Locking in Mastery Feels Bad

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62

This is essentially the root of the problem. You can see it how you like but be advised you are wrong.

My own opinion is that Masteries being set in stone encourages the creation of Alts. Or maybe the better way to say it would be that allowing Mastery swaps would stifle the creation of Alts.

The creation of Alts typically is a GOOD THING and extends most people’s playtime of an ARPG more than anything else. People playing Last Epoch for longer not only feel they got better value for money, but greatly contributes to the game’s ultimate success and future.

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63

And the mastery skill, and any skills above the halfway line and the passives above the halfway line. Not just the mastery bonus & I wouldn’t call the mastery bonus the main benefit. It is the least “avoidable”, in that you can choose to not use the mastery-specific skills and passives.

Only if they buy supporter packs & either play with others or use the bazaar (in 1.0). If they “only” bought the game and play online then how much of a “contribution to the ongoing success of the game” they are depends on how much mp resources they’re using compared to the box price. I don’t know how much the costs for an hour’s mp play is but then you could work out how many hours the $35 box price is equivalent to.

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Even if they only play online with CoF and not having interactions with other players, they still contribute to the success of the game, if only to boost the number of players it has. If LE announces that x players played in whatever season, the higher the number, the higher the success, even if they didn’t buy packs, MTX or interacted with anyone. A high number of users online will always be a measure of an ARPG success (live service ones, of course) and will attract other players.

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65

Yes, but ultimately if the average user (including the higher spending ones) brings in less cash than they’re consuming then eventually the company runs out of money, the online component is ceased & most importantly, employees are made redundant.

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66

Sure, there’s always a balance that needs to be maintained, but you don’t usually need that many (in relative terms) to buy stuff to bring in the money. Especially when, unlike PoE, LE has an upfront cost. And the PoE model works, as can be seen by their growth over 10 years.

It remains to be seen, though, if the amount of people buying packs/MTX will be the same or if it will be lower due to the upfront cost. But ultimately, the more players there are, the more you can attract to your game and the more likely it becomes someone will pay for something.

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And the higher your day to day provision related costs are (ie, non-development costs).

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True. Again, some balance needs to be maintained. But as a general rule, you only need a small amount of players (in relative terms) to pay those costs for everyone. Especially with the upfront cost.

Like I said, PoE has this model and you can be sure that the vast majority of players don’t buy MTX, other than stash tabs. And it’s been lucrative for them.

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69

This topic is called “Locking in mastery FEELS bad”. It may be right and reasonable, but it still feels bad. For me how the game feels is the most important thing. So, if players want a feature, that’s not messing up with game balance, I think it should be added.
Maybe make mastery respec an MTX. And character name change too. Time travel can justify anything.

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Yeah, this is a problem. People discuss things here as true or not true, but that is not the case for a design decision like this.

Fir off, this has nothing to do with game balance, this is just a design decision.
Secondly, believe it or not, the community and players in general do not always know what is “best for the game”. If devs would add everything that is requested the game would become way less coherent for the most part, because people do suggest stuff that is all over the place.

EHG already did a lot of things based on communtiy feedback, but almost everything they added never was taking direct ussgestions, but rather design new systems based on the needs and requests.

Oh my god, this would make things even worse. I cannot fathom the amount of hate EHG would receive for this :smiley:

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71

So, for me, I loathe trudging painfully through the campaign after the 3rd trip. So I understand leveling another toon in another master is frustrating.

Having said that, I have since started one toon of each class\mastery (haven’t got all yet) and I level them up to Mastery selection and park them till I get a handful of useful Legendary item I can use on that too. to dive into Monoliths. I absolutely dread and loathe the horribly slow movement speed from character start-up combined with all the long marathon runs to places in the campaign and Monos so the first legendaries I built were boots with movement speed.

Even now, with faster sprinting toon I find the running around many of the monoliths to be excessive given the low return rate of stability received killing trash along the way. By no means do I want easy drops, but at least better stability gains would make the runs feel better.

Anyway, my point is, get legendaries, level a few noobs up to mastery selection and park them so you can just pick up and run with them if a Mastery turns out not to be ideal for you.

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I do wonder how certain changes in game balance might affect the regret some people have. For instance, there can be some skills that look cool but turn out not to scale very well or have good synergies. If almost every skill could scale well and more synergies were introduced, that might help lessen the feeling of hitting a dead-end in a build.

Of course that would not be an easy undertaking. Enormous dev resources would be needed to bring every skill up to the level of the “good” ones, and it would take great balancing care to make sure new synergies would not get out of hand.

And of course even if nearly every skill was scaleable to end-game, some players might still regret their Mastery choice just because they grow to dislike the mechanics of their build, regardless of power.

I often have such twinges of disappointment, but I do not dislike rerolling an alt like some others have expressed. In fact, I often reroll out of boredom with echoes, when I get even a vague concept for a new build to try. It can be refreshing to go back to gaining a level every hour and seeing skills level up and unlocking more skills in the passive tree and seeing frequent gear upgrades.

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Legit, I would rather no system for mastery respec exist than a paid mastery respec be added. Adding that to the cash shop would essentially be direct profiting off of the inconvenience of the system and if ladder resets have a competitive racing scene, would potentially allow players to pay to win.

I think a number of people have brought up good points about leveling and how improving that experience could lessen the “need” for a mastery respec. I made the post about Mastery respec because it is the easier fix in my mind. Improving leveling is a lot of work and might not go far enough to make leveling another mastery for the same base not feel like ass. That said, making improvements to character leveling has broader benefits than just adding a mastery respec and frankly, I’d be fine with either a mastery respec system or a better leveling experience. Those are really my only 2 problems with the game, bad leveling and masteries being locked in and fixing either makes the other much more tolerable.

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Replayability. Just wasting time creating alts to cover the lil ammount of content there is. Imagine you need to have every class only once to play whatever build you want on said class.
The only downside I can think of is you level with mastery X because it’s better for leveling and you switch to mastery Y because it’s better lategame/the mastery you want to play. On top of it it makes switching to fotm setups more easy.

Well that’s a balance that will most likely never be achived. I remember the first time I unlocked erasing strike and was almost drooling because of the tooltip. Then I used the skill and instantly wanted to play another mastery because what a piece of crap it was. If the skills aren’t what they are described as in the tooltip you just feel fooled and that’s it. If you replay the whole story and pick Forge Guard because Forge strike sounds so cool on paper… yeah well… some people will go batshit crazy about the system in place for a while but things will get normal pretty fast because haters gone hate no matter what.

Right now the mastery choice is rather early on and that’s a good thing. Imagine you pick your mastery at ~50 when you finished the campaign :smiley: .

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That’s not what OP actually feels bad about, though. The only thing they feel bad about is making decisions that turned out not to be “optimal” ones. They’re just using Mastery lock-in as an escapegoat from blaming themselves for inappropriate decisions. What they claim to feel is irrelevant, because they’re not being honest about it.

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I sure do love being called a liar on the topic of my own feelings and taste.

I really do genuinely believe that the decision to lock in mastery itself is what feels bad, given that the times I find myself lamenting the lack of a mastery respec system are when I am starting a new character and when I actually select my mastery, not 80 levels down the line when I look at what I could’ve had had I made a different choice.

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77

If they start doing shady things like that I will drop this game and its devs like a hot potato.
This is a terrible idea. In a p2p game MTX should be cosmetics only, certainly not power or QoL features.

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78

Then maybe the topic should be called “For some players, locking in mastery FEELS bad.”. As has been seen in this thread, there are plenty of players who either don’t care or are fine with it the way it is. Some even support/defend the way it is.
So, should things be added because SOME players want it?

Just FYI, I don’t think there is anything in the game that SHOULD be added, no matter your reasons for it, other than the stuff the devs design and plan for it. There is only stuff we would like or wish would be added. SHOULD is way too innacurate a term when players couldn’t even fully agree on the color of a button.

Devs have already said they’re working on dungeon balance so you can do dungeons at a much lower level. In case you didn’t know, dungeons work as campaign skips. Once that’s balanced and you can get your quest rewards from elsewhere, campaign trudging should be much less bothersome.
So if the issue really is only doing campaign once again, then there will be no need to respec mastery.

Also, people will complain that their character is suddenly trash because they chose the “wrong” mastery. But that’s not true. You have pretty much infinite respects. You can make whichever builds you want with that mastery. You made a choice that is weaker for whichever skill you were using, but you can play around and find a combo that works better. You aren’t suddenly forced to delete that character because there simply is no other alternative.

Just because the char you were making isn’t the new Meta :tm: doesn’t mean it’s a waste of space. You can certainly still make it work. And one might argue that not having a mastery respec will simply encourage you to try things out and give that character a shot, rather than just re-roll it.

Devs will never add anything like that to the game.

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79

From what I have seen so far, I don’t think they will either.

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80

And guess what? All of the people who defend it are on their 20th alt and have hundrets of hours in the g ame. They don’t care about it because it’s a non issue to them and they couldn’t even think about other players then them. If you look at statistics over the year the average player has 10h a week to play. Even some of said average players wont care but for many this will be most likely a bad thing they don’t understand why it’s there in the first place.

Personaly I don’t give a rats ass about it because I can play 100+hours a week if I want to and I already created every masterie at least once. Other people can’t do that and are bent over by bad informations they can read ingame aka tooltips. On top of this not everyone has the imagination needed to translate what is written into a simulation of what happens with xyz gear and xyz passives and this or that skill setup.

The system is just in place to waste peoples time and that’s it. Making a descission at lvl 20 without information of everything that comesß guess what people who wan’t to play the game and don’t want to do “homework” and google their fingers off will most likely end up with masteries they don’t like at all when they peicked them up.

Sure suuuurreee this is a non issue later on and with a bit of savedleveling gear you are at the same point in the story in no time. Then again that time is wasted. If I die in PoE and lose xp because I’m stupid and don’t build layers of defense it’s on me. Picking shaman because it sounds awesome just to see that the mastery is BS compared to other choices might get people mad :man_shrugging: .

The issue is knowledge. Can you even remember your first times playing the game when you had 0 idea what is coming? I did I simply tried every mastery up to lvl 75 so I had an idea what is going on. I don’t think everyone hast time to do this before they start to play the game ^^. If you go in blind LE is terrible becaue the skill tooltips are missleading and what sounds good on paper isn’t that good once you use it.

On the other hand making Masteries changeable will lead to 0 downsides outside of elitist players absue a strong early mastery untill they can play a stronger endgame mastery. Only EHG would be hurt by swappable masteries because it reduces the time players run in the treadmill EHG createt to stretch the thin ammount of content there is. This is an issue a lot of new games have and I understand the need of EHG to do this but calling a descission made at lvl 20 60 minutes into the game something special is a joke by itself.

I don’t want peoples time to be wasted so I’m not against the possibility of changing masteries but at the end of the day I don’t care if EHG want a good new player experience or not there are already enough fanboys arround that keep the game running.

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81

Since I bought the game 3 months ago I have an avg of 20h per week. So I guess I’d qualify as one of those players.

Again, how is this any different if you had to choose your mastery at creation instead of at level 20? You wouldn’t see the impact of your choice until later anyway.
And how is it any different than trying a class that seems fun but then you don’t like the gameplay? You’d have to make a new character anyway.

I simply did what probably 95% of the players will do, which is check a build and follow it. I saw gameplay videos, found a build I liked and followed the guide.
Even though LE is much easier to create builds than PoE, the majority of players will still follow build guides. Hell, they even do that for D4 and that has no science to it.

That in itself is a valid reason not to change. For one, it’s their game and they decide how they want it to be. For another, if it prolongs the game, as you admit, then it’s a good thing for them. Whether it has little content (for now) or not.
In this aspect, how is respecing masteries different from auto-pick/transfer shards? Or having LP/FP in the loot filter?
It’s how they want the game to be, they designed it that way. Sure, some players won’t like it. Some players won’t like something no matter what. Those aren’t the players for LE. LE isn’t really aimed for the super casual players, much like PoE/GD isn’t.

If you want a game where the decisions are based on the opinions of the majority you can play D4. That’s a game that compromises it’s view and design choices of the game to try to please the vast majority of players.

I don’t really care if there’s a mastery respec or not. But if EHG feels they want it that way, it’s their right to do so. If EHG feels like shards should be picked up because they think it’s good for their game, it’s their right to do so. If they feel like the loot filter shouldn’t lead to a point where you only pick up the good stuff because your filter hides everything else (like in PoE), then it’s their right to do so.

Players have a right to suggest stuff and to say things they aren’t pleased with. EHG listens to feedback and they adjust their game according to it a lot of times. But players don’t really have a right to say something SHOULD/HAS TO be in the game. Only EHG has that right.

Players do, however, have a right to decide if this is the game for them or not. And either choice is valid.

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