One of the most frequently discussed topics is changes to how you can respec both skill trees and class passives. Today we’d like to talk about the changes we plan on making in the near future. We are not yet ready to commit to these being in a specific patch.
Skills
In addition to despecializing skills, it will be possible to respecialize individual points.
As per the current functionality, you will still need to earn XP to re-gain a point to be spent elsewhere on the tree. (This can be done even at the level cap of 100.)
Additionally, it will only be possible to perform respecialization if it would not cause the tree to enter an invalid state. For example, you cannot use respecialization to remove your investment from a node that is a prerequisite for another node which you have also taken on your tree. In other words, you can only use respecialization to achieve a result which would be possible without respecializing.
Passives
The amount of gold required to refund passives will no longer incrementally increase as you continue to refund passives.
The gold cost to refund a passive point will now depend on the following;
The number of points invested in that passive.
The level requirement of the passive.
Base class passives will be less costly to refund than mastery class passives.
The goal of our changes is to facilitate making minor adjustments and reducing the cost of low level experimentation. Passives in which you have repeatedly invested are likely to have been more integral to your build, and will thus be more costly to refund.
Love this ideas, also will it be possible to respecialize individual passive points? Not with npc menu when you should click on “1” every time, but smth like right-click on passive to respec it.
Really like the change to the passive respecs. Allows more experimenting on lower levels when you can’t have accumulated much gold yet.
Botched a character recently due to this exact thing.
I feel like it would be more conducive to experimentation if you kept the levels that you’ve earned into a skill, even if you de specialize it.
If I try one skill in my build. Then level it up, then switch to another skill to try it out, then level it up, then if I realize the first skill is better and switch back to it, I have to level it all back up again.
Also idk how much I love straight up having to regain the levels back that you un spec in the tree. Sure it helps low level experimentation with a tree but for big varying things. Say I want to try two completely different directions in a tree. I still have to basically completely level it up twice. Which isnt suuuuper fun to me as someone that likes to experiment a lot.
As of now theres not a great way to experiment other than extreme time input, these changes reduce it some, but I feel like theres still a large chunk of grind just to see how a specialization feels one way or another way. I feel like once I grind deep into it once it shouldn’t take as long to continue to experiment.
quote from someone in the discord presenting their thoughts too:
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I agree with Anaheim that the respecialization system is currently way too punitive and doesn’t allow for meaningful experimentation, especially during a testing period. After a certain threshold (in the beta) there should just be a “Reset yourself to a blank slate of Passives and all selected skills pre-levelled to 20” button so people can really do some buildcraft.
It’s especially a problem because gear affixes for a lot of archetypes are weird and way behind, and the massively sequestered affixes don’t help: Everything being super-local, additive, non-multiplying… It keeps the numbers tidy but makes building intersting hybrid characters enormously painful.
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There should be much MORE active skills that you can specialise than you can put on your skill bar.
The idea is simple. Allow flexibility of your charcter to have few viable builds for different situation/game mode, by allow a limited (say 15) pool of active skills.
Say one for solo, one for speed farming, & another for group play while your character still maintain uniqueness.
One trick pony get bored quick. I know the counter argment is, “make a new character then”.
Sure, making a new character make sense for a unique, different playstyle/class etc, but seem excessive if you just want to swap a few skills to play better in groups for instance.
Great change. Especially given that gold is essentially infinite once you’ve made multiple characters at high levels. The old system was essentially just punishing beginners and it should be the exact opposite.
While this is likely to remain true to a broad extent, we’ll be making some changes to both the rate of gold income the cost of buying items from a vendor in Patch 0.7.3.
