with massive improvements, including DLSS.

Considering I still get both gear and idols for other classes all the time, yes, I’d say it’s a slight weight. It’s not like in D3 where you get a drop for another class every 20h or so.

From experience (and without any real numbers to back it up), I’d say that instead of 20% for each you have 40-60% for the one you’re playing, meaning you get 10-15% for other classes. Which does seem like a lot, but when the end result is that you’re still showered with them, it’s not too significant.

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I always forget that I filter out any loot that doesn’t have a T5+ Class Specific Affix for shattering so I never see gear for other classes unless it’s a class specific idol or legendary/exalted/set item lol

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The problem for the game as a whole is not if only a select few players bother with it, but if it becomes the mainstream way of playing the game.

What I usually expect to happen is that the game’s identity will then start to shape itself around a loadout meta.

Imagine the majority of players will run specific challenges in the game with optimized builds - the specific challenge becomes trivialized for everyone. So the devs have to ramp up the difficulty of the challenge to keep it a challenge - and now only the specialized builds can hope to overcome it.