Neither did I ever tell you this game wasn’t for you.
Characterizing the current system as a punishment is an extreme exaggeration. If you just play a little, you get your skill points back. Outside of respeccing very regularly, you shouldn’t be feeling that much of an impact.
As for the mastery, I believe that there was a significant enough effort from the devs to make them have sufficiently different flavors to justify it being an actual permanent commitment. Its choice has a very significant impact on how you play, and how the class is going to feel, and as such should be a thought-out choice for its flavor and gameplay.
If the issue is about being able to try different stuff out, then I think there have already been better solutions offered than removing all commitments in the game.
No, it isn’t. Please keep in mind that providing feedback is always legitimate, even if the solution isn’t necessarily the right one (hence why we are having these discussions, rather than requesting for the devs to lock the topic). From the issues they are expressing, the devs may actually find out ways to solve or diminish them without compromising the integrity of the game.
Just to clarify, I did say “my” ideal solution, not “the” ideal solution. What I was expressing is that I don’t mind others being able to have extra freedom, what I need is those restrictions for myself, and that self-enforcement just doesn’t cut it.
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First of all: I absolutely understand the notion of frustrating game elements being there, which is something you’ll likely find with any game.
One of the most liked games from my side ever was ‘Ori and the Blind Forest’ and some elements there were something I found not quite enjoyable, like the extreme backtracking if you wanted to 100% it for example, which was even a lot for a Metroidvania.
There’s a difference though in voicing an opinion of something which isn’t only flavor - and hence immutable unless it turns out that a product is actively failing because of it - but also getting replies that it has been talked over a bazillion times with the same outcome as well as the devs standing behind their decision. Versus giving feedback on mechanical shortcomings which can clearly be seen that an alternative is a better solution without downsides and not being a flavor aspect.
If you bash your head against a wall and try to tell the people which not only accepted a situation but even revel in it that they’re ‘wrong’ for a flavor things then you’ll likely start to have a bad time… and if you even do so despite the devs also standing behind that you’ll have a veeeeeery bad time.
I don’t understand why it’s so hard to accept there.
And if that’s a dealbreaker… yeah, you might like the product overall… but it’s still not for you then by design. Which is fine to voice out.
I like MMO’s for example. The first MMO I played was Tibia, it has issues gameplay wise. Hence I had to leave it behind. Still love it… not for me though!
So where is the issue? It’s just the part that people can’t let go when something’s not doing them well… if you can’t change something and don’t enjoy it because of it… the only sane solution is leaving it behind. Everything else is insanity.
Yes, and that’s how ‘AAA’ companies have trained us to behave by pushing the limits. That companies will cave in under enough pressure.
The issue with that though is… why should a normal company not out for maximizing profits do that? Sure, they wanna make money… but what if it’s not their primary goal but a fantastic and usable side-effect?
Yeah, you run against a wall, because they flip the finger and you waste your time. The behavior of ‘enough people voicing their opinion’ is a democratic principle… but we’re not in a democracy here! As long as their product sustains itself they have exactly ‘0’ incentive to change anything no matter how many people beyond the needed amount wants something. If they can sustain themselves on 1% of the playerbase and 99% leave because they don’t want a specific thing to stay inside the game… yeah, no issue for them basically.
You’re not in a suggestion forum to enforce what the devs do, that’s a misconception.
You’re here to give input to make their work easier for the bits which they’ve decided they’re not immutable. Sure, they might change their opinion if enough people ask for something… but they’re under no obligation at all to follow along.
Your right is to voice your opinion, your right ends with exactly that, you got no power beyond that, neither of us does.
If you voice your opinion, it’s a problem for you and it gets ignored then the only option you have is to either bear with it or leave, there is no other solution available. Maybe they change it in the future. Nice! if not? Tough luck!
If someone says ‘it has to be that way’ then people will come and tell them off.
If someone goes ahead with an actual suggestion a’la ‘I think it would be nice to have xyz because zyx and here is abc on how I would implement it as a first thought’ then kudos, that’s how you do it.
If someone comes and tells you ‘yeah, had that 100+ times in the exact same manner already, devs said no’ then out of luck, once more. If not… nice!
Simple I would say.
100% agreed, nothing said against that.
What I’m saying is… ‘if you voice your opinion on a change that would otherwise be a dealbreaker for you’ then you’ll have to be prepared that it nonetheless doesn’t happen.
And if it’s a dealbreaker then ‘It is not a game for you’, fairly simple I would say. You can then start to discuss a compromise or maybe even a full solution for a win-win, what you can’t do is double-down.
If it’s not a dealbreaker then there’s no further thing to do then - once again - discuss the details as to why things happen and broaden your horizon or maybe find solutions to please both camps, a compromise is also possible. And if nothing comes from that you can only bear with it.
I mean… it’s really no rocket science but I’m often baffled how few people understand this concept.
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Actually yes. There are alot of players that would. Im one of them.
It removes build identity. As well as removes the need to balance ur build around single target and clear speed
I want to play last epoch not diablo 3 2.0
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Correct.
Yeah, this. The way my dad used to put it was - “Is this the hill you want to die on?”
The game forum obsession with ceaselessly arguing and yelling about something that you don’t like is atrociously childish. And I mean “childish” in the most literal possible sense because thinking that if you just complain long enough and loud enough they will cave and you will get your way is exactly how my 2 year old deals with being told “No”.
The squeaky wheel doesn’t get the grease if it’s supposed to be squeaking. Yeah, say your piece. If it’s not a big enough pain point for you to stop playing the game, move on. Some people have this totally baffling attachment to playing games that make them mad constantly and that they can never stop complaining about. Just break up with her already, criminy.
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Okey so people don’t support an option, fine.
What it comes down to is, there isn’t a single person here who can honestly appreciate getting your efforts obliterated, or am i out of line here. Afterall it’s a game, where everybody commits their own time.
I don’t care about the Mastery topic, only about Skill Level reduction.
Okey what other ways are there?
Perhaps:
24 hour cooldown when you swap out your 5 skill slots, but you always keep your maximum skill level on all skills. That’s fair? Then you can’t freely swap here and there for whatever endgame purpose you have, me personally im not really into competing, i understand that some do which is fine.
Or perhaps a huge gold sink? I don’t care, what do you even spend gold on? Trading and buying shards, so what you get it back naturally. It’s not really as painful as losing out skill levels to be clear here. Maybe even top it off more, add durability on gear for additional gold sink (hefty repair), which make your decision on swapping skills being more cautious?
I could sacrifice whatever there is ingame, as long as your skill levels aren’t reduced.
Say hello to POE.
That games isnt geared for casual players and yet GGG is doing pretty damn fine.
Games dont NEED to cater to casuals to be successful.
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No, you’re not.
The notion is understandable after all, absolutely, 100% so.
It’s just not compatible with the system EHG has made which pulled in a large group of people because of those systems in place.
And this even stands when removing the mastery part and only looking at the skill respec… which has after all active gameplay effects rather then solely time-saving effects.
Sure, it’s far far more severe then what we have now.
If someone changes once they hence can’t change back if they make a mistake and realize ‘that hasn’t turned out well’ as well as affecting those people which play a lot for a day, for example a Saturday or Sunday.
That’s why commonly real-time based systems aren’t used. Everyone who’s played some games with excessive waiting times knows how obnoxious they can become. That’s why commonly effort-based systems are created. So someone playing 6 hours on Saturday can change their skills… for example 12 times if it takes 30 minutes. Or in end-game ~40 times in the same timeframe.
I agree that there’s an issue with effort needed for lower level ranges, fully on your side there, those should be sped up. Respec should be very easy early on and become gradually harder as the game progresses, not the other way around.
The market, my equipment hence, my stash tab, or as CoF using it for Lightless Arbor, millions of it per try actually.
That’s a vastly higher loss as well, so sure, can be done.
The system is very forgiving for a reason in terms of passive respec cost, miniscule costs and nigh no effect. And the skill one is mostly focused on needing a bit of effort to get it back end-game. Which brings us back to early game and hence the need to speed that aspect up.
Yeah, the vast majority of people will disagree with that notion.
A high gold investment is active progress being halted. You can farm for loot while you’re getting your skills up again… you get the progress removed though when you give up the resources you would’ve gotten during that time though.
The same with a time-based block. They could after all re-spec in that block-time several times over.
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Or say hello to FromSoftware spawning an entire genre with its moniker named after them because of how much people loved the unabashed, unforgiving difficulty they delivered.
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Interestingly, Path of Exile has just announced that they will make respeccing easier (by replacing a specific respec currency with gold, that will be more universally available).
I wonder if respeccing will become easier in Last Epoch in the future as well.
Respec in PoE is still vastly harder then in LE, not even remotely a comparison.
And they didn’t only announce that… they basically shames the whole genre with the massive changes and improvements, many of which have been wanted to be seen since ages.
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You use orbs of regret and be done with it. What is so hard about it?
I would rather say that the major difference is that in PoE you figure out the optimal “configuration” with path of building and only then execute it. Nothing hard about it. So there is no painful back and forth required as in LE,
Not that PoE is in any way optimal, having to rely on an external tool for example distracts from the experience. But the respeccing itsself is very straight forward, quick and nothing about it is hard.
The amount of respec that is available is very limited (or at least was, I don’t know how hard it is to get orbs of regret nowadays). You can’t freely make massive changes to a build.
I’d be fine with PoE’s system for both passives and skill points, but I don’t think that many people would be.
I was never good at PoE, I played a lot but never beat the elder or the new guy in town. I was just a casual who sucked at bosses. Respeccing however never was a problem for me.
And a payed mechanic is not neccessarily a bad idea, say 5000 per node. The problem is that in LE we do not have a tool to figure out the required changes in advance. Hence the need to respec often and quickly instead which brings us back to this thread.
The good point about PoE is that the mechanic isn’t based on gold, but rather on a consumable. Gold ends up becoming an irrelevant resource after some time, while a consumable’s drop rate can be refined to always be relevant.
I agree. The issue isn’t respec, it’s the ability to foresee how efficient your build is going to be, and how it will feel like.
Well… how do you obtain those regrets? 
It’s just front-loaded there, you don’t realize the difference.
If you want to switch over to another build with your character how much of the passive tree do you need to respec? 60% 80%? Something like this mostly unless it’s small changes to simply adjust the current build, for which that system was designed.
Put it into pure hard and cold time investment. How many regrets do you make during the campaign? 2? Which level are you then? How much can you hence respec?
Ah yes, jack-shit during that time.
So that brings us to mapping, how much do you make there? A 60% respec solely? That’s several hours without trade, and with trade it’s still around 5-10 hours early on, late game it’s around half an hour of play-time solely to afford, not to put the time into it to acquire the currency, use it and actually put the points into it… and better not make a mistake while you do it either or you need more.
Have you ever played the game? I did, 8500 hours actually. I know their mechanics in-depth, the backend is probably the only thing I don’t know in-depth. I can tell you exactly how to achieve a mirror-tier item, how to craft it the cheapest, which methods provide the most currency per hour return, which are the least hassle… everything there. I’m still playing it besides Last Epoch.
Anyone who tells me ‘respec in PoE isn’t hard’ either hasn’t played it or has not done it personally before end-game.
Because the harsh truth is… if you’re mid progression and you want to do another build… you start over, it’s that much faster.
If you compare that exact line for PoE and LE? Then oh boy… you’re in for a really… really bad time.
You remember that chaos orbs are the baseline currency, right?
Now… PoE needs… I think it was 118 at max? Let’s take 100 since we have a char that’s not 100, which is likely after all.
We need to respec 60% of our tree for a new build, which means 60 regrets.
A regret costs around 1,5 chaos.
That means you need 90 chaos orbs just to respec.
That’s a piece of equipment right there unless you’re end-game. And not a bad one either. Definitely a mid-tier piece of gear.
A mid-tier piece of gear in LE is a well crafted 1L rare unique or 2L common unique in equivalency.
This season they have a gold respec option, gold is a extremely important resource there unlike in other games with the new league which hence causes it to never loose value and become irrelevant.
Old regret orb option still exists.
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As mentioned I played casually for years and never had any issues with respeccing.
This is rediculous. With the knowledge and mastery you claim to have you obtain those orbs of regret in no time. Heck, you would be swimming in them
And you know that very well so I must assume that you are actually trolling. Sad.
Yes, no issue, I do gather those materials easy as hell, I also don’t use them too much to be fair.
Also I don’t swim in them since they’re directly related to atlas-tree re-spec which depending on circulating strategy based on personal resources available can vastly shift. Albeit that’s gotten a lot better since they implemented 3 separate Atlas trees to spec each as you progress.
Do you?
Does a casual?
Does a beginner?
Do you actually know the drop-rate of regrets and in which tier-bracket for currency they are?
For example exalts, divines and annuls are the ‘T1’ bracket, hence whenever one of those drops they could’ve also been one of the others, the system randomizes which one does when that bracket is chosen.
In comparison the Orbs of Regret are put together with chaos orbs, hence they have the same rarity in the game. If you drop a ‘pure’ chaos orb then it could’ve been a regret.
Taki into consideration, that only counts for ‘raw’ drops. Many mechanics specifically adjust the table inside the bracket as well as outright enforcing specific drops directly.
As to how we know that? GGG provided information about currency drops during the Delve league on how it works mechanically, which is how people found out that many of them are interchangeable with each other.
So, that brings us to the actual way to obtain them in different levels of content.
I personally will say that Maven is the end-goal and hence declare content related to that.
Campaign is ‘early game’
white and yellow map progress (full) is ‘mid-game’
starting with red maps it’s ‘late-game’
Early-game - Campaign:
You’re out of luck, you don’t get em. There’s no reliable way. Much like many people have ~5 chaos orbs at the end of the whole campaign it stays the same with regrets, ~5 is the common number for a campaign-run without backtracking. And that’s actually fairly much the upper limit.
At the end of the campaign the game expects you to be level 68 (albeit you’ll likely be higher).
Also if you’ve done every quest during the campaign then you’ll have 20 free respec points… which is a good start! +5 from your drops, 25 total.
Full respec in a campaign possible?: No
LE Comparison: You can, it takes too long though, 30minutes to 1 hour
Mid-game - mapping progress - LE equivalency normal monoliths:
Your best bet is to use the ‘Expedition’ mechanic if you want to focus on it early on. Alternatively ‘Ritual’ can also be used, might even be better, I don’t know, Ritual is not rewarding enough in the grand scheme of things so I rarely use it.
But that’s not what a progressing player should ever do. You go with essences, plain and simple because that provides you your gear upgrades better then anything else in that stage. Essences are king, always were. So you’ll have baseline amounts of regrets.
So unless the league is especially prone to providing high amounts of currency (some do, some don’t) you’re out of luck unless you hamper your own progression quite heavily.
So that means we’re now in ‘map level drops rates’, baseline ones, after all neither in white nor yellow maps you’ll be overly fast and you’re unlikely to ‘juice’ your maps substantially either, so the drop-rate is around 1 regrets per map there baseline + whatever mechanics you encounter randomly boosting it up. Which should lead to an outcome of an extra one, hence around 2 regrets per map if you pick those instead of other currency when the choice is given.
That means to have a full respec of a level 80 character (roughly yellow maps reached, leveling and progression get wonky at that stage because of high variance) you’ll have to run 24 maps (60% of 80 passives, yes I’m ignoring extra ones to make it look better for your argument and not mine) to achieve it.
Given that a map at least takes 5 minutes at that stage - for someone not focusing on efficiency - you’re looking forward around 2 hours of pure farming to achieve a single re-spec.
Better make it count!
Full respec in mid-game possible: Yes. High time investment.
LE comparison: Respec takes roughly 15-20 minutes here.
End-game (empowered monolith play LE equivalency):
You’ll be able to run maps decently fast and worst-case can go 1-2 tiers down to achieve decent speeds. Your Atlas passives have shaped up and hence you can actually invest into specific mechanics directly. Here it becomes rather easy.
10+ chaos a map are a thing that can happen. Hence also 10+ regrets depending on the mechanic.
By that time we’re level 90, hence 90 regrets needed hence 9 maps.
Maps still take around 5 minutes, we’re progressing after all and not speed-farming (and side-content takes substantially more time since maps are packed nowadays) so we’ll still need around 45 minutes to achieve a single re spec.
Re-spec time in end-game: ~45 minutes if you’re dedicated.
LE comparison: 5-10 minutes
And we don’t need to talk about post end-game, that’s high corruption which increases exp extremely while a PoE player makes easily 1 divine per map that takes between 5-10 minutes if they know what they do.
So, where exactly is PoE so re-spec friendly?
Yes, it absolutely is.
It’s sad that people which played both games don’t know how punishing or forgiving their respective mechanics are in comparison.
But you’re not the only one with this factually wrong notion in your head and it baffles me repeatedly when I hear it.
Put things into cold hard numbers and you get the truth, don’t go by feeling.
LE pushes it into your face with what you need to re-do, PoE frontloads those things.
‘Out of your sight, out of your mind’
That’s all that happens.
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I know, that’s the point.
Much has been said above as to how it would be bad if Last Epoch had a frictionless respec system, like the one in Diablo 3.
But Path of Exile has just made their respec system easier, while still being far, far harder than in Diablo 3 and even than in Last Epoch.
Maybe this is what EHG could do. Make Last Epoch’s respec more forgiving, but not to the extreme Diablo 3 went - just like PoE has made their system more forgiving, while still being very different from D3.