ManiaCCC talks about opportunity costs - if I swap out my Fireball for a Pulse, and play for a bit then I am not levelling that FB, and that is a “cost”. Fair enough. Most people would discount those type of costs and focus on the fact that the FB’s level when I removed it is still intact, earned and mine forever. Plus often in PoE my build experiments would only need a few minutes to realise a gem was not for me. It cost me very little to discover that.
I think most people would lump PoE into the “free skill respec” category. You can even level 6 other gems that you are not using, which is the cherry on the cake.
In comparison to LE, skill respec in PoE feels like a bargain.
In fact this discussion has made me see the light. Not only am I going to campaign for free skill respecs in LE, I also want to be able to level 5 other skills that I am not currently using as well!!
Free respecs for lvl 100s on a character by character basis. Free respecs for single player. Put respecs on the in-game market bought with gold (not for lvl 100s). Allow free respecs for everyone up to lvl 5. Build planners will help a bit but skills play a certain way and no build planner will show that.
Perhaps a single player offline focused arena with all characters and skills available with lvl 1 basic items only to test to see how trees feel?
So I am not an insane masochist that needs pain to feel joy. So i think a lot of solutions to make respec early game more viable. Here are some ideas that could be added to the current system.
What about gifting a free refund for every specialisation slot every 10 (or whatever) character levels.
Or everytime you unlock a new specialisation slot. This would allow us to respec more often during the story playthrough when despecialising hurts the most.
Make skillpoints refundable for the first 10 minutes after you spent them. But only onetime so that duration cannot be refreshed.
Give a full refund for 1 skill when you choose the mastery
I think gating respec behind some kind of currency does not solve the problem some people have. Early game people wont have a lot of that currency and lategame it makes no sense.
If I have to farm 10 Minutes to find an “orb of respec” I could also relevel that skill.
I despecialised 2 skills today on my lvl 91 FG. I went into a monolith lvl 4 and had both skills on lvl 17 at the end of a 8 minute run. If it had not been the main damage skills I would have completed it faster.
On another toon I despecialised warpath at lvl 39 and replace it with erasing strike. Now at lvl 43 the skill is only 2 levels behind my other skills. It’s not that bad as people think.
I think many people are afraid to respec because they think that it will take as long as it had taken before to get that new skill to the same level as the old one. They don’t know about that rubber band mechanic in this game.
I encourage people to try it and respec early game. If someone then says “That feels awful” I can take them serious because they tried.
Yeah, i also think people don’t know that the exp required for each level is not linear, but gets exponentially more, but the exp gain also gets exponentially higher.
In all stages of the game, even the first few minutes, if you respec you will get the respecced skill to be 1-2 levels lower than compared to your other abilities. And those few catch up level go VERY fast in all stages of the game.
And if people still complain that they don’t get their respecced skill on par with the rest of the build because they are missing like 1 or 2 skills points i really don’t understand, that is by no stretch game breaking or makes you build “unplayable”
Some of these aren’t bad. I’m not crazy about the every 10 levels idea or the ‘first ten minutes’ one but I really like is the unlock specialization idea. I think giving a free respec every time you reach a new specialization is pretty good, it reaches milestones. So at 9th level you can respec your 4th level skill for free. At 19(ack can’t remember the actual number!!!) you can respec either your 4th or your 9th level skill free. And so on up the ladder. I think this actually has potential.
The current system is far too limiting. Especially in the absence of any kind of character planner. I want to be able to check out other skills and try combinations to find a playstyle that suits me. Games are supposed to be fun. This system is tedious.
Why do alot of people sound/articulate like they pointing out “issues” about certain systems, while it’s just them disliking certain things about certain mechanics?
Did you even read the posts in this thread?
Current system is most definitely fun for me and as far as i can tell, also fun for alot of other people already stated their opinion here and in various other threads.
Don’t get me wrong, i do advocate discussion and talking about things but i am getting tired of people stating stuff like it’s fact.
Just please put a little bit of effort in the way you give feedback.
This is not just directed to you, but to alot of people in this and various other threads.
Every kind of feedback is valuable. Constructive feedback is of course the most appreciated. But also just a number of people making the statement that something is “good” or “bad” are making it into a statistic.
I’m sure that Mike has a whiteboard in his office drawing strokes everytime pro and con feedback is given by different persons
It helps to identify the topics that are received the worst by the customers. Saying this finding the root cause of the issue is harder without constructive feedback.
Edit:
To mention the rules of feedback.
The person who gives feedback should do this in a polite way pointing out his/her own impression and give reasons why he/she thinks so.
The person that receives feedback should not defend anything and not respond to the feedback. He/she takes it as it is - an impression of another person that is very subjective. The receiver has to figure out and judge for himself if the feedback is valuable or not. But even if he thinks it is not viable there is a reason for why the impression was created in the first place.
For example if people say respeccing is bad and EHG is if the opinion that this isn’t the fact, there is a reason why people get that impression.
I’m a new player who just reached the end of time on a mage. I respecced mana strike at level 10 or so from damage boosts while high on mana to damage boosts while below zero mana once I realized you can actually go below zero MP. Overall, the respect was not too painful, though it felt slower than I would have liked.
I am strongly opposed to completely free respec. At the same time, I think the current system is too limiting, and feels punishing from the perspective of a new player, even if the actual impact of a respec is pretty low. Under the current system, there is a psychological cost associated with respeccing that will be hard for a lot of players to overcome. Respeccing represents a permanent loss of experience, even if the long term “damage” is minimal that’s going to be a bitter pill for many people to swallow. I’d loosely compare it to soul memory in Dark Souls 2, which was very unlikely to effect 99% of players, but was in fact a terrible idea and widely despised because of its psychological impact.
I’d propose awarding a fairly generous number of free respecs to either one or all skills over the course of the campaign as quest rewards. That keeps skill choices meaningful, but offers a way for players to experiment without feeling punished.
Just to debunk the myth that being able to re-level a skill to level 16 or level 17 very quickly @ high levels is acceptable . It isn’t. You need level 20. Here is my (real world) example:
My Fire Mage is level almost 70 and my main nuke is Fireball, which is level 20. To fine-tune my build, I want to experiment with piercing Fireballs, a skill node I didn’t take. Piercing FB needs 4 points to get 100% pierce chance. I therefore need to respec down to level 16 and wait HOW LONG to get FB back to 20 again just to experiment with piercing FB…
Now imagine I find I can’t sustain the extra mana cost that piercing FB brings, then want to go back to where I was or fine-tune in some other way.
You need to re-level to 20 in many cases to do the type of build experiment that players like me (min-maxers) enjoy doing. Level 16 doesn’t give enough information. So telling me it’s only 5 minutes to get a spell to from level 1 to 17 so I am exaggerating the issue is not always relevant. Very often it is level 16 to 20 that matters, especially when fine-tuning a build. And that takes considerably more than 5 minutes. As we all know, the last few points in a skill 17 → 20 take agonisingly long at any level.
So when I want to change a build and I figure out that the nodes i am aiming for are only accessible in levels 17+ I respec other not that important nodes to get the skill level to a point where leveling works fast.
I pick the cool new nodes and level the not so important nodes last.
But you are absolutely right. You can’t hotswap anything. No matter what you do, you always need time investment.
I am ok with that and for me it’s not that unforgiving like it feels to you.
With that said, I want to end the argument. I got your point and understand it, although I don’t agree that it’s is that of an issue.
Let’s agree on the point that the skilltrees are very interesting mostly and encourage experimenting
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.
