More skill keys would be dope

AndrewTilley · September 30, 2020, 1:59pm

Hi, and welcome to the game and community! Sorry, the 5 skill limitation was a design choice from the very beginning of development and is unlikely to change (at least before release, but who knows what the future holds). This is an excerpt from the developer blog explaining this choice;

Skills to Pay the Bills

While you are out adventuring in Eterra, you will only be able to have 5 skills equipped. This is a really important component of Last Epoch as it forces you to pick which skills to bring with you very carefully. At first, this might seem like an arbitrary and silly constraint to put on players. As a small aside, I play a lot of Magic The Gathering (more specifically the commander variant) and one of my favorite things to do is build a deck with some very odd restrictions. When all the cards in the game are available to me, I often end up with very similar decks. For example, most of my decks have the card Sol Ring in it. It’s just so reliably good in almost every situation that it finds a way into almost every one of my decks. Now, if I make a deck with the restriction, no artifacts (Sol Ring is an artifact) then I suddenly need to get creative to find alternative ways of fulfilling that same role without using Sol Ring. The point that I’m trying to illustrate here is that, if you apply restrictions to a system like this then it makes for interesting decision making. If we allow you to take 10 skills with you out into the wild then several of them will be the same ones you always take because they are just good supplemental skills to always bring. This is not interesting decision making.

This system will mean that not every Sorcerer will bring Teleport with them and not every Beast Master will bring Fury Leap. With this difficult decision of which 5 skills make up my build, it is unlikely that you will run into another player playing the same loadout as you are. Even if you do come across someone with the same skill selection, it is unlikely that the two characters will even play the same way. This is where skill specializations come into effect. As you level up you will unlock skill specialization slots. You will only have 5 specialization slots total. This means that once again, you need to decide carefully which skills you want to specialize in. While we will have systems in place to help respec your character to some degree, but it will be a little punishing to change a decision that you have already made. If you decide to change one of your specializations then you will likely need to start leveling up that new skill from scratch.

But as to your worry about respecializing skills, this is getting an update in the next patch and will be much more forgiving than the current implementation;