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.
I think PoE provides a good template there. Why not accumulate respect points past level 20? That way accumulating lot’s of points remains a scaling effect, and respeccing is practically free if you get to 10 respec points (i. e lvl 30).
Sounds fine in principal, but it doesnt prevent the one thing the devs dont want you to be able to do… i.e. respec’ing immediately before facing different kinds of content/challenges.
The key here, imho, is not the actual skill points (because quite honestly they are quick to re-earn), but preventing people from respec’ing at will without any repercussions…
I dont personally agree with the OPs reasoning here but I was thinking that the issue of trying out new skills could be addressed in an out-of-band environment - e.g. perhaps there would be a “dressing room” location/map that allows for you to respec and try out any or all skills against a dummy or two and then when you leave this location your build resets to what it was before - that should then allow ANYONE, no matter their level, experience or understanding of the game, to try out anything they want in a safe space…
Maybe even the dude who gives you the mastery quest can give access to this after you have chosen your mastery…
Who knows… spitballing here to try and solve the “new player” issue on skill choices/testing…
I like that idea a training grounds would let you experiment with builds, maybe with different trial parameters even, like one would let you try against a boss dummy, while another one would let you experiment with hordes of mobs.
Another thought, sort of in the line of the PoE thing but more controlled, might be 'free respecs, but only in the early game. Like every 5 character levels (or whatever arbitrary number) you get a free skill respec. This could stop after you reach character level 40 or 50 (about when i think most folks hop into MoF ). Or maybe each time you unlock an idol quest you also get a free skill respec that you can accumulate or save). This might allow new players more of a buffer and a bit of relief.
It’s kind of similar to the ‘minimum level’ but at the early stages, especially for new players, it’s a bit more of a boost. veterans would then figure out ways to make it work for the speed leveling process, thus also helping to curtail THAT particular gripe.
Indeed, I feel it should be the opposite way, easy skill respec and leveling up to level 35, and significantly more difficult after. Identity of a build should be forged in the later stage of the game, not early.
A simple design is to make respec cost scale with your level in the early stage of the game. For example, below level 35, each respec only cost 1k gold x level, and skill points are refunded, not lost. After level 35 when you gain your 4th specialization slot, we revert back to current system. By that time, players are already quite resolute in the main damaging skills that they want to play with that char, the rest are just supporting skills that doesn’t hurt as much due to the current respec system.
Mind you, a completely new player, being 1 - 2h into the game, and dev making experimentation miserable for him, that can result in a rage refund out of frustration, which dev won’t like it. Loss of profit.
I just want to echo this because I think you hit the nail on the head. It annoys new players, while veterans really grow to appreciate the design of Last Epoch. So balancing those competing needs is important.
a training grounds would let you experiment with builds, maybe with different trial parameters even, like one would let you try against a boss dummy, while another one would let you experiment with hordes of mobs.