So I got my first mastery the other day and decided to try a different build with it.
That was a mistake.
First of all, I didn’t like the new skill. Tough, happens, no harm done.
But then I went back to my old build and I had to relevel my skills.
I get this is intended behaviour, but it also punishes experimentation.
In the character passives, I can remove and reallocate points as I see fit for a small gold cost.
I feel like swapping specializations should not reset skill levels, so that you can freely experiment with different builds.
Maybe add a money cost to respeccing instead, so there is still a certain commitment.
This would also better play into the problem with ‘+X to skill’ item attributes.
If you didn’t have to re-level your skills then you’d be able to go through monos with clear/AoE focussed skills then respec them for the boss/quest echo boss to single target focussed skills.
Over the past few years the devs have consistently made it less punishing to respec and re-level skills. They get minimum skill levels (up to 10 at around lvl 80), lower level skills get a boost to their levelling speed if they are “too low level” for your character level and if you’re in a higher level area then your skills will level faster due to you getting more xp per kill.
That would make it trivial to respec skills. Unless it’s millions/billions of gold per level, or maybe a “large” % of your current gold, this wouldn’t be a cost.
The problem where equiping/reequiping such an item randlomy alters your build. Being able to cheaply move points around would counter this.
This could also be countered by only being able to respec in a safe zone. Maybe with the addition of the town portal vanishing when respeccing, so you can’t use that to teleport in/out boss room.
Well, this needs better balancing then, because I was much, much weaker trying out a new skill/build, which let me to not enjoy it and switch back quickly after.
A percentage would work - say 2% per point or so? Other games also often do a scaling increase: each time you respec, it becomes more and more expensive. This does penalize rebuilding over and over, which would promote leveling alts.
That’s exactly why they do it, they don’t want +skills gear to be used as a means to respec.
That’s exactly the thing I mean. The quest echo bosses are their own “map” you enter purely for the purpose of killing the boss. You’d be able to do echos to gain the stability to get the boss, then respec to kill the boss easily then respec to do normal echos.
Imho, respec’ing skills should not be a trivial decision and should definitely not be easy enough to change a build based on the map that you are about to face. That would change the entire feel of the game to the point where all builds would end up being these chameleon type setups that have to be respec’d each time for best performance against a very niche map/boss requirement…
At the moment, skills are far too powerful to be changed easily… various players have shown that the power of a build (offensively & defencively) is skewed in favour of Skill vs gear/passives and unless this balance is changed, its important not to allow skills to be changed trivially.
Yes… I realise that there is the issue of “trying a new skill instead of one you have” will take you re-earning the levels. This is why the devs have adjusted this to allow faster skill leveling in these cases, but I still dont think that it should be quick to reskill… I would think that you should need to run at least 2 or 3 maps to get the new skill up - it would take that long to understand how a skill works and if its a way to go… At higher levels (when most people respec a build) its easier to re-earn levels and characters are advanced enough that the impact of respec’ing a single skill is unlikely to break things irrecoverably…
Well, this might be true at end game.
But while leveling a first character and unlocking its masteries, the desire to try out these new skills is hampered by the fact you get massively underpowered when doing so.
I was easily running through maps and then I tried a new skill. It took me a bunch more runs to get back to my old power level, and it took away the fun of trying the new skills for me.
This also makes it less likely for me to try new builds in the future. My current build works great, why would I try experimenting when I get penalized so much that it takes me a bunch of maps to get to the powerlevel I’m supposed to be at. To then find out I don’t like the new build. And needing to gimp myself again, over and over, to try different variations? Just reallocating 1 point, means I need to rerun a map, or even more at my current rate, to get that point back.
This might make sense for you guys, but for me, this means I’m never going to experiment with builds, which for me used to be a large part of the fun of arpgs.
I might be better of making alts instead respeccing.
Well, this is where another dev design thing kicks in - masteries cannot be changed once chosen so ALTs are basically a given in LE… once you are a Forge Guard for example, you are always a Forge Guard and are limited by that choice even within the Sentinel class… this then limits the special (and most powerful) skills you can use.
I honestly dont think that relearning skills is as problematic as you make it out to be… Yes, its not like other games but its in line with how the devs have designed the game to be different and what they have always said - choices need to have meaning.
My view on this is relatively simple, but involves a different mindset: chose your skills more consciously…
Early in the game with low level skills, changing skills doesnt really make that much difference to your characters performance because the game isnt that hard and definitely doesnt need powerleveling if you change your mind. By level 50 (iirc) you have unlocked all 5 slots and would have tried different skills and chosen the ones to level up by then…
Thats roughly about the time you are nearing the end of the campaign and beginning to understand where your build is lacking (if at all)… Its also around the time when it started getting easier to make dramatic skill changes because you are getting boosts to skill relevelling… Once the campaign is over and you are into the start of end-game, then it gets even easier to relevel skills because of higher XP from mobs etc… and this is when most people respec their characters because the content gets much harder much faster…
Anyway… I have always been in the camp of “adjusting to how the game is intended to be played” rather than “play the game like I want to play it” so for me things like this are a non-issue and dont cause me any stress… if, with this attitude a game is still bad for me then I just find another… no stress…
I think the difference in our perspectives is that I’m talking from a leveling perspective, when you’ve just unlocked your mastery. While you are talking about end game respeccing.
You might be right about end game experience, but while leveling experimenting with different skills is punished harshly.
Perhaps the devs can create a compromise, where experimenting while leveling through the campaign is free and without penalty, while after the campaign, or a certain level, respeccing works the way it does now.
This would allow a new player to play around more with his build and trying different things, before settling into a certain skillset.
I haven’t even tried half of my skills, because changing my current skills would mean I would gimp my experience.
While leveling, I would want my players to experience the different aspects of a class without this major penalty.
Is Last Epoch’s respec mechanic not the most forgiving of any other mainstream ARPG? It takes 1-2 hours maximum to relevel skills to par with other skills you have specialized. Maybe it takes 3 hours to despec a level 20 skill and level the new skill to 20.
The largest effort is going to be farming equipment for a new build which even that in Last Epoch is more streamlined than other ARPGs.
They’ve already done this I’d say. As you level your character up, all of your skills gain a ‘minimum #.’ At lvl 25 I think it’s 3 or 4? Can’t remember exactly. At this level you’ve already gotten 3 skills. By the time your get your fourth and fifth skill they have like a minimum free starting point of somewhere around 5 and 7 (again my numbers aren’t exact.)
To boot you can’t really hit max level in a skill until you get to about lvl 75 character.
And as easy as campaign is trading out one of those three to another lvl 3 or 4 skill is pretty darn fast but still requires you to actually play it a bit to ‘test it.’ That and every 5 character levels or so, you skills all get an ‘accelerate xp’ until they reach a certain point.
LE’s skills have a lot of interactions and it requires experimentation and real testing. This re-spec/re-level builds in some of that necessity. I’ve leveled up a couple of characters of each mastery and I’m constantly mucking around with the skills so I can experiment during the leveling process.
Not on my home computer but maybe a nice visual break down of the level minimums and maximums. Is there something like that in the game guide?
There’s a very large faction of players here that like the commitment to skills and mastery because it adds identity to builds. You aren’t that Sentinel, you are that Barrage Javelin Lightning focused Paladin.
I’m also one of these people and I have to admit that we might have driven off some people here in the past. There were fierce discussions about that exact topic with lots of emotions. Even if it’s hard to grasp, this is a main selling point of LE for many people compared to games like D3 where you can switch skill on the fly.
But I get your point. Respeccing skills becomes easier the further you progress. But as a new player the beginning of the game is the phase where you want to experiment and test skills. And in that phase the respecc mechanic is the most punishing.
Imho there should be free respec until a certain point, like i.e. lvl 50. Or every skill has at least 1 free respec.
From what I can tell, the sense of punishment gets smaller the more you play. Veterans don’t feel this. It’s mainly a new player experience. But I think this is the most important. If LE loses players because they feel punished before they get to the point where they have knowledge about all possible skills and interactions, this is bad.
Hopefully they come up with a more new player friendly system.
It’s not relevant to the player if the loss of power is not preventing him from getting through the story.
The loss if power is there and it is very noticable. Your killspeed can get a significant setback if you take the wrong choices. It may not stop you, but it leaves a bad taste.
Yeah, if you just blindly and randomly experiment and throw mouse clicks out there, you’re not gonna have a great time. That’s kind of a given. What you’re talking about is a player that hit a wall because they made bad choices.
Every experience I’ve had with respeccing during the campaign was that the power difference was noticeable but never enough to keep me from progressing unless I did dumb stuff.
No, what I mean is I have a strong build that has carried me easily through all of the campaign so far.
I melt everything and have only died twice because of insta-kill abilities/mistakes with dodging certain abilities.
When I tried some other skills, like multi-shot and exploding arrow, when I got my Marksman mastery. I had a bad time. I could no longer melt everything and had to run for my life. It took much longer to get through the exact same mobs that I was just running through with ease. All of a sudden, I felt weak.
I dropped the abilities without investing and experimenting more. Only to then find out, going back to my previous skills left me gimped as well.
I had to slow my pace and re-earn what I felt I had already earned.
This just put me off to even consider the new skills that I have unlocked since.
So you had a strong build, experimented with a new build, found out it wasn’t as strong (which could be for any number of reasons including that you planned it poorly), had a bad time, presumably went back to your original build (or at least had every ability to do so), and your takeaway was “The game punished me for experimenting so I’m never going to experiment again” instead of something more reasonable, such as “Not every build can work as well as another” or “There are maybe some skill balancing issues” or even just “lol whoops”.
He’s describing his experience with respeccing a skill and how it felt. That’s absolutely valid feedback. I bet the majority of people feels this way.
Multishot by far is not a weak skill, instead it is really strong. But only if you invest into it and build your gear around it. Vets know that you should not drop your main damage skill for MS because you would be gimped. MS needs a lot of investment before it does enough damage and you can sustain the mana consumption. These are all facts that a new player doesn’t know.
That’s absolutely not a very likely conclusion people would come to. On our community discord what OP describes is a relatively common feedback and we then are calming people down with sentences like “It will get better later” and so on.
You dismiss very valid and reasonable feedback and I strongly disagree.
Again, I did not have the ability to do so immediately. I had to grind the 8 missing levels back to get back to my original power. This took me 2 days! And just progressing through the campaign took much longer, because I had literally become weaker. That’s harsh while leveling.
