It says that in the game when you select the mastery. Some people just don’t read.
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It isn’t though. The main clear skill I’m planning to use is LITERALLY THE SAME SKILL.
Did I say I wanted free mastery respecs? No. In fact, I specify that it should probably be a bit of a grind like in D2.
I actually picked D2 as my example BECAUSE it is an older ARPG. If you look at what I was quoting, I was addressing the argument that my problem with masteries is a “modern gamer” thing. D2 as an example shows that players have ALWAYS disliked having these kinds of choices be permanent.
No shit the game says it. The issue isn’t a lack of communication, it’s that what is being communicated is, in my opinion, a silly restriction which makes the game worse.
No, they’re not. Your Mastery is your class. You are viewing it wrong, full stop. The absolute most that your incorrect perspective rises to being a problem to solve with game design is to try to better inform you, sooner, that Sentinel is not your class, VK/Paladin/FG is. That’s it though.
Nothing stopped you from learning that before clicking “I understand I can’t change my Mastery” after choosing Void Knight. That’s just the baseline for any skill decision like this, though. In your specific case, there is literally nothing about Javelin that should have made you think Void Knight was the right choice. I mean that with the utmost sincerity. If you had looked at the skill tree for Javelin or any of the passive trees at all, it would have been very clear that it has almost no synergy with VK.
You were careless with your Mastery choice. That’s your problem, not the game’s.
That sucks. But it’s your fault for not thinking about your choices at all, not the game’s for not giving you an undo button for every choice you may regret.
Disliked is not the same as demanding the choices be made impermanent. I was there. The forums did not have a new post every week demanding a respec function. We played without it for 10 years and it was fine. What we did instead was one part planning our characters (something you should have done and didn’t) and one part sucking it up when we made a mistake. That’s what my comment about modern gamers is about - Instead of dealing with what the state of the game they’re given and figuring out how to make the best of it, they whine and stomp their feet and demand a do-over for their every screwup.
You’re being disingenuous and it’s rude. You wouldn’t have made this post if you had chosen Paladin to begin with. “It makes the game worse” is not actually the synonym for “I don’t like it” that you’re trying to use it as.
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That’s what EHG_Kain tried to explain to you, conceptually the difference between VK and Paladin is closer to Barbarian/Sorcerer than Meteor/Blizzard.
They could ask you to pick your mastery when you create your character that would be the same.
I chose Void Knight because echoed attacks seemed like a potentially powerful way to scale Javelin. I did actually read ahead and even had multiple different uniques that I was planning to try out, and frankly I’m not a fan of the borderline ad hominem you’re starting to employ rather than actually address my points.
As far as the VK being the reason I made the post, it isn’t. I made the post because I started leveling a mage. I picked sorcerer because my plan was to make tons of meteors fall from the sky with the funny belt and I didn’t want to level another rogue to accomplish that. I don’t regret my choice of sorcerer, but I am curious how rune master’s runic invocation actually works and would like to be able to try it once I’ve had my fun with meteors. I brought up the VK because it’s such a blatant example of the masteries not being truly distinct classes.
Regardless of how the Devs describe masteries. They simply aren’t functionally different classes. They all share most of their kits with eachother and the game is designed around that. D2 Sorceress and Barb don’t share anything other than Teleport and that’s just because I run Enigma on all my characters.
In this case, yes, but this would not always be the case.
I could also ask WHY you plan the same skill.
Even then, in my case where I have 3 Runemasters, they all use Frost Wall and Flame Ward and 2 of them spam Frost Claw yet they feel very different to play, and the difference in strength between them is massive. Yes they are 3 RMs but they are individual characters.
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Does that mean that PoE doesn’t have classes then? Because every single one can use every single skill in the game. When you pick, for example, Righteous Fire as your main skill, you can make a build with every single class and ascendancy in the game using it. If you choose Templar for it and then decide that maybe Witch would be better for it, should PoE let you respec it? After all, it’s LITERALLY THE SAME SKILL.
You aren’t, though. If you want a better javelin build with Paladin, you can make a new character. But your VK isn’t suddenly trash. You can simply respec it to something else. There are plenty of VK builds that aren’t “sub-optimal”
You can. Just make a new character. It really doesn’t take that much time to zoom your new character to the point where you choose a new mastery. It doesn’t even take that long to get to monos. Creating new characters and trying out different builds is the point of ARPGs.
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D2 does not allow you to change class with that respec does it? Changing Mastery should be thought of as changing class. No ARPG that has actual classes lets you do that (that I know of). The closest is Wolcen which is class-free (you just pick what skills you want to use from the master pool of all skills, and you can change your choice at any time).
I am the first to complain that respecing (skills) in this game is far too expensive (time investment to re-level the lost points really, really annoys me and I think it is the biggest design flaw in this game) - I am HUGE fan of cheap and easy respeccing in ARPGs, but I feel respecing Mastery is a step too far.
No different than if Mastery was selected at level 1 at character creation. You’d still have to either
Pick whatever looks cool to you and hope for the best, OR
Do some research and make an informed choice, OR
Just follow an established build
The fact that Mastery is not chosen until level 20ish doesn’t change the fact that at some point you need to commit to a choice that cannot be undone. Same in all class-based ARPGs. It seems the fact that this choice comes a little later than level 1 is what is causing the problems. But nevertheless it is a binding choice, just like choice of class is usually binding, because it IS choice of class.
I have to ask, if you think Mastery choice should be undoable, do you also think original class choice should be undoable? And if not, why not?
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All the time spent bitching, could have just raised a Paladin. Talk about wasting one’s time…
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Again I think this is the least problematic point because experienced players do the campaign on auto pilot. Experienced players have no problems with everything and are up to date. New players will have the hardest time becaue LE is doing a bad Job in the new player department.
Whomever is “forcing” you to do so… call the cops and sue that bugger!
I would take this over the system in playe 100 times!
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I don’t think original class choice should be undoable. There are passive trees and skills, that define the class. Every class has own backstory, model, animations, voice.
For mastery choice to be undoable, I want it to make such changes to a character, so that I could say “that character is not primalist anymore, it’s now a druid”. But I can’t say that, because mastery just unlocks 1-2 new skills and one half of a passive tree. Equipping an item can have more effect on a build, than a mastery choice. Masteries should be either more significant or undoable.
Doesn’t mean they don’t get tired/bored of doing it.
Some are, the VK’s echoes, for example. Plus some mastery skills are excellent & must haves for all/most builds.
BASED. Inaccurate, but based.
I don’t think base class should be undoable because the base class is the reason I want to respec masteries. Some people are saying that making the mastery selection be at character creation would solve this and I actually somewhat agree.
If masteries were selected at the start of the game, rather than picking base class, I probably wouldn’t be asking for a mastery respec, but that would just be shifting the framing of the issue, as there would then be a bunch of clusters of weirdly similar classes that share a skill tree and base skills for some reason and can also use some of each others’ skill trees and skills. I would prefer the option of a mastery respec to this.
I would argue that for the most part, class based ARPG’s have you make ONE choice that cannot be undone: your base class. I know y’all see mastery as the actual class but due to the framing and structure of the masteries around centralizing base classes, I don’t.
I do agree that cheap and easy respeccing is nice and I do agree that being able to cheaply and easily respec mastery would be a step too far. I am not asking for cheap and easy mastery respec. I’m asking for any way to respec mastery. I would be over the moon for a giga uber Dante must Die dungeon that lets you re-select your mastery after the boss. I don’t want to freely change out my mastery, I want to be able to respec my mastery through trial and effort.
I’m curious what y’all opposed to any form of mastery respec think would be the downside of having the option. How would Last Epoch be made worse by having a mastery respec?
How would that help in your VK case? If you make a hard dungeon as a pre-requisite to respec, then your “sub-optimal” VK wouldn’t have been able to complete it. You would have either had to keep leveling it for some extra power or respec it into another build, which, at that point, what’s the point of the respec?
Personally, I’m neither for nor against it. I don’t really care which option ends up in the game. I barely use passives respec as it is anyway. If I want to try another build, I just make another char.
I just don’t think there’s been any reason presented so far that makes a mastery respec a better option, or a mandatory option, or even a QoL option. Just a lazy option. Which, I might point out, I’m not necessarily against, since I’m lazy myself, but I don’t think it merits, in this case.
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My VK is sub-optimal, not weak. Assuming the dungeon was legit tough, I’d definitely have to invest more into the build to be able to take it on, but that’s what I want. I don’t want mastery respec as a way to bandage lost cause builds, I want it to allow me to keep investing into my characters, rather than abandoning them.
Fair enough. I despise leveling new characters through the story and the one thing that helps for me is the drip feed of new skills to try out while leveling. I just got a mage through the story and over the course of it, used every base class skill they have other than mana strike. When I level a new mage either to try Rune Master or if Last Epoch starts having ladder resets, I probably just won’t really have fun until monoliths, which kinda sucks, but in the ladder reset scenario I’d be leveling alongside a couple of buddies, so it wouldn’t be so bad.
The benefit of a mastery respec would be that I can skip the repetition of leveling multiple mages, primalists, rogues, sentinels and acolytes to be able to try all their different builds. A benefit that potentially compounds itself if Last Epoch gets ladder resets of some sort.
Sure like almost everyone still they do it and suffer in silence 
.
But that’s part of the point, it’s like complaining that the Ascendant is weired and can get bonuses from the other ascendancies in PoE.
I agree on that.
As DJSamhein said, that would just leave “sub-optimal” builds/masteries, the ones that are most likely to want to be changed, to not be able to be changed.
So, your VK isn’t weak, it’s just possibly not quite as strong as a Pally version (& IMO the effective 40% more damage from having echoes isn’t a small thing compared to a higher % increased damage). You want the game to allow you to do something its not preventing you from doing (investing more in your character) to be able to do very difficult content to be able to swap masteries to something that may or may not be more “optimal”.
What if you find that there’s a different build on a different class that’s even moar optimal than a Javelin Pally? Would you want to be able to change to that mastery?
That’ll be 1.0.
Even the “sub-optimal” ones? What if they can’t do the uber difficult content?
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Well there you go. Think of Mastery choice as class choice. Because IT IS. It simply happens at level 20 instead of level 1, but it essentially your class choice.
This is incorrect. The main thing a Mastery bestows upon you is the special ability which you seem to have ignored. E.g. Beastmaster gets +1 companions and +50% melee damage and companion melee damage. THAT is what defines a Beastmaster, and this is completely different from a Shaman (-5 Totem cost, +10 Attunement, +50% elemental resist with a totem) or a Druid (+20% health and mana, and damage reduction when transforming).
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