I’m enjoying the game a fair amount, having gotten to end game and grinding out the level 85-90 monoliths. The skill specialization system feels fun, I feel like I’m making meaningful choices between different good options, which is ideal. But I have one major issue with the system: having exactly 5 specialization choices for 5 skills puts significant disincentives for experimentation, purely through loss aversion. The early stage of learning a game and experimenting with the different skills your chosen class has to offer is one of the most enjoyable parts of playing a new game for me, and I have a suggestion on how this might be improved.
Here is my current situation for context. I’m on my first real end game character, it’s a level 77 Glacier Runemaster setup humming fairly nicely. I’m running level 85 monoliths without much issue, one to two shotting everything with Glacier/Runic Invocation, while getting very good utility out of my other 3 skills. I now want to experiment with some other skills the class has to offer to get a feel for them, but this runs into two issues that I don’t like:
I have to despecialize one of my five skills to slot in something new. This reduces my progress in that skill to level 10. I appreciate that leveling it back to 18 is pretty quick, but the last two levels do take quite a while. Even if this is not costing a ton of power since the last two points aren’t a huge deal, psychologically, it does feel pretty shitty to lose what feels like hard earned progress in these skills.
The new skill takes a while to catch up to a power level where it feels comparable to the existing skills in utility. This is not a huge deal really, the skill does catch up pretty quickly, but it still feels slightly unpleasant and can lead to a bad first impression of a skill after swapping.
I appreciate that adding in more specialization slots would incentivize swapping skills in and out constantly, and this both reduces the weight of skill choices and encourages unpleasant levels of optimization. I have a suggestion that would address my issue and discourage this level of skill swapping:
When you get your first skill specialization slot, unlock 1-2 reserve specialization slots.
Skills can be placed into the reserved slots and will level up in the same manner as your primary specializations. But the bonuses from skill specializations in the reserve slots do not apply.
Players can swap skills between a reserve slot and a primary slot without losing skill progress. This swap can have a gold cost that scales with player level. At end game, the gold cast can be fairly large, for example the average earnings of 2-3 full monolith runs (just spitballing numbers), to discourage constant skill swapping.
This would make the game a whole lot more enjoyable for me, and hopefully, for other players who wish to play their first runs through each character without looking up guides or videos to see how a skill feels.
Ah, loss aversion, actual business terms FTW. I know you mentioned weighting - or the feeling of meaningful choices w/ skill specs, but I have to push back and say your solution, IMO, does take away the choice-weight, or makes it too ‘lite’.
What would you think about a testing area, where you can swap a skill w/ all skill points retained, and ‘feel’ if it will be as powerful, or what you’re looking for?
My experience has been re-leveling a skill only to find its not as fun or as synergistic/powerful as I thought.
But, either way, totally appreciate that you’re coming up with well thought out and reasoned ideas - much respect!
A testing area is also a good idea, assuming you can scale it to the content level you are attempting to fight. That would also address the issue of feeling bad about experimenting, while avoiding any incentives to constantly switch. It’s a nice idea, I think I do prefer being able to swap while doing content that progresses my character, but there is a tradeoff win here where you retain the full weight of your actual choices, and LE is not as big a time sink as say PoE, so some amount of time spent away from actual progression seems ok.
I do agree that there is some loss in decision importance if you allow these reserve slots. Fundamentally, I think there is always going to be some tradeoff between decision weight and freedom to experiment, and currently I think Last Epoch is slightly too positioned towards decision weight, and not quite enough friendly towards blind experimentation. That’s the main point I wanted to bring up, I am by no means firm in thinking my solution is necessarily the best compromise between these factors.
To make an analogy with Path of Exile, which is where I’m coming from, the current system basically offers no equivalent to off-hand gem leveling, which is something I often do, if I plan to try swapping my build out, and it also reduces your gem level to 10 (with a speedup to 18) if you ever unsocket it. This analogy isn’t perfect, skill specializations in LE are actually significantly more build impacting than single skill gems in PoE, so you do need to be more careful about impacting decision weight here, but I think the analogy does point out that the current system may not be perfect.
With your implemented system the player would not have to fight any monsters to swap skills. The primary reason for having re-leveling in place is to prevent players from having to feel like they need to switch their skills around for a boss and then switch back.
The only reason no one does that all the time is because of the requirement to level the skill back up. I have build that will replace specialized skills with non specialized ones for bosses. If I had a reserve slot I would portal to the end of time and swap those skills before a boss.
Your way to combat that is an expensive gold cost, but I think that subverts the intended goal. When you swap skills, you should be unable to do a boss for a time. In your solution you can just prefarm gold and accept the penalty of a bit less gold to switch between a bossing and echo setup.
There would be no real disincentive to swapping skills, just a cost of doing business.
I see your point, but I think making the cost be time efficiency can be a pretty strong disincentivization tool. Playing efficiently is a pretty big reward in itself, and putting a hefty cost in terms of gold will make this swap pretty uncomfortable if you’re planning to do it often.
Also, if the concern is swapping repeatedly, putting a scaling gold cost like for stash tabs would also work. It would make it extremely punitive to swap skills eventually, but would be relatively cheap to do so in the early stages of the game where you’re using it to experiment.
I was a bit concerned this would happen but I would prefer the focus of the post be more on whether people consider the disincentives towards experimentation a big deal. The actual suggestion I made is not that important. I think it is an approach you could use, but I only spent half an hour thinking it over and it could definitely both be improved or a better suggestion could replace it entirely. I just didn’t want to make a critical post without attempting to provide a solution.
I don’t think so.
And you will just give more advantage to those whose life is just play games. Gold is no problem to them. They will take any possibility to optimize boss fights.
I agree with this:
I think it’s fine as it is.
As much as you said it’s annoying to relevel skills to test other skill in your setup, and I felt this way sometimes, I have accepted it, it’s necessary and in fact it wasnt a big deal as I used to think.
As you said 10 to 18 is very fast. And 18 to 20 is 2 echoes. Come on, echoes is the main activity you will be doing, why can’t the player afford 2 runs to test a new setup?
At the stage of the game you are, it’s pretty easy to swap skills. The game also is hinting you the best way. While releveling the skill you will have to fight monsters and see the new setup in action, instead of just swap skills and do a dummy test.
Levelling up a skill back to 20 is a matter of minutes. It’s faster if you run experience reward echoes.
Farming the proposed resources will take as long or longer, and people will absolutely strategise/exploit around the option. Prepare 10 timelines to fight the bosses - switch - kill all bosses - switch - prepare all timelines and farm more than enough resources in the process.
Yeah, while the OP might use it to lvl spare skills, everyone else will just use it for a sinlge target skill to swap to before starting the mono boss echo.
If yhe devs wanted 6 specialisable skills, they’d have given us 6 slots, or just allow lossless skill respecs.
Once you are level 90+ you can respec EVERY skill and it literally takes like 5-10minutes to get back to 20 full skill points… You are not losing anything by respec.
I love how the goalposts on needing to test/experiment with skills have gone from 5-7 skill points to test with new chars, to needing a full 20 to test end-game setups. Almost as if all the threads FOR, have just proven all the arguments AGAINST.
I vote that OP gets access to reserve slots since he’ll do no wrong with them, everyone else gets to cry in agony(for 2 echoes) while releveling everything they swap out.
I see this isn’t a particularly popular opinion here, and there isn’t much demand for this change, so I won’t belabor this argument much more, I also agree that it isn’t a huge deal, this issue is more of a psychological barrier to experimentation than an actual one. But I don’t really agree with some of the points mentioned here.
I don’t think this is particularly important. People who play more efficiently will always have an advantage,. You can also escalate the costs sufficiently to make this much less of an issue.
Is there actually a testing area that lets me respecialize skills and test out new builds without having to despecialize my current loadout? That would solve most of the concerns I had but I don’t know where that is in game.
This, I think is a feature, not a bug. You can do this in most arpgs, and it feels rewarding to have planned out your content in a smart way. When I play Path of Exile SSF, I will often have a clear loadout for my build and a single target one. I will farm out a bunch of boss invitations and then will repsec to my single target setup to farm them. This feels rewarding to do, you’re getting paid off for having invested more time into figuring out your build and how you can eke out an advantage here. I see no issue with this, especially if there actually is a significant cost.
I do think there will be a good amount of new players who will play the game and will be turned off of respecing because it feels like they lose progress. The game does a decent job of signaling that you recover progress faster after respecing, but not really before doing so. Also, new skills that are underlevelled will feel crappy to play till they catch up, and that can be a turn off from trying something new, especially if you don’t know exactly how long it will take to catch up.
