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
- no instant swapping of fully specced skills depending on content
- no instant swapping of skill builds depending on content
-> 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.
- skills level independent from character level
- skill progression has to somehow match the character progression but also should not restrict the player from respeccing or experimenting while maintaining the “decisions matter” aspect
-> 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.
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