Mastery Respec Feedback

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Hello,

I wanted to provide my thoughts on mastery respec, both what i feel was implemented well, and areas for improvement.

What was done well/feels good:

In general the option to respec mastery is a great addition to the game. As someone with 1500+ hours in last epoch, it’s wonderful not having a character list that is multiple pages long.

Many masterys have a certain level of shared gear at end game, that in the past could get annoying sending between all your alts. While obviously this is still the case inbetween classes (red rings, ravenous etc), this cuts down on it quiet a bit.

Having a mastery respec helps player engagement by being able to quickly access new specs to play/try instead of doing the campaign over again, farming for all your idols etc.

Things that didn’t quiet hit the mark with mastery respec:

Lets just rip the bandaid off here and get this one out of the way. At level 97 it costs ~900k gold to respec. I understand the desire to have a penalty here and not just have players be able to swap back and forth willy nilly. However, there is a very large discrepancy in gold generation between MF and COF. As a COF player, instead of leveling, and farming gear last night, I spent 5 hours grinding gold from echoes, until I finally got frustrated enough to just start selling a ton of gear from my stash tab, I only needed 300k gold to achieve the respec.

In hindsight, I could have fully leveled an alt, had it be around level 80, and have ~8 more stash tabs in the time it took me to farm up just 300k gold.

Now, what happens if I respec, and end up hating what i changed to? What if it’s more sub optimal, i’ve just spent a full night grinding gold, have no gold left, and am now in a worse spot than I was (not actually the case for me, but very easily could be), all because I wanted to try different builds.

If I was merchant guild, I could swap back and forth with ease and it potentially would just cost me a little bit of trading/economy power.

I’d really like to see an implementation that is balanced around which faction you are, in order to ensure balance. Perhaps if you are COF it gets a 60/70% discount? In its current state, while a great function, it is much too expensive to not just ignore it entirely and make alts.

Thanks for reading through my rant!
Nihility

2 Likes
2

My biggest issue with mastery respec is the fact that it motivates everyone to play the meta leveling build for their class. And if you’re competing on ladders, it’s even worse. It creates an extremely stale season-start.

Want to play Forge Guard? ALL sentinels level as a VK or Paladin, all Acolytes level as Warlock, all Rogues level as Falconer…you get the drift. Whatever the “meta” leveling build is, that’s what the majority of people use, now that we can just respec anytime.

Furthermore, can someone respec right before reaching lvl100 to a mastery that doesn’t have someone who has reached 100 yet, allowing you to take the title? Idk…

Regardless, IMO, you should have to level as the mastery you’re wanting to play. That’s just my philosophy for ARPG’s. One way to fix this is to not allow respecing until a much higher level. If you can’t respec till level 90 or 95, then you’ll level as the mastery you’re wanting to play. And then when you’re done with your build, respec to your heart’s desire.

3

Thats backwards from the goal of the respecing system.

The point of it is to allow for players to experiment with the masteries allow for fixing a wrong choice or fixing mistakes ect.

I do agree with u on the leveling meta.

I dont agree with it being used as a campaign skip. Why the devs said and have anytime campaign skip gets brought up. There are no plans to do a full campaign skip.

Imo this also applies to mastery respec. If theres no plans then mastery respecing shouldnt allow this. Which it does.

What should be done is locking ur mastery choice at high lvl like around 85-90. This way players can equip all gear in the game. Lvl 85 is the last lvl requirement for gear. Some tho

Reason for locking it is once ur far enough in end game it should be testing ur build and improving on it. And not having away to say well this mastery works better for 500c than what im using.

Which could as time goes on create a meta of lvling master switch to X mastery for empowered up to normal aby then switch to Y master for 300+ to take on aby.

Locking it stop this as well as makes players learn the strengths and weaknesses of the build/mastery and how to deal with thos weaknesses in said situations.

Edit another issue with mastery respec in its current for is of course gold being used and MG advantage on it.

The other is when u look at people that have killed abby even uber. Theres no way to tell if they switched mastery to one that can better handle it. Which removes the skill and knowledge part of ur choice being meaning full

4

Agreed. It defeats the purpose if it’s prohibitively expensive.

5

Fundamentally, I agree with you. It’s exactly as you said - “to allow for players to experiment with the masteries.” In my humble opinion, though, this shouldn’t be allowed until you’re DEEP into your build. It should be a simple QoL thing that we get to use later on when we’re basically done with our builds, not a NECESSITY for competing in the ladders. Right now, though, it just pigeonholes the entire player-base into a pre-curated list of meta leveling builds.

6

Well, up until 2 months before now, there were also no plans for allowing mastery respec of any sorts in this game either. In fact, they were always very firm and adamant against that, saying it would hurt character identity.
Now we simply have it, and all the problems people who are against this always talked about regarding it are already emerging.

Yes, this is probably the best they could do to ameliorate the whole situation… If they locked mastery respec at higher levels, they could even completely get rid of the respec cost (or at least cut it down by a lot), as it wouldn’t be necessary to have high respec costs to prevent people from doing a respec-meta to do bosses/maps in the late game, while also removing the MG discrepant advantage on it over CoF players.

1 Like
7

Which purpose?

8

Not needing to level another character if you just want to change masteries? Whatever your reason, if it’s more efficient to just go level again instead of using the respec, the system doesn’t accomplish anything.

9

It does, it allows you to change mastery, just not at will (unless you’ve got “lots” of gold, ie, MG).

10

So does leveling. The function is letting you do it faster. Since it takes time to farm gold you can pretty directly compare the two. If it isn’t any faster to farm the gold instead of leveling then it doesn’t serve a purpose.

You can keep being stubborn about not liking it in the game. But given that they want it in the game now, it being functionally designed is important.

1 Like
11

True, but you will have acquired gold in the past while levelling, more so if you’re MG. Also if this isn’t your first character you’ve played (presumably in the season) then any gold previous characters acquired could be used as well.