I can do that. 
I’d still like to hear a bit more about why people need the “choices matter” aspect or else they’d lose interest. That remains baffling to me. Why do those who want no respec at all or perhaps more expensive respec, want that? What if you make a terrible mistake in your build (which you absolutely will no matter how much you research). Do you bin the character?
I think maybe a middleground for all could be making respecs don’t lose exp, but cost gold instead(balanced appropriate for the level of course), since as far as we know EHG want to introduce an economy where gold is important.
Of course that system will need some balancing and tweaking to make everyone kinda happy but i could arrange with that.
But that’s the point. Nothing restricts you from respeccing. If you made a mistake, respec. It all possible. I’ve done this numerous times with several characters. Only mastery is fix. Nothing else.
I have to admit that I got stuck on 1-3characters because I respecced into absolutely different builds that left me with high level, but not the adequate gear.
So what do you do when you respec your shield throw Sentinel into melee? 60% of your gear is absolutely not fitting the new build and you have to farm items before you can perform at the same level as the previous build.
As I said before, it’s only a bit of time you have to invest. And it’s a game i play for fun in my free time. You could consider playing at all is a waste of time. I could learn Japanese or rescue animals. Instead i sit before my screen and click on pixels.
But this is fun for me. I would probably complain about releveling when I’d think that playing feels absolutely horrible and I don’t like it.
I’d run through monolith anyways. It doesn’t matter if I run through it with 5 lvl 20 skills or 4x 19 and 1x0.
What would you do with the time you saved if you could instantly respec? Is it really a loss of time if you run arena with fully leveled skills or with respecced skill?
I’d try out even more builds and tweak successful builds to a ridiculous degree. We have 15 to 20 skills per class, and most chose 5. Each skill has a tree that could accommodate almost 100 points, but we are limited to a mere 20. The possibilities are mind-boggling. I want to try them all !!!
I don’t know if this is even possible, when gold is created from thin air. You either need some super rare currency to maintain some sort of balance in economy (in most cases, currency are just unique items) or you need to have massive gold sink, which would increase power of your character. Some sort of crafting, enhancing of gear or something - however, massive gold sinks are just not possible to balance properly. Either you will force players to massive grind - because you tied playtime with power of your character, or you will just cut big group of people from this feature altogether.
I still believe time as main respec penalization is the best option here and I don’t buy “you need to have level 20 skill to know, how to build works” argument - unless anyone can provide me good example, how level 16-17 is not cutting it, it’s bollocks.
I don’t think you necessarily need a big gold sink, you would be constantly “nickle & diming” the player to reduce the amount of gold they have (I remember Sacred 1 had a rare affix that took part of the damage from a hit from your gold before hp). I also mentioned here that you could have the crafting of rarer affixes from more common affixes using gold (& possibly something else), which would also help to link the prices of the various affixes on the auction house so they don’t go totally nuts.
I would love to see game, where primary currency is actually useful even in the end game, but the closest thing tho this I saw in ARPG was torchlight 2, but only because all my characters play on the hardest difficulty and you lose 10% of your gold on each death. But I hope they will be able to do that.
But for your crafting idea, I think they have to be careful not make crafting too accessible and too flexible. If the best way, how to get strong items, will be crafting, LE will become gold farming game instead of loot hunting. But I am not against your idea.
Absolutely, crafting “up” the rarity of affix shards has the same potential downsides as trading, that you get most of your good gear by playing the “upgrade your affix shards” game than killing things.
I gave you what I thought was a great example. My Fireball was level 20. I had not taken the piercing FB skill nodes (4 points) and wanted to try them. I respecced 4 points. I then painfully re-levelled FB from 16 to 20 to take those nodes only to find I could not sustain the Mana cost of piercing Fireballs, so I had to remove those 4 points and re-level 16 to 20 again. As I am sure you know, levelling a skill from 16 → 20 takes absolutely ages, hours and hours, for what was a simple build tweak/experiment. Ridiculous.
In short, build tweaking and experimentation once your skill is level 20 is absolutely prohibitive. There’s 90 nodes in the Fireball tree and I’d like to experiment with many of them, but I can’t. Just tweaking a mere 4 nodes cost me about 6 hours running level 70 Arenas and Monoliths. 3 hours to try it, and 3 hours to put it back when the experiment failed.
I’ve levelled 4 chars to ~65 now and I am at the point I want to tweak their builds. This experience with my Mage and the Fireball however has put me right off that idea now I’ve seen how absolutely painful it is to adjust just 4 damn points. I have little desire to keep playing to be honest. Tweaking builds is what I do in ARPGs.
Which is kinda pointless for lower level characters, i don’t care how easy it is at end game i want to respec when i need to at early game to fix my build and continue on not at end game when i’m done playing…
I’ll never get used to this losing skills point on skills its bad.
Sadly its far from reasonable in my opinion its way to slow and tedious… its honestly not worth it at lvl 30s maybe at 67 its great but by then its far too late game.
Here is the thing, if leveling up skill to level 16 takes just several minutes in Arena (never tried it, but this is repeated several times in this thread alone), it would be much better for you to not respec just 4 points, but respec several points, just to have enough points for piercing FB while taking out some points from +damage nodes, relevel that skill in just minutes back to 16. At worst, you will have just few points less in less impactful nodes.
You are saying it’s very prohibitive, I say it’s still too easy for my liking.
The point of the argument with “respec is easier lategame” is only to calm beginners that are afraid that respec is always that tedious in LE.
That’s the reason why I also suggested to give some full refund a certain goals like every 10 character levels or everytime you unlock a skill specialisation slot.
When people give feedback about the respec system they are sometimes really fast in suggesting “make it easier” and see the actual system as a kind of punishment.
The point is that the current respec system is designed to fulfill different goals. The tedious respec earlygame is a negative side effect that could not have been solved, yet. Because most “solutions” that are suggested only act on that particular part but disregard other aspects that the current system would not be able to fulfill anymore.
These aspects are
-> This is why there are only 5 specialisation slots corresponding to the slots on the bar. Give builds identity and make decisions as what skill to choose and how to build it more meaningful. But also give players the opportunity to partially or fully respec if they made a mistake or wanna change and tweak their builds. This is a design decision made by the devs as a part of the core game design. As long as the devs don’t change their mind on this the respec system has to meet these requirements.
-> This is the point where it’s getting tricky. If the skill progression time to max level would be the same during your complete character progression it would make a bad experience. Say it’s 10 minutes to relevel a complete skill at level 90 and also level 20 that would lead to the point you have completed skill progression in 10 minutes when you get your skill.
For this reason EHG made skill progression slower the lower your level is. If you stick to your skill it will progress in a similar speed as your character level.
Your character progression gets slower the higher you get. It works the same way with your skills.
Now we have character level milestones that unlock additional skill specialisation slots. With the last patch EHG tweaked their formular for skill xp to get more of a rubber band effect. The goal is to make the lower level skills catch up with the ones you’ve chosen earlier. The new skills level way faster that the old ones and at some point they have the same level and same progression speed.
That’s the whole reason why skills level faster the higher your level / the content is you play through. It’s not to punish experimenting early game. It’s to reduce the leveling time if you have made a bad decision and you realise it at higher levels. If at level 30 you recognize that you rather want to go with warparh instead of vengeance you despecialise vengeance and start warpath from the scratch. But you’ll see that it is leveling way faster at the beginning because the respec system wants warpath to catch up your other skills.
The actual system is very smart. Instead of punishing the player for sticking with a bad decision for to long it compensate for this by granting you a faster skill progression the later you respec.
Theres a lot of intelligence behind this and this has probably taken a lot of effort to implement and tweak to work like it does right now.
It would have been a lot easier to just say “press button, get skillpoints refunded”. But because the “make decisions meaningful” design decisions is seen as a very important core design EHG went the way they did.
I agree that a drawback is that early game experimenting is not that easy. But I personally accept this drawback of the current system because of the goals it achieves on the other side. They do matter more for me and obviously also for EHG since they would not have chosen this way otherwise.
To solve the drawback and make experimenting early game viable we need suggestions that help in that regard but also respect the core design of meaningful decisions.
By this logic we either:
a) Never level a skill to 20
or
b) Never experiment or tweak our skill once it is level 20
Forgive me if I pour scorn on either choice.
I will level my last char to the end - I think; I am rapidly losing the will to play knowing what’s coming - and that’s me done with the game. And I probably won’t be back while the respec is this punishing for late game build tweaks and experimentation (i.e after I’ve got my skill to 20). If I did’t have a wife and family to worry about and had infinite time, maybe it would be different, but 6+ hours just to try varying 4 points in my completed Fireball tree (when I had another dozen experiments lined up in my head for Fireball)…just no.
This is very stretchyty stretch - none of these options are even remotely implied by my logic. My logic just say - experimentation is easy, at least in endgame, just because your skill is not min-maxed to the limits does not mean you can’t test it out.
But I understand you may not like it and I understand why you may not play in the future, I just think you are exaggerating your arguments quite a bit here. That’s all.
The only Acceptable cost for Changing your Masteries would be losing 99 levels and all skill levels essentially being the same as making a new character but without being required to run through the story again.
Due to the current Mastery system you have to make a new character per Mastery and that is exactly how it should be.
Currently at least for the Beta being able to change up Passives with just a bit of gold is excellent as passives should be experimented with as much as possible for testing purposes however something hilariously punishing like losing a level or having your left eye poked out with a sharp stick could be interesting for the final build.
Edit: I think Skill Specializations would be abused far too much if they didn’t require releveling upon despecialization or perk changes and for that reason alone should never be free in the open world but I wouldn’t be apposed to the idea of keeping your respec points by using the respec vendor, provided you weren’t able to portal back to the boss after changing to a boss killing setup.
That’s a failing grade either way.
From a development standpoint you’re 100% wrong.
I timed it because of this thread 
. Recap:
a) Fireball was level 20
b) Wanting to try piercing FB, I respecced 4 points and re-levelled to 20, spent 4 points in piercing FB
c) Decided it was too mana intensive, respecced out of those 4 points and put them back where they were before
6 hours grinding Monoliths and Arena it took to do this. A very simple build tweak at end game.
My point exactly just to try a build change took you 6 hours… An customers are ok with this, i think this game is far too grindy for me, i’ll look for another arpg i think.
That is way too time intensive, i’m a carer, i play games when i can not spend 6 hours leveling a skill i may or may not even like.
I don’t get the whole meaningful decisions thing… Why isn’t a respec just press a button and change it…
Are we suppose to be punished for playing games now? Is this how gamers enjoy things to be grinding away like crazy mice on tread wheels to get some sort of gameplay experience, if thats the case why not just have 6 skills per class and ignore the rest, there is no need for choice just the grind. or we can just watch youtube for builds and never try anything out ourselves because its a pointless waste of time too…