That Planning and Confirmation is indeed missing.
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I do. I don’t start tweaking until well after the campaign. Then I’ll fiddle with a few things here and there. Once I’m lvl 90 or so I really start mixing things up, literally trying every single build I can find and adjusting to my liking. That’s the fun part!
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I was a big complainer of the “mastery locked” system here. But after realizing how quickly I can get a character to the End of time, that basically means I can roll a character for every mastery in pretty short order.
Additionally I was a big complainer about the lost points in the skill respects (and subsequently having to re-learn them).
I’m on the fence on this one. Having gotten high lvl characters, I now see how quickly you can earn points back, especially in full resets.
HOWEVER! Due the the complexity of these types of games, I simply would not play if I could not respec my passives and skill points in some way, and I am very grateful for the ability to do so.
I think this game has struck a fine balance between effort and reward in regards to skill/passive point placements.
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I do too, but for me thats when a game has failed mechanically its literally copying someone elses time, we aren’t really playing a game then we are literally just following everyone else who has… To me thats a bit of a waste.
One i hate arenas personally, rinse repeat gameplay makes me uninstall. i do it through the story… And two at what level did you level the skill up? was it under level 30?
I tweak and change all the way through, if i’m building a character i need good ground work… level 90 is far far too late imo… hell lv 40 is far to late to me.
That’s aRPGs for you though, all you’re doing is going into a new area & killing the (usually low-ish density, until you do arenas, then the density is much higher) mobs that you come across for a chance at some loot.
I was approx level 63-ish when I wanted to experiment with shifting 4 points from my level 20 Fireball to make it piercing. I removed 4 points from the build. It took me 3 hours grind to level back from 16 → 20. I then decided I didn’t like the piercing because it cost too much mana and had to take the 4 points out again and level from 16 → 20 again - 3 more hours.
Mike, the dev above, has done a similar respec at level 86, and found it took 36 minutes to do the same grind. Obviously his skills are earning a lot more XP @ level 86 than mine were because Monolith scales to your level.
For the record, I do not find 36 minutes to respec a meagre 4 points in a skill any more acceptable than 6 hours.
So what would you find acceptable?
I’m curious to know how much more xp you get per kill at lvl 86 compared to 63.
Zero time.
Basically respec either has to be free or cost some other commodity that I’ve either been gathering anyway (gold) and/or can go an buy or trade for (when we have multiplayer), e.g. Orbs of Regret. I don’t care. But ZERO TIME. That’s the key issue. And yes I am aware gold and orbs costs time to acquire but that’s time I was spending anyway / have already spent prior to wanting to respec.
So you effectively want to front-load the time spent by being able to gather the currency before respecing so you then don’t have to feel like you’re spending time respecing (despite the opportunity cost of not being able to spend that currency on gear, be it gambling for bases to craft or buying stuff on the AH when that’s implemented/etc).
I think it has to be unique currency for this sole reason of respecing. I can see two types of currencies.
Single node respec orb - it will allow you to remove point from node without lowering level of skill itself.
Respeciallize orb - which will allow you change skill in slot without losing levels in that slot.
This is sort of solving issue I have with respecialization and hopefully what Ghostlight has. You can’t be just switching from one build to another in matter of seconds - at least not many times, you need to spend “time” and resources and if you are respecing a lot, you will run out of these and you still need to use old fashioned respec or just grind for hours to get more these orbs, but if you are playing let say for like 70-80 levels, you should have enough these orbs to completely respec your character at least once - or respec few skills several times.
I can get behind this, but these orbs have to have some rarity and not be dropping like crazy.
I think I agree, but would you want the xp to be bound to the slot or the skill? I’d probably want it to be bound to the skill, but that would allow the player to level a skill up to 20, respeciallise (freeing up that slot but keeping the skill at lvl 20) to allow them to level up a different skill up to 20 thereby having more than 5 skills specialised. Which would be “bad” (given the devs view on how many specialised skills they want us to have) so the xp/levels would have to be bound to the slot as un-intuitive as that feels to me.
Also, would they be tradeable or not?
If you bound XP to skill, you will get to the point, where you leveled up all your skills and you are in fact in same position, what is currently proposed in Diablo 4 and I don’t like it.
I would say bound XP to slot and if you want keep xp on that slot, you have to use currency to respec the skill.
And I think these should be tradeable. If someone want spend other currencies or items to respec more often, I am fine with that.
Not sure why you doubled his time, but he actually said;
I think that was the experiment time and then reverting back to the way it was which doubled the time. I also died and I didn’t mention that I crashed because I was trying to work at the same time. I probably could have done it sub 10 mins pretty easily.
I think that one of the main problems is the disconnect in our vision for when level 20 skills are supposed to be easily accessible. Level 63 is early to be regularly playing with fully leveled skills. We considered locking the max level of skills behind character levels. Have a sliding scale of max skill levels. So at say level 63 max skill level would be say 15 so the respec time for a “max’d out skill” would be much faster just because you can’t get it up to 20. We figured that it would be better to let people get up to 20 earlier if they really pushed for it though.
I know people aren’t really calling for this but I just want to be clear that we have no intention of making skill respecs completely free. It will probably always hold some sort of gold/item and/or time cost. We are still experimenting with the system as a whole.
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After a discussion already this long + various other similar threads it’s nice to hear some devs thoughts.
And i really like that you don’t intend to make it completely free.
But from what i gathered you are very much open to different solutions and that might be still worth discussing here or in another thread.
Thanks for the insight.
So after creating a new topic and not commenting here i will do it properly.
I think respeccing a char for a new build is ok but maybe even a bit too easy currently. The issue i raised was implementing a “D3 armory” type system not implementing a D3 respeccing system.
The reason i say this is that it should take time to get a build together but once i have gone through the grind it should be “saved” for to come back to at a later stage.
Once you have ground out a particular build, then move on to grind out a new build, it should be very simple and easy to go back to the build you first ground out.
I dont want creating a new build to be easy but i want going back to a build i have previously ground out to be easy. Hope that is clear as mud 
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Like this one?
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I hope it will steer towards gold/item cost. It feels to me that the inconvenience of time cost had made you folks experimenting with making skills easier (or faster) to respec at higher character level and I’m not sure if I think that’s just a very awkward way of taking away the cost but also trying to stick to the original philosophy.
I would like build identity to be strong and for respec to always have cost. But I do agree with many that releveling the skill is clunky as a cost and would be better priced with material resources.
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