QoL needed for swapping skill trees thanks to Uber Abby

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Hey EHG,
Can we please get a way to swap back and forth between an echo clearing and bossing spec for our 5 customizable skills? I realize it doesn’t take long to run a couple of echo’s but right now this is just unneeded, unwanted friction when switching between bossing and echo clearing.

Of course you’d want it to only be available in town or between echo’s or something but please make this much less annoying with this one change. The introduction of Abby and I assume future aspirational contact requires dedicated skill tree building and there’s no good reason for it to be frustrating.

Thank you!

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This is something the devs very vehemently don’t want to happen. They want you to make a balanced build that can handle all content.
So a loadout/armory is very very unlikely to happen (though mastery respec was as well and here we are).

I honestly hope this never happens, because it will simply kill build diversity.

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No thank you.

Having to manage at least 2 different builds and 2 sets of equipment on each character, and having to switch between the 2 before each boss would make me quit the game. That is SO much extra effort for something that should be possible with 1 build and 1 set of equipment. There’s no need for this added complexity, we have enough things to keep track of right now.

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When we warned people would soon be requesting some sort of loadout system (because it makes sense in a system where respeccing is possible), some said it was just slippery slope fallacy
:sweat_smile:

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It sort of seems like that goal already failed though right? I see people talk about having a clear character and having a bossing character. They basically have loadouts, just inconvenient.

There’s also just the issue of content design. The game doesn’t exactly reward a build for being well rounded. Clearing fast is super important and you can just transfer that gear to another character that can basically waltz into Uber Aberroth with the corruption catchup. Extreme boss content with absurdly high health basically demands a build that can optimize around that.

To be clear, I don’t prefer this. I’d much rather my character be well rounded and get to do everything, but the game isn’t exactly set up for that to be the most practical way to play. But as always, fixing a design problem shouldn’t be done with inconveniencing the player and hoping that’s enough to discourage them.

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All QoL is the reduction of barriers.
Barriers are what causes investment.
Investment is what causes enjoyment of overcoming barriers.
Enjoyment is what a game is supposed to give us.

As examples of what I mean with that:

In Dark Souls you don’t have animation cancelling. Why? Because timing and commitment to the attack is what causes the stringend requirements of pattern recognition to allow us to overcome the challenge of a boss. You got close timeframes and you need to know how long your own attack will last and if it fits in the open timeframe.
Removing the ‘animation lock’ would utterly reduce difficulty and hence the barrier to overcome the challenge, thus reducing how ‘valuable’ the perceived reward is.

The same is happening in this case. It hasn’t ‘failed’, there’s a ton of builds which handle ‘all content’, but that’ll get ever harder to manage for EHG (and I agree, in my sight also a detriment to limit themselves on that aspect) but they exist.
And even if not, creating 2 characters for different content and hence enforcing the time investment for both rather then allowing us to switch is a sort of barrier to overcome.

This core concept goes both ways. Too much and it’s not worthwhile, the reward is not valuable enough and hence you don’t do it.
Too little and it looses all value, you’re left with a ‘that’s it?’ feeling afterwards.

Allowing skill-swapping is a pure detriment in my eyes, much like mastery respec is rather then proper positioning and a trial time before permanently locking in. It reduces the perceived content. It reduces difficulty and it causes choices to have less ‘weight’ and hence less meaning.
You only can have meaning when you can pick wrong.

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You mistake inconvenience for difficulty. There are plenty of barriers you can put up that just make your software worse, not “harder.” You could make an action take 3 clicks when it could take one click. You could make your date input a dropdown menu with every individual date for the last 100 years. You could require someone to mail a letter when an email would have sufficed. etc.

Absolutely none of that is some challenge that would be satisfying to overcome. That’s the mistake you and other stubborn ARPG players make.

If you can’t take away necessary aspects of the experience because you worry that there won’t be anything worthwhile left then… maybe focus on making the core experience better?

Able to do all content is a little fuzzy with how corruption works, but at least using Uber Aberroth as an upper limit, “a ton of builds” is a bit generous. That said, even talking about what builds can do Uber Aberroth is kind of fuzzy because technically you could just dodge everything forever even with no damage and no health. But clearly that’s not a reasonable way to look at it for this genre. Content design is going to impact other aspects of design and making super single target bosses in a game that’s mostly built around AoE clear is going to lead to this need for specialization.

But there’s the matter of how classes and skills are designed. You only get to spec into 5 abilities and put 5 on the bar. So you’re fairly limited in what you can make your character do. Plus some passive effects like minions, auras, etc need to be on the hotbar even if you never intend to click them, so that further limits what you can do even with unpsecced utility skills.

The skills are often very directly offering a tradeoff between single target power and AoE, requiring a level of specialization to be good at either.

Maybe that’d be fine if skills worked relatively independently and you could use one skill for single target and one for clear, but that’s not really how things work out most of the time. A lot of your slots are going to be dedicated to either utility or things that directly improve your main skill such as builders, auras, debuffs, and skills that get used by the main skill. Since finding ways to multiply damage is so important, focusing all of that effort into making one skill good is going to be a lot better than making 2 skills just ok.

A lot of the builds that can do everything effectively are the ones where the balance is completely out of whack in the first place. Where their clear skill does so much damage it makes bosses look like rare enemies.

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That is how the static orb/frost claw worked in 1.1. Static orb was for deleting bosses, frostclaw for deleting echoes.
But yes, most of the time this doesn’t happen. Mostly by player choice. You could still do it with 2 skills that synergize (and thus scale with the same things), by giving up one of the utility/buff skills.

The objective of this system, in how it is set up, is that you choose your DPS skill and then you make a choice about where in the ST<—>speed clear spectrum you want to have it. You can make that skill focused on killing bosses knowing your clear speed will be slower, or you can make it more focused on clear speed, knowing your boss kill times will be slower.

That is what provides build diversity. For any given skill you can spec it in several different places in that spectrum according to your objectives and preferences in gameplay.
Using a loadout will remove all those builds because you’ll only have 2: one that is pure ST focused and another that is pure speed clear focused.

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No its not a mistake.

The game is balanced around u making a build balancing out clear speed and single target. Load outs will remove this. And change how builds are done. We see this already happening with mastery respec. Many players have started one build to switch to another to kill uber within the same class

Game is also balanced around my first point. The challenge is making a balanced build around clear and single target dmg. So yes in fact not having what u want does in fact create difficulty

What ur asking for does in fact remove this difficulty. Theres no confusion here with inconvenience vs difficulty as u can see from what i explained.

U want D3 all over again go play it. I havent supported LE for 6 yrs to want d3 all over again. Iv supported it because i dont want D3 all over again. Load outs will push even further in that direction mastery respecing has already pushed it that way.

Thats called balancing. We only get 5 skills for that reason. The game is balanced around that. Same way making builds are as i said above.

Again balance as i was saying earlier.

U do see a pattern here with how builds are designed to be balanced around single tartget and clear speed? Hope u can cuz thats what im trying to point out

Load outs will destroy this. As well as sacrificing a skill to be more single target than an AoE.

There was a saying back in D3 days. U dont have a build u have everything. That came to be due to load outs and swapping skills and ruins on the fly… if load outs come same thing will happen here. U dont have a build u have everything. Which will also lead into players having the exact same gear. Destroying build identity even further than it has been due to mastery respecing.

Edit i see DJSAMHEIN pretty much said the same thing i did here. I just tried breaking it down based on what u wrote. DJ has a very good point load outs do in fact reduce build diversity. I kinda explained that with the whole u dont have a build u have everything.

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While being an “inconvenience”, the restriction of not being able to swap builds by the click of a buttom brings great joy to me personally, because when I did create a build that can do all content without the need to constantly jump back and forth between different variations I feel much much more statisfied and rewarded for it.

I could still “improve” my builds by changing a couple of thigns every now and then depending on the content that I am farming currently, but I don’t want to do tha anyway, even if it would be “objectively better”.

I find loot and build driven games that have this loadout system highly unstatisfying and there is not a single ARPG that I ever played that kept me playing very long if they had a feature like that or something similar. The only exception was Marvel Heroes which introduce some kind of loadouts later down the line but at that point I played that game already 5 digit hours and with that patch I started playing significantly less before (because of that reasons and other compounding issues) it was shutdown anyway.

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Inconvenience directly is linked to our perceived reward in psychology actually.

That’s why someone building a house in Minecraft and doing so in Survival mode feels more accomplished compared to someone doing the same in creative mode. Getting stone, crafting it into the fitting pieces, chopping wood and the likes are not difficult, they’re beyond easy. It just takes time and repetition, hence… tedium! Still, that tedium causes you to have invested effort, and that invested effort translates to our brain into rewards.

I’m not mistaking it, it’s just that so… soooo few people realize that yes… tedium has value actually… if done in the respective amount.

Oh, agreed! Tedium without function is just a negative.
But… making a second character is tedium with a function.
Having to dial into a specific choice is causing weight behind actions, hence it has a function.

If it would be functionless I would agree, if that amount of function warrants the amount of tedium though? That’s a difference for everybody, and in ARPGs there’s a reason why PoE 1 does so well, Torchlight does despite p2w elements and D3/D4 have always been a dumpsterfire when we take the price-tag of ‘AAA’ game development, content-pipeline and especially the focus on graphical aspects and modelling into consideration.
People always say ‘But D3 is such a massive success!’ and yes, after years it was, when the costs from development recuperated because it sucked up money into a massive negative early on.

What is a ‘satisfying challenge to overcome’ exactly then? Since you worry about the core experience… what exactly is that part which makes it worthwhile to repeat endlessly?

Look at which games are played ‘forever’, which is the mandatory aspect of a live-service game. Well… not entirely ‘forever’ but at least ‘regularly returning’ is. We got MMOs which do that, primarily FF14, then we got WoW, PoE 1 (2 is loosing slowly, but too for now), Lost Ark, Guild Wars 2, OSRS… everything else? Barely staying ‘ahead’. Everquest 2 struggles to stay online, Torchlight Infinite is close to the lower limit of a functional live-service, Last Epoch too. Even Black Desert Online lost a boatload of ‘lifeblood’ and is seriously struggling. The market is small for those types of games and you better guarantee that your game has staying power.

How to achieve that? By enforcing players to keep playing while you desperately hope that you can make provide enough variance to allow people to stay longer-term. Because if you look at the ones doing well they all have something in common: at least 200 hours of concurrent play-time with a single character as a mediocre player to get through all available content. Usually more.

Because:

The core experience doesn’t do much. Anything repetetive doesn’t, stuff gets boring. Unless there’s direct competition available (PvP) it becomes repetitive quickly, not many people stay with that. Hence why broadening the amount of content is mandatory actually. To date I don’t know any live-service game that actually has to sustain servers constantly + provide regular sizeable updates to stay even relevant to be successful without doing that. Many tried, all failed and are either gone or barely surviving nowadays.

Uberroth plainly spoken is a joke. Absolute nonsensical implementation in a game which lacks severe amounts of progression content overall to fill the time to reach him. Not to speak of balancing issues which are so severe that you can’t even kill him realistically with quite good skills on many builds.

I still count ‘Aberroth + unique content outside of Uberroth’ as ‘all content’ for now.

Yes, and that plays directly into what I said above. Variety, most games struggle with it since creating content is taking time. Warframe has circumvented it by forcing you to stay in a single map up to 1 hour for a single drop, those often being a 13,33% drop-rate only. Hence you need to re-do that 5+ times, + you got the 24 hour limit of FORMA which also is needed in dozens. All of that leading to long-term repeated logins and hence engagement.

I really prefer either a really drawn out core gameplay (FF 14, OSRS) or flooding players with different content (PoE 1) compared to that option. But… it’s an option.

Very few are actually. I don’t know all that many. If you lack AoE you gotta invest which comes at the cost of damage or defenses. Without AoE during Echos you’re rather screwed at times, so it’s mandatory. And solely a boss-build is non-feasable still… but getting closer gradually.

EHG will have to decide if they allow focusing builds into specific playstyles or keep up the ‘all or nothing’ builds they currently have.

Plainly spoken? I think with their current state and direction it’s kinda mandatory to allow specialized builds.

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