When I read through my earlier posts on some similar topics I have to admit that I had a similar opinion on respecs at early levels being to punishing. Seems that my opinion had changed with time playing.
That’s propably because of the more higher level characters I have now where respec isn’t that hard and when I level something new I have a rough plan and already know the different skills and nodes so “real” experimenting isn’t a thing.
From a perspective of a new player I can understand that the time investment early levels is really punishing, when you have no clue about the skills and synergies.
My opinion i feel skills should save the points you’ve earned in case you want to level said skill again, starting a new skill is fine as long as the journey there isn’t wasted like it is now.
Absolutely. When I am tweaking builds it is a process of experimentation. An idea comes to me and I want to try it NOW to see if it works, not in 3 hours when I’ve forgotten what the idea was in the first place. Strike while the iron is hot as they say. With that in mind, it is vital the cost for the respec can be payed BEFORE the respec is going to happen (e.g earn gold or orbs or whatever and be sitting on a stockpile). I can’t stress this enough.
I was experimenting with a build and changed 4 points. Experiment failed, so I had to put them back again. So I had to level 16->20 twice. He listed his time for doing it once.
Heh. My opinion has gone the opposite way. I see no problem with the respec cost early on for a new char. Now that I have levelled 5 chars to post 60 (finished campaign) I know that an early respec is fine as all your skills will end up hitting ~17 more or less together, so it’s not a problem. Also the campaign is laughably easy so I don’t need levelled skills to roflstomp it.
However, now having 5 chars at end game, which is when I want to tweak my builds more and more and test them in Arenas, is where I feel the painful cost of respecing much much more. It hurts more lategame, not early game. Well level 60 to 70 at least.
In short where I am now, respec time from 16 → 20 is much important than cost from 1 → 16.
I’d love it. I can experiment all day without cost. That is my ideal. In fact the completely free respec was the one thing I think D3 got absolutely right, in terms of the evolution of ARPGs. Unfortunately there were just not enough skills or skill variations in the game to merit it being free, which is what caused the issue I think. This is not so here.
LE is not like D3 because there are far more combinations of skills available here and in each skill you are picking 20 skill points from about 100 possibilities. That is FAR MORE diversity than D3 offers by many many orders of magnitude. Not even comparible. This is an absolutely key point and is why fully free respec would be OK in my book, as there are just so many possibilities. Even if it was 100% free I could still not try as many experiments as I’d want to.
The game is being marketed by the sheer number of build possibilties and hence the depth offered to the player. That’s its strong suit. Therefore, it seems counter-intuitive to punish the player so hard for wanting to explore those depths. And yes I feel punished for wanting to tweak late game builds, as per my Fireball example.
I hate it. I absolutely hate this. How the hell your choice matters when you don’t even know what you’re getting? It’s completely opposite. Your choice doesn’t matter at all. Because the only way you can acquire the information about a skill is to GUESS(by poorly described tool tips), but there’s no refund. You’re forced to be committed without any testing chance. Yes, you can respec your passive easily, but skill specialization on the other hand… There could be so many different outputs with 20 points, and dozens of node. It’s so tedious to test every possible result with the current system.
I’m fine with sticking to one mastery though. You also have to guess what you’ll get from each mastery but they all have a clear concept that really differs from other two.
To me, ARPG is all about building. Building a character that I would like to play by making hundreds of small change. It’s just not happening here. So I actually gave up. This game already offers different base classes. You need to re-start from 1 if you want to play something else. And I’m fine with that, but why is it so punishing to test a skill?
I don’t see any change coming with this amount of people actually want this to be harder, or are okay with the current system so it’s whatever. I personally like how PoE executed a respec system. [On a full respec it costs you about 2-3ex, which isn’t too hard but not brainless-easy to do without planning or thinking. Actually, it’s better to create a complete new character for a skill that uses different mechanic. I’d say it’s much harder doing that than how you respec your passive points in Last Epoch. Although, in exchange, it’s far more fair to test(respec) skills that can work with your passive tree. You can level multiple skills that you don’t currently use all at once, and they’re permanent once they are leveled up. And you can change how your skills work by just linking different support gems. And putting them in and out on your gear is easy(this whole part was out of point, and unnecessary, I was writing gibberish)]
While i would say that there are probably some cases where you really have to try out certain nodes before actually knwoing how it “plays”. I would say most of the tooltips(especially on the skill changing nodes) are pretty decent.
If you are leveling and try out some of the skill changing nodes and don’t like it, or maybe it behaves different from what you expected, you can still respec one point at the time, to not lose all stats on your skill spec tree, which will not leave your skill completly useless.
And if there are really some nodes that absolutly don’t do what you would think of it, suggest something better and i am sure devs will change that tooltip.
I am not sure if i can follow you on this one. Correct me if i am wrong, or if you maybe expressed yourself a bit poorly.
You are saying that making a respec very expensive, so leveling a new char is (in most cases) cheaper/faster is ok? But in LE the respec system doesnt really force you to make a new char, because adjustments to your build also just cost playtime.
I don’t get it, maybe it’s because you have alot of playtime/experience in PoE and kinda arranged with how it works there. Probably i bit biased because you played so much PoE?
The more playtime/experience you have in a game, you will find ways around stuff you don’t like or minimize the impact they have.
Same goes for me in LE(i don’t know how much playtime or experience you have in LE), but i tend to stick with certain stuff early on(first 1 and 2 specialisation slots) and start experimenting with the 3rd and 4th slot, because usally you just need 1-2 very good and strong sklills to breeze through the campaign.
This will lead to me expermenting alot while leveling and keep changing skills and try things out. Not sure how other people going through the campaign.
You really don’t need 4-5 skills that synergize well in the process of the campaign and finind stuff you like.
Saving up / stacking something in any way may be penalising casual players like me. I rather rebuild the skilltree in like 30 mins as it seems to be now, also giving me the aspect of a growing character. I grow into my new build. Having to grind for respec material sounds like a useless time consuming effort to me.
How about making respeccing points within a skilltree the same as passive points, just a bit of coin And instant, but upon skill change you keep the current situation where you have to regain the points? That way tinkering with nodes is instant and almost free. It seems to me this would remove most complaints I read here about the game discouraging discovering different nodes.
I am not totally against it, but probably not my favorites solution of some things already suggested.
IF skill respec costs gold, it depend on the whole games economy, if that makes sense or not.
If gold is valauble and the main ressource for trading i could get behind that.
First, it won’t be 30 mins unless you are very high level. A casual player like you just will not get to respec much post campaign at all. Believe me, I am there right now with 5 chars who are levels 60 to 75, trying to tweak builds and experiment. It is long and painful. Multiple hours just to shuffle 3 or 4 points around.
Second why not have both? A currency for respeccing freely that we can stockpile or buy, and an option not to use said currency (or a fall-back for when we are out) and invest time re-levelling instead?
I’d welcome anything that is better than the current situation, and it is true that most of my tinkering occurs within the 5 skills I have settled on. Switching an entire skill is a major experiment and one I’d expect to take a considerable amount of time. Not a bad idea.
It doesn’t matter how decent the tooltip is, you just cannot tell the true impact without trying it out, in the vast majority of cases. Take my simple Fireball example. 4 points to make Fireballs have 100% chance to pierce. Tell me what difference, precisely, that will make to my kill efficiency? You can’t you need to try it. Each point increases the mana cost of Fireball by X, tell me the impact on my casting sustainability with all 4 points? With 3 points? How about with only 2? You can’t without trying.
Plus even the most straightforward of skill points - with the simplest of tooltips - still comes with the unknown opportunity cost of all the other points you chose not to take for it. Till you try them all and compare of course.
Well, that’s what a forum is here for. We don’t all have to agree on everything, that’s what good discussion makes a discussion, sharing different points of views and try to find solutions.
The main point i wanted to bring across with the “you can respec one point at the time” was that when you trying out some of the skill changing nodes, you can revert that if you don’t like it with only one point. Surly the small nodes on the way to that point also needs to be respecced if you want to test out something new on a completly different area of the skill’s spec tree. But most of that “smaller nodes” give you stats anyway. So when you respec just the skill changing node and keep the rest of your skills for the next few levels you don’t have to reset progress on the whole skill.
TLDR: you don’t always have to reset your whole skill to change it into another direction, you can take a step by step appraoch with single point respecs
I know where you are coming from with the whole skill system in PoE and i do understand that. But the skill system in LE is so different it’s hard to compare.
The closest thing to this was my suggestion to just use 1 or 2 skills “mainly” that you are familar with and then start experimenting with the 3rd and 4th(later 5th) spec slot.
Just wanted to point out that respeccing one point at a time is absolutely the worst advice, especially at high skill level, because that single point is the most expensive point of all to get back. You are much more efficient removing as many points as possible at each tweak / experiment.
Well I assure you I thought that +2 mana cost to Fireball (17 → 19) would be fine, yet it absolutely wasn’t. It meant I was oom that little significant amount of time ealier than before, and thus needed Focus just a little earlier than before, and it basically cost me about 40 Arena waves compared to normal. 1 skill point, +2 mana. You just can’t tell.
