Love the game, but the skill respec system is exhausting

General
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TLDR version: Skill respec system doesnt seem to have any pros to go along with the many cons of it even existing. It just causes unnecessary hinderance to playing your character the way you want to play, leading you to make multiple characters of the same class in order to have different skill builds within the SAME mastery.

Long Version:

I basically have the following characters

2 Beastmasters
3 Shaman
2 Druids

I get the “no respec for mastery”. Thats not my frustration. The passive respec system is fine too. Gold cost, only done in town… thats all good.

My frustration is with respec and skills. Why do I have duplicates of the same mastery?

Here is an example:

Ive got a cold/melee shaman, lightning melee shaman, and a totem shaman.

“Why dont I just play ONE shaman and respec my skills?” 0ne might ask… Well, thats because respec on skills leaves your skills you swap out at level 10 (out of 20). Lots of builds often rely on more points than that to be functional (lots of synergies or chaining off passives, like one skill triggering another skill). Often times you cant do this with only 10 points. So jumping back into high level content to try to level it back up, many times, isnt doable without your build being functional due to lack of skill points.

This has led to me having to play multiple versions of the same class. With no real decent way to optimally skip the campaign, its becomes a slog to go through it for the 4th, 5th, 6th etc time in order to make sure get your 15 passives and idol slots.

Id love to just be able to play one of each mastery, and be able to swap between builds easily (in town), even if it was for a gold cost…

Constructive Idea: Once you get to 100, and have leveled a skill to 20, despec’ing it removes it as the active skill, but you can respec back into it later at its level 20 rank. After all, you already hit 100, and already leveled it to 20.

7 Likes
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In general I agree, and I wish that respeccing (either passives or skills) wasn’t such a pain. Especially if they want to encourage us to play with different builds instead of the current broken meta. It’s especially a pain because de-equipping an item with “Levels of…” will randomly remove skill points somewhere on the tree, and it’s not always easy to reroute around them with a lower number of points correctly :frowning:

There’s just no upside for making you have to grind to skill up again, while having a weak character in the meantime.

That said though, I’m around 80 right now, and respeccing a skill from 10 to 20 doesn’t take more than 10-15 minutes or so. Certainly it’s faster than leveling another character. Has that not been your experience?

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Man it takes less than 1 echo in empowered monos to go from 10-20 in any skill.

Just ask to tag along with someone in global, the respecing of the skills is the same thing me and my buddies praised as to how easy and convenient it is to switch…

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1 empowered echo is often not doable when you only have 10 points in your skills

As I said in my post, many builds rely a lot on skill synergy and chaining which often isnt doable with only 10 points.

AND!!!

If it really is that easy, then the system has ZERO VALUE.

And it seriously hinders being able to try out skills as you level a new character, because at those levels is absolutely not as easy as “1 empowered echo”

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It’s exhausting muting the new thread that gets posted to complain about this every day. Post in one of the existing ones, you aren’t saying anything new or interesting. This isn’t D3 or WoW and it’s not going to be.

Then don’t respec every skill all at once. Radical concept. Failing that, go do two regular monos or faceroll a few waves of the arena.

It’s enough friction to keep constant spec swapping based on your current goal from being the best way to play the game.

Yes it is.

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Not sure how other people choose to play affects you.

Not like you would be forced to use a system that was less restrictive just because you could.

Also…
There are plenty of things they go do to implement it properly too. Similar to how you cant respec your passive tree outside of town.

They could make it so that skills couldnt be changed in the middle of a monolith, dungeon, arena, etc, so people wouldnt just hot swap to get past certain parts.

There isnt a single reason FOR having a system like this that isnt easily countered by a well thought out alternative system that could be put in place to protect about those reasons while still offering more freedom to play how you want without exhausting systems.

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Why cant I hack online then wtf. my cheating should not effect you right?

Thats not how these things work. When bad design like the ability to just willy nilly flip flop your skills creates the optimal play being swapping your skills around whenever its time to run the timeline boss is booty cheeks.

The small 2-5 minute chore exists so they dont have to balance around people sucking the fun out of the game.

The 2-5 minute nerf is doing its job, your complaints prove that. if you are not willing to pay the 2-5 minute tax, then so be it. The rest of us will enjoy not having the game balanced around hot swapping and snap shotting thanks.

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I’d rather they focus on making the game more alt-friendly, like more ways to share progress and stuff, so you are motivated to make alts, and would still feel sense of accomplishment even when you have multiple characters of same masteries.

I understand not everyone has the time to make that many alts, so offline play might be a better option because you can just edit your character.

Your request is understandable but I’ve always voted no to this suggestion. I hate to see skill swapping. You can say it won’t affect me as long as I don’t do it, but this is like saying don’t need to balance broken op builds because it doesn’t affect me.

I doubt EHG will change their stance on that.

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I understand the friction around changing skill specializations, though the nerf I took swapping from leveling to endgame spec was really annoying.

What I object to is friction around moving points within a specialized skill that I’ve gotten to level 20. Even mis-clicking with 30+ second lag for registering clicks on passive and skill trees is punished. It discourages me from experimenting freely even within a build, which is not good design in an ARPG.

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The irony in this logic is that if it’s only a 2-5 minute inconvenience, then it doesn’t really serve a purpose, doesn’t it?

Why wouldn’t getting to level 100 take 2-5 minutes then? Or fully gearing out your character?

Because it’s either not a 2-5 minute chore, or it’s such an insignificant one that it’s indiscernible from not being there in the first place. So it just shouldn’t for logistics sake and resources to everyone.

Also, people can “hack” all the way in the game, that’s what offline is for.
There’s a huge difference between removing a 2-5 minute inconvenience and allowing an unhindered manipulation of the entire game. These are not equal circumstances.

1 Like
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My biggest issue with the respec system is it taking far too long to relevel skills while leveling, when people would be experimenting the most.

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Agreed. Every time something like this is brought up people keep saying stuff like “Well, high corruption monoliths…” or "Well when you’re 100 you can do this one trick… " , etc… Even had devs come in saying stuff like this, like you’re just supposed to accept a voodoo ritual in order to make it work.

And that’s great and all /s … but it helps absolutely nothing for everyone before that time and place … which is 99% of players and game time. It’s all really backwards logic … it should be streamlined across the board … not at the backend.

Edit: And to the point, the “Catch up” mechanic is completely redundant. Starting half way through your max doesn’t even help you because the first half of your points would have come to you almost instantly the moment you started killing enemies … just as the next few points come quickly after the half way point. The arduous place is the remaining 1/4th of your cap … where it takes forever even at an “accelerated” pace.

And that’s a problem with the leveling in general … where even getting back to the spot you were takes basically the same decelerated curve as it first did … and then you just stop gaining xp arbitrarily because of character level.

And the minimum level doesn’t keep up… at all. You would think you’d start at 15 points by the time your cap is 20. The same with all the levels before it. But no … you basically get the quickest points that barely get you into enjoying the skill first … and then have to experience a diminished gameplay where you have to put points into your skill while you’re fighting mobs because why would you sit on several points while you complete the monolith to have a safe spot to do so?

It’s not designed to be useful or helpful, just a misguided hindrance.

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its designed to be a hinderance so you dont cast something at 20 skill levels, respec, then do it with a different skill and repeat.

There is a clip of a very good streamer in PoE literally respeccing his skills mid pvp fight once learning his opponents set up.

Because if you can, why wouldnt you?

There has to be limitations on skill swapping. This how they chose to do it. The fact that someone is complaining about it proves that it is annoying enough that they cant do it whenever they want. So its doing its job of not letting people break the system

its the exact same reason when you remove a +3 level item, it removes 3 random skill points not just whatever you added when you put the item on. This is so you need to readjust after swapping gear and cant just hotswap items on the fly for benefits. does it annoy people? of course, its designed to make it annoying to hotswap.

All these poopooing about things that happen literally in the first 5 hours of the game are pointless. if you cant get past the first 5 hours of tutorial the genre simply isnt for you, and the devs cant bend the genre to fit for you without breaking it for everyone else.

the players that would quit over a system like this basically were not sticking around anyways, so the devs have no reason to appease them.

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But bro, think of the roleplay, you cant just ‘unlearn stuff and learn it again without the roleplay of learning it again’ - People defending the current system.

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There really was no need for a new thread about this. There are dozens already open about this and everything that has been said here (and in most of those threads) has already been said before.
The more threads about this are open, the less votes/attention they get. It’s much more helpful to your “cause” if you simply reply in the open threads with the most votes and upvote it.

It’s also helpful if you read them, since this has all been said before ad nauseaum and you have literally nothing new to add to the discussion (nor does the other side) other than a “me too” for whichever side you support.

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Odds are you didnt read more than the first sentence or two, or even just only read the topic of my post, so you probably have no idea if anything new was brought to this topic or not.

As many have stated, restrictions seemingly need to exist to stop people from swapping builds or skills mid battle. Or even mid-monolith/dungeon/arena.

This can be done any number of ways, not just the way the devs have done it.

Limiting respec to towns is one potential way.

Making it so that if you have an active monolith or dungeon you cant respec is another way.

Those are just two alternative examples that provide the same “protection” from everyone seems to be so fearful of, without being as much of a hinderance to others playing the game who just want to more easily be able to experiment with skills and builds without trying to “cheese” the system by swapping mid-battle.

Necroing old threads doesnt do anything good ever… especially if those threads only have complaints and zero constructive ideas (which most do unfortunately)

1 Like
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I did read your post. But you haven’t read the most voted threads. Granted, there are a lot of replies there, but your idea isn’t new. It’s been suggested before.

This has also been suggested before. It is simply the D3 way and it didn’t work to retain the D2 players (or PoE ones). Which are the ones EHG is aiming for, so far. Instant respec will never please everyone. In fact, some people think respec should have MORE attrition, rather than less.

Devs are aware of all points of view from either side and neither side has anything new to say at this point (actually, for quite some time). Necroing a post that has dozens of votes and placing your vote there does more for the visibility of the issue than new ones do. Especially because new ones tend to get less and less votes, which makes it seem as if it’s not an issue anymore.

At this point, the only real useful info for the devs is how many people want it and how many don’t. And you don’t get to know that properly with a dozen posts that have a couple votes each.

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You are right, I dont have that kinda of data of how many players want it, vs dont want it.

However

What threads like this do, as they keep popping up, is let the devs know that MAYBE they should check that data, to see if its something they should invest time into changing.

If thats all my post assists in happening, im content.

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I understand your point. But my point was that making new threads all the time leads to them having less votes and less and less community engagement. Mostly because people are tired of saying the same things over and over.
Which leads to new threads popping by but they have less replies and less votes, so the topic loses visibility. The devs are more likely to take notice of a thread that has hundreds of replies and dozens of votes than a thread with just a couple votes and a dozens replies.

So my point was only that increasing visibility is better served by using the highly voted ones and not letting them die.

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Ive got a cold/melee shaman, lightning melee shaman, and a totem shaman.

you have to be realistic here. almost no one is doing this. you don’t need 3 seperate characters, you need 3 sets of gear. it only takes like half an hour to get a skill from 16 to 20.

it would be nice if they added a way to save builds in game though