Came back to LE to try Runemaster, and this is a glaring flaw that made me quit again very quickly (also dying in a loading screen but I was already on the edge of quitting). It heavily punishes experimenting with builds, and having a ton of options to play with seems to be the entire point of Runemaster.
It’s already faster for me to just play something I know works for leveling, so I don’t see why trying new stuff needs to have an extra penalty.
I know it feels bad, but early game you don’t have enough skill points to get enough nice damage nodes to make a massive difference & the majority of your power comes from upgrading your weapon (& offensive prefixes).
Otherwise you’d just respec from a clear/aoe setup to a single target setup when you get to the boss which is not what the devs want.
I’m not sure why this keeps coming up. I just leveled 4 characters (2 Rogue, 2 Mage), and each one had 2 skills respec’d at low levels (skill level < 8), and I couldn’t notice a dip in power whatsoever. Hell, most of the time, I’m walking around with 2 or 3 unspent points, and sometimes 8+ passive points, because I can’t be arsed to stop and spend them.
I mean it’s pretty simple math. I had a skill that did 20 + 35 damage. I had nodes giving me 140% more damage on the 35. I lost those nodes. It’s like half the damage.
Players with the game knowledge to do this just play strong leveling builds for everything though. This isn’t a real scenario. No one would ever do that outside of some niche speedrunning scenario though, and even then it’s probably slower to spec ST and spec back to AOE than it is to just kill the boss.
If your argument is that it doesn’t do anything, then why does it need to be a thing?
And it 100% does affect it if I can’t path to nodes I want on the new skill that cause major mechanical changes.
It doesn’t need to be, anymore than it does need to be. It is how it is. However, the argument that it is somehow detrimental to play is a tad bit dishonest, at best. Since, at low levels, skill nodes really don’t have that much of an impact. There are some exceptions, of course . But overall, you won’t notice much, if any, difference, and it doesn’t take long to get the points back (especially with the catch-up mechanism, if you have other skills at higher levels).
I guess an argument could be made that skill levels 1-7 should be free to respec, once you earn them, since we eventually get that with the minimum skill level thing anyhow. It would just make the early levels less “painful”…even though “painful” is debatable.
IMO, it’s because of the practice of looking strictly at “smaller number less than bigger number”, at which point their thinking stops completely and goes no further. It’s just the product of some people treating games not as actual games, but as complex GUIs for a spreadsheet. When your experience is dictated by “the numbers”, anything that makes “the numbers” smaller is intolerable, whether or not it has any actual manifest effect on gameplay. It’s like when people fall for the classic marketing gimmick of “Our product reduces risk by 500%!”, but the base rate of risk was so small that a 500% reduction can be true but also practically meaningless.
You can’t get through to a Silly Goose who’s willing to obsess over numbers to the detriment of their own experience but stops short of evaluating whether those numbers even matter.
Just a side note chipped in here and not directly linked to what you are saying about nodes themselves - I am not sure how long you have been playing and therefore if you know this or not, but its very important not to trust what you view in any Tooltips regarding DPS - they can be wildly incorrect and mispresent what you think is a positive change - this is a known issue that the devs are aware of and can cause substantial confusion in terms of comparing a skill node change, passive node or even gear change vs the actual change in play. For now, the best way to tell if a change ACTUALLY made a real quantifiable difference is to test it in play or at least on the dummies in game (Arena area) - dont trust tooltips.
Because you’re loosing something you’ve “earned” (despite it being relatively easy to earn back) which feels bad. Despite an weapon upgrade to the next tier likely being a bigger upgrade.
I’m glad you’ve brought up the maths, 'cause you’ve not said what skill, which nodes you respec’d out of, what weapon you had equipped & what lvl you were. All of which are kinda important to be able to judge how much power you lost. But given all of that, as DirePenguin says, the reduction to kill time is fairly minimal, especially if you can upgrade a weapon to the next tier.
It’s what you’re asking to be enabled though. Then once that happens, someone else will ask to be able to switch skill specs with a click of a button (if they haven’t already).
If it’s more effective (which it is), it’s not a “niche speedrunning scenario”, it’s the most effective way to play the game, which, for some reason, some/many people gravitate towards.
Exactly. There would be a ‘speed build’, for flying through monos and dungeons. Then a ‘boss killer’ spec for… well, killing the boss(es). And they would be swapped back and forth constantly. This is the scenario EHG are trying to avoid. Also, as @Llama8 alluded to, the next request, along this slippery slope, would be ‘multiple specs’ and/or ‘gear loads’ that could be saved and selected with a single button click… ala WoW or D3.
Hi,
Sorry, this is related to the topic but not to the discussion. Is there a workaround to prevent max-level skills not messing up when removing +skills equipment? I mean, when I equip one then remove it, usually it deduct point to a random skill. Then I will have to respec 1 point somewhere and level it back up again. Though I’ve heard there’s like some “smart” system EHG implemented to combat this. This usually happens when I equip Weaver’s Will relics that has +1 all skills and trying to level it up, so to prevent it from happening, I just don’t bother spending that 1SP for all my skills.
Unfortunately not. Its the side effect of the devs view that they dont want players to respec adhoc depending on maps/bosses/clear etc and with all gear that has the +skill affixes, there is a potential for this to make it trivial for a player to bypass what they (devs) dont want us to be able to do. The way it works right now is meant to prevent cheesing the respec process with the gear affixes (you can get +6 skill points from gear fairly easily for some skills so its quite powerful). yeah, because of the way it works and the restricts it has (like it cannot take away nodes that have dependancies) it can mess with skills and re-levelling.
They added the “highlighted” skill nodes affected but sometimes its easy to miss what the game took away when you changed gear.
Didn’t know about the “highlighted” skill nodes!
Thanks!
But yeah, too bad there’s no real solution
Sometimes what happens to me is that I am actually trying to send my item to the forge or sell the item but the shift button isn’t as responsive and end up swapped equipment…
I respeced to try a new skill, it was bad and bugged, I lost 50% of my damage swapping back to the skill I was using before.
Not every skill will be like that, but it hurts a lot.
Not talking about the tooltip, just the base damage of the skill itself. I think I had like… +3 adaptive spell damage. So 28 + 38 base damage, and I lost 140% more damage on the 38.
Weird that I’ve never seen people asking for that in games where respec doesn’t just make you weaker, because that would obviously make builds that use multiple specs in combat.
The only time it would be remotely worth doing is on act bosses, and again I’m talking about earlygame, so that’s like 5-6 bosses, which all take like 1-2 minutes to kill. So at best doing this you save like 30-60sec per boss, which is basically “who cares” if some people want to minmax that hard.
Is “earlygame” that hard to understand? I’m talking about like until level 40 or something (skill level 10ish?).
Seeing this topic and related ones usually turn sour at some point. I personally never had problems with it even I was still very new to the game and I thought it’s fine if I lose that 1 skill point temporarily from respeccing, just like other people who also don’t care much. But also of course I know there are people who find this punishing and “not a fun experience” so I am not trying to disregard that.
So maybe I think EHG something could implement is to prevent skill point loss at certain level when respeccing (just the 1-point respec option and not “Despecialize”), for characters below certain level, maybe Lv40, Lv50 or something. Idk, just an idea and my opinion.
Apart from, you know, late/end game (ie “high” corruption) where stuff’s harder & min-maxing is more important.
What spell are you talking about? There aren’t that many that have that much base spell damage at very low level.
They already have, there’s minimum skill lvls that increase as your character levels up plus if a skill is below a certain level (compared to it’s “expected” lvl) then it levels up much faster. They added this years ago in order to help make experimenting with skills less punishing. Plus you can get +skills from items.
How is the word “earlygame” so hard to understand. You even quoted me saying it. I’m talking about making skills not lose points up to like 10 or something.
Glacier
Sounds like instead of the half-assed method they just shouldn’t lose points in the earlygame.
So as one of the people that optimses teh game too much, if respeccing didnt lose points, we’d actually be respeccing points constantly, as each new point you get changes up what the most effective distribution at that time is. We take travel nodes while levelling, because the value of ones they connect to is so great, with no point loss, we only take that travel node when we can also get the higher value node after it. Just to bring some clarity to that.
However as you’ve said, and people keep (like everytime this is brought up) missing, is that in earlygame the number of people this effects is staggeringly low. As long as this isn’t the case later on into the game, it’s really not that much of an issue. I mean I already have my invcentory open half the time when zooming, so i can change what weapon i have equipped lmao, we’re always gonna find ways to go quicker.
So I do agree with you for the most part, but it isn’t correct to say it wouldn’t be that useful for going quicker in the early game, it could save a relatively large amount of time. (Also my take on that is that it would be fine tbh, I think it would open up a lot more depth for going fast, and increase the reward for pulling off harder strats.)
Ok I see what you’re saying with this, but TBH the amount of people willing to go that far and the level of advantage you would get is very low (it’s not like the travel nodes do nothing), I think I’m correct in saying it would mostly be a speedrunning tech.
Plus the feeling of “I can spend this point here on a useful node and move it later when I have 2 points to get the 2 point node I want” it actually a good feeling IMO. Get this a lot in PoE when filling out jewel sockets. 1 point in a good 1 pointer, respec into 2 point jewel socket next level. Just putting 1 point in a 10 attribute node because the next node is a jewel socket feels bad.
Thats literally what I said in the rest of my post lol
I’m afraid this would just turn the game into a Respec Simulator ™.
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