test stuff out and make builds arround your findings
1.1. Minmax the living hell out things when you understood them
1.2. Establish a meta
Look for guides and news to always know what meta is
2.1. don’t use other skills outside of the meta skills because it’s not as fun and rarely something new is found if ever.
Do what you think is the best even if it’s not and perish because you didn’t knew it better.
There is some space inbetween these points but do I ever respecc? Hell no why should I? The only mastery I respecc is spellblade and that’s it. Everything else can be built the way I want it to. Just prepare, resarch and play the game and in no time you don’t have to especc anymore outside of testing changes.
I think the current system strikes a fair balance between establishing that choices matter, while still allowing for some freedom to alter your build without a full re-roll.
That being said, I think having points in a particular skill remain permanent (even when despecialized) would be a positive change to the system. You would still be penalized for wanting to change out your load out for a new skill you never leveled, but could revert that change without the unnecessary hassle of re-leveling a skill you already invested in. Of course, if you choose to change how that particular skill is built, the same de-leveling rules would apply.
I think PoE’s system is actually far more forgiving.
By the time you’re at endgame, you’ll have close to a hundred orbs of regret, or at least be able to afford them.
I think it’s currently too punishing to explore endgame build optimizations with Last Epoch’a current system relative to PoE.
I got tons of replay-ability in various leagues where I was seeking to eek out the last few % points of damage in Path of Building and needed to test the feel in game. I don’t personally buy the argument that making it too easy hurts replayability. Mastery locking already protects that to a fair extent, which feels fine to me.
In my opinion, the system to respec active skills as it is right now is kinda ok, but maybe they could make the new chosen skill to level a bit faster until reaching the level that the old one was. If not, the problem is that if u change a major damaging skill, it can be a problem or rather difficult to continue the game without struggling too much. And it’s even more true in beta stage i think. Some skills dont scale well with leveling while other are better. For exemple, I was struggling like crazy with fireball with my sorcerer at the beginning of act 2, then realized that with fire orb, it was way better. Punishing too much for a change of skill is not good in my opinon. The work of leveling a skill that you wanna change has been done already. The level of “punishment” should be at a good “dosage”: not too easy to make you select a skill too fast and without thinking, but also not frustating so much that it makes you want to quit.
Now that I am in end game, I think I like the way it works.
But early game could use an improvement.
I remember as a new player that I was too scared to choose a skill specialization for a while. I wanted to wait until I unlocked more skills before I choose. I didnt know it was easy enough to respec and that I should have just started trying stuff.
Damage in tooltips may help new players decide which skill they want to try first.
Also, I see some players that are very frustrated. If 80% of players gain a mild happiness from the current system but 20% get a big frustration. Perhaps it would be better to make some adjustments.
Maybe you could respec to a different skill up to your current level but that luxury maxes out at 5 levels. So you could respec a level 6 lightning blast to a level 5 fireball in your first specialization slot. And you could also respec your level 4 teleport to a level 4 flame ward in your second specialization slot. And there should be a short message explaining that, so new players feel like its okay to try out different things.
I prefer skill respecs be free and unconditional. I like to experiment. It’s that simple. Having to re-level de-specced skills is anti-creativity and stupid in my eyes.
PoE has it right. In PoE you only pay to respec your passives. Respeccing your actual playstyle in PoE is 100% free and involves simply changing gems and gems do not lose levels when removed. This allows plenty of build experimentation which is healthy for the genre and encourages player creativity. It is the reason PoE sees so many successful builds come and go.
This game has it backwards. Respeccing skills should be free and easy like PoE gem shuffling, thus allowing player experimentation, and respeccing the passive tree should cost or be difficult so that “choices matter”. The fact it is backwards to the PoE approach is the reason why so few builds are being used in this game and why everyone is a Death Seal Reaper Lich. Very sad.
Making respeccing expensive does not give your build an “identity”, it just means you goggle a build so you get the optimum without making a mistake that is difficult to change later. If anything, this is the opposite of giving your build an identity.
Ironically, if respeccing were completely free players would experiment all day long and likely end up with very personal builds that absolutely had identities.
Except in PoE there’s only a few (IE: 1 or 2 builds) each season that are actually playable. PoE gives the illusion of choice but in reality it has very little choices to give. Especially that absurdly large tree of skills to pick from that are 90% worthless.
Nice hyperbole you’ve got there, I would politely suggest that that kind of attitude is part of PoE’s problem (not all of it, obviously, “balance” is part of it as well). The attitude that a game should be approached as work, and that if you’re not taking the most optimal/optimised path (or Mathil’s builds) then you’re somehow wasting time, or a noob for not knowing, or for not having the best gear, or for wanting to play a different build/way/etc. And there’s the (IMO) toxic (for the community) viewpoint that focuses in so hard on differences of a fraction of a percent & declares the skill with the smaller figure garbage. It reminds me of when I raided in SWTOR & some groups wanted to only take people through a story mode raid if they had gear that dropped in the hard mode or nightmare mode…
Edit: That said, there is room for more than one way to play a game & “my” way is just as valid as the one I’m decrying…
First we are not talking about expensive or free respec on that special thread. We are talking about instantly swapping premade loadouts depending on content or group constellation in mp games.
This possibility kills build identity. Bause you dont play a certain build anymore. You hotswap to what is needed.
Second, the respec of skills actually is completely free. You can respec and despecialise as often as you like without any costs. The only thing is a bit of time investment for releveling the skill. But is it really that huge?
If you respec a skill completely at lvl 65, you go into monolith and do a run to relevel the skill. After the run your skill is around lvl 15 maybe higher. All buildchanging nodes are accessible at that skill level. The last few skills add only stat improvement in most cases. During the run, if you invest your skillpoints as you relevel you also get a feeling about how/if the new spec works.
If you get all skillpoints refunded you put them into the new spec and do what? - A monolith run to test it. Maybe you also save some points to test first if a certain route feels viable.
So the time spent to experiment with a new skill is roughly the same.
All the complaints that respec is to hard come from early to midgame. And in this case they are absolutely correct.
But the general complaint that you can’t experiment in LE is not true. Because it gets more and more easy the further you progress.
And it also pushes people to play the game. If you can’t test all the possible builds of a sub class on day one, you need to come back on day two.
You can’t say generally that people would only use guides (is using a guide a bad thing, btw?) when respec is harder. People that dont have much time to play may be less motivated to experiment with new builds anyways, no matter how easy it is to respec.
There are so many different mindsets that it is not possible for me to say what will happen.
Some people appreciate it more when they have to earn their loot. Others are happy when its gifted to them.
There’s no right or wrong. Just different opinions and a developer inbetween that has to find a balance or good compromise.
To get back to the hotswap topic:
I am open for any good suggestions to encourage experimenting. But being able to instantly swap between loadouts or builds without any drawback is a different pair of shoes. This should not be possible. Because this has a really huge impact in making your build decisions (after experimenting) absolutely meaningless.
Now that I’m going to have to pedantically disagree with you quite strenuously, time can be quite a significant cost. If it weren’t “free to play” games wouldn’t rake in so much cash selling ways around the time sinks they deliberately put in!
I can imagine that exact sentence said by the devs/publishers of said “free to play” games…
I am not a seasonal/league player in PoE. I have 20+ characters all of which I consider on-going and have been working on for years. All of which get tweaked when new abilities and ideas leak into the main game from leagues. All of which are experimental and fun. And very few of which are “established builds”.
Yes it is. Time is the most precious commodity of all. Any other currency for a respec would be preferable.
It is during levelling when I most want to experiment, which is when the time cost is so very high. It makes a respec during levelling prohibitive.
I have done several Monolith runs now and also some Arenas and my first ever specialised skills are still not even level 20!!! The belief you can quickly level a skill at end game is a nonsense.
I want level 20 not 15.
Given how long I am seeing it has taken my first ever speclised skills to hit 20, I will never, ever respec out of them. I’m trapped.
Disagree. If you have gone more than one general direction in a tree it can very often be the case that the last few nodes or even just the last node, completes the build. Level 15 doesn’t cut it, please stop throwing it up as “everything is fine because” candidate. It takes ages to get to 20, end of story.
Can you provide some example here? From my own experience, if you just put minimum required points into nodes to progress further, by level 15 your skill build should be completed, after this point it’s just increasing power of some other nodes. But again, if you have example, where you actually needs like 18-20 points to complete your skill build, that would be great.
Yes, but if respecing cost some currency that took you an hour to get, as compared to re-levelling that skill for an hour, what’s the difference. You’re right, time is a precious commodity & F2P developers/publishers agree with you.
It’s not nonsense, it depends what level (rank? timeline?) the monoliths are. You’ll get more xp from a 30 timeline monolith than a 1 timeline monolith, or wave 200 in the arena as compared to wave 10.
I mean the main difference is that you can farm respec resources along side of leveling, so when time comes and you want respec, you should have some respec resources in “bank” already. (like in PoE). In LE case, you really can’t bank respec points as you play, thus, it feels much more punishing.
Obvious answer would be some sort of currency, which will either allow you respec without losing levels or maybe some "XP orb, which will instantly gain some amount of XP to your skill. Just some examples.
It’s not a belief, it’s a fact. But as said before it depends on your character level. What level is the char you make your runs? I said lvl 65. It was an estimated value. But I have some characters around that level. I’ll note the time I need to relevel completely from 0-20.
I will tell my “everything is fine” opinion as long as there are people that make a game breaking issue out of the respec system.
Not even close. After about level 60 (even 50 it isn’t that bad) which most characters should be by the time they end campaign (low 50s now, high 50s low 60s once the entire game and all acts are done is my estimate) getting back to level 20 in a skill is maybe 4 or 5 more levels of your character. Heck in one Arena wave up to level 50 you can be at like 15 or 16 from a straight full out respect.) I’m not even remotely a big time player. I am at endgame. I have a character of every current class between levels 65-80. Several of them I have respeced skills on multiple times. It doesn’t take that long at all.
Now at the beginning of your characters life? Sure it does take longer and probably needs a bit of a tweak but the problem here is someone might take 4 points in a skill, decide they don’t like it because it doesn’t ‘work’ and respec it. Never fully testing out the skill. Fully testing doesn’t mean all the way to 20 per se, but it does mean giving it some shots. I respected my warpath paladin (just the warpath skill alone) three different times trying to figure out how to make it work. didn’t take forever and by the third time I was mid level 70s and I think it took me two arena runs and I was at 18.
I definitely think the skills system ‘works’ as it is now mid-late game. I also definitely think that early game needs some sort of tweak but I’m not even remotely an expert on this.
And can we please tone down hyperbolic comments like this? It’s not constructive, it’s not helpful and it certainly doesn’t convey or earn respect.
My highest level char is my BM. He is level 63. He has run Monlotihs up to about level 20, and Arena up to 50. His Wolf skill, first skill I ever specced into, and have never specced out of, is still level 19. I have yet to see a level 20 skill. See my worry?
