Say I’m rank 10 at Rip Blood. I then despecialize in it in order to try a new skill. If I learn I don’t like said new skill and then go back to Rip Blood… I would go back at, say, level 5, and my previous progress leveling that skill would have been lost.
Losing progress like this in an action RPG feels rather bad, IMO. Even in Path of Exile, in which it feels like the developers hate their players, the experience penalty on death never lowers the level of a character.
I know some people think we should not be able to respec at all - that permanent choices give “meaning” or “weight” to what we do (the same kind of player who wanted us to not have a respec system in Baldur’s Gate 3, and yet the game is massively sucessful with it, but anyway). I don’t really agree with them, but to not ignore their opinion I’m not talking about having a pool of skill points that we would be able to move around freely.
Rather, I would feel a lot better about Last Epoch if despecializing in a skill stopped our progression in it (and only allowed us to use it without any of its skill tree’s effects) but, when speciazling back in it, we went back to whatever level we previously had.
This way, players would have to work and use the skills in order to level them up, but no progress would be lost.
Considering how the skill tree system is one of the most unique aspects of Last Epoch, the current design feels like it punishes players who want to experiment with it.
The game is balanced pretty well around being able to get to monos (even start empowered) with very yolo builds, which is a strong point to the game.
Once you start getting to some corruption and higher levels the amount of time it takes to fully re-level skills is very short, even one or two echoes, and I think ultimately offers a good tradeoff between encouraging players to think some about what they’re putting points in, seeing what benefit you get from points you invest as you switch skills around, and feels a lot better than something like spending currency to respec.
IMO it’s good that it guides people towards experimenting and getting familiar with with low point base skills you want to use at lower levels, and then opening up quick experimenting with deeper cross-skill full build making at higher levels.
Please search before posting. It’s basic forum etiquette. This has been discussed dozens of times, you aren’t saying anything new or interesting, and there is no value in a new thread being created about this.
If you use passive skill points mostly to get higher numbers and statistical increases, yeah, it will feel like that.
In other hand, if you use the skill system to combine synergies and make a build merging all your strenghts, even a single point makes a huge difference.
For example, the point that converts Rip Blood’s damage to necrotic. It gives me synergy with other skills (like the resistance removal from Chtonic Fissure), with my passive tree (Chaos Flame, etc), allows me to trigger Chains of Ruins, and so on and so on. It’s a single skill point, but it massively changes how powerful my character is.
Isn’t that the opposite of what we would expect?
In other games, usually in the early game it’s easy to experiment with many options, as players learn how their builds feel and adjust it, and in the end game, when the build is consolidated, making changes is not so easy. Making experiments with the skill system restricted to the end game doesn’t really make sense.
Looks like it’s something in high demand.
I wonder if you’re not opposed to discussing it just because it’s something you don’t agree with.
High demand is comparative when put into context. There are tens of thousands of active players. There are maybe a dozen or so threads regarding this topic.
Looking at only the number of threads would definitely make one think it’s in high demand, but when put into perspective compared to the thousands of players, it’s not high demand at all.
EHG is aware a small minority part of the community finds it difficult and demanding to respec, they want to address this concern without changing things too drastically.
Making choices and having some form of consequence for said choice is extremely important not only to the genre but to EHG specifically. It’s why they won’t allow respecing to masteries.
Choosing a skill to specialize into comes with it’s own draw backs when wanting to revert certain choices. It’s not a gold investment, but a time one.
Sure, experimenting is fine, and it’s completely viable throughout the campaign and also throughout end-game. The campaign itself isn’t difficult enough to bottleneck a build even if one or two skills are currently behind on level compared to others. There’s a catch-up mechanic as well built in to allow you to get back to where you were before, but again, the time investment is intentional.
It is proper etiquette though to search for recent threads when asking a question or providing feedback, so it’s definitely a bit annoying having new threads popping up which don’t really change the argument, narrative, or debate in any meaningful way.
If you had bothered to search and read any of the past threads, you’d have found I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think this complaint is overexaggerated and hyperbolic, and that the same three “solutions” everyone comes up with are bad and would turn the game into something I’d hate. I specifically did not engage with your complaint because I’m sick of arguing about it, and so is everybody else who didn’t get here yesterday.
What I’m opposed to here is people selfishly cluttering up the forum with new posts about dead-horse subjects when they have nothing new to say. There’s no discussion to have. It’s been had. If you want to bring it back up again, have the courtesy to do it in a new thread that the rest of us who moved on have already muted.
Just posting here to say I agree with the OP, and wish respeccing were easier/cheaper to encourage, not punish, experimentation – especially at the earlier levels. It makes no sense that respeccing at 80+ takes a couple minutes while doing it in the teens and twenties takes like 30-60 min.
Also, seems to me like multiple posts about the same topic are a strong indicator that the many members of the community care about it, and went out of their way to make a post describing their frustration. I found this thread helpful.
While I know that emotions are a complex topic, up to a certain degree, people can control how they feel, sometimes by using rational thought.
You aren’t punished. You aren’t really loosing progress. For a couple of minutes, you play with mildly reduced efficiency, but you can usually still have fun with the game. Press onwards to make actual progress by advancing the campaign, through echoes, gathering gold, level experience, loot, etc.
Contrasting to PoE and other games with a death EXP penality, you will be always going forward. While you can’t lose levels in PoE, you can get stuck at a level, since you always lose what you earned.
How do you know it’s a “small minority”? Did EHG make an official announcement about it?
I think your criticism is overexaggerated and hyperbolic
If you don’t want to read a common criticism that apparently is shared by a lot of people, my suggestion is to not read it.
Why would I have to play with “mildly” (often hugely) reduced efficiency?
Your answer is basically saying the game is fine as it is without giving arguments about why it would ne fine. Doesn’t really sound like “rational thought” to me.
In POE losing 10% of exp was the same as losing 1-2 hours once you got to level 95+. In LE at that level and experience it takes maybe 5 minutes to get a skill back to 20.
It’s usually at the early game that players are encouraged to try and experiment. In the late game, when the build is already consolidated, why would a player keep changing skills?
Last Epoch does the opposite of what would be expected.
@Erasculio
Skills gain minimum levels as you progress early game so experimentation is possible and more forgiving than at later levels. I imagine most people will try to respec skills around 20 which the min should be around level 3-5.
The main argument from EHG, as I understand, against making respec’ing lossless is that there is an issue that players will switch from build to build between bosses or clearing (Example: D3). I’ve rarely see anyone address this issue when making a thread about lossless respecc’ing.
You’re making a valid point and this is something that bugs me as well. Ignore the naysayers and continue with providing feedback. The devs themselves have explicitly stated there is no issue in creating new threads to provide feedback. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
I’m saying that people blow things out of proportion. They have a gut feeling reaction and reinforce it by mourning how bad it is - when it isn’t.
It’s not as bad, because:
you are (usually) still powerful enough to progress through story and echoes.
your skills come back gradually. It might take 20-30 minutes at some point in the game to have them all back, but the first few are rather quick. You aren’t forced to play 30 minutes with 5/10 skill points. That lasts maybe 2 minutes, then it is 6/10.
once you hit empowered monolith, the first group of enemies gives you already 2-3 skill points back.
you don’t lose these 20 - 30 minutes, because you still make progress. If you are 5 minutes slower than if you had respecced with all points available, you could consider it a net loss of 5 minutes. In the great scheme of things, this is no big deal.
With fewer words, these arguments were already hinted at - for you to think about it.
This isn’t a rebuttal against the idea of introducing changes to the game.
If I were responsible for designing the game, I would make changes:
reducing the time to get skillpoints back at lower levels, because you get less EXP
or having the minimum skill level always be your maximum until 10 skill points, which should cover the campaign.
implementing a way more user-friendly UI for respeccing passives and skills.
I know some people want the game to have instant swaps, loadouts, etc.
But since the devs don’t want to encourage a gameplay where people swap builds every time they interact with different types of content in the game, re-levelling skills is a decent way of handling things. The implementation for earlier levels isn’t great for new players who would like to experiment with their new toys/skills.
To optimize their build for the part of content they currently engage with.
I am a strong proponent of having build identity and not going a build loadout approach. But OP is exactly right. The current system actually favours build swapping at endgame and punishes early game experimentations where people may not be familiar with skills.
Look at what you said yourself:
The Devs are enabling exactly what they want to discourage.
I don’t know where the devs explicitly said that. I might have missed it.
I can’t possibly think that this would be the prefered way for the devs. They probably said it in a context of “before you don’t post feedback at all, just do a new thread”. Which is ok, but still makes it bad
But nontheless, it makes the experience for everyone else worse. The forum is a community effort and not solely aimed at new player providing feedback to the devs. But a place for the entirety of the community to have discussions.
Cluttering the forum with 10x the same sentiment in a new thread is making the forum as a whole much worse to have good discussions. Some people might not read all of these threads and so there is a lot of potential for good and cosntructive discussiosn to be had lost.
And if your goal as a poster is not to discuss, but to only give feedback to the devs, posting in an existing thread will achieve the same, without making the experience for other people using the forum worse.
It is totally ok to create a new topic if there is no releveant topic open or maybe if you couldn’t find a appropiate topic.
But still posting without the slightly effort into looking for an existing discussion is just self-ish.
