I love the skill mastery system and the customization it offers, but the current way it is set up discourages experimenting with new skills/builds.
Do I really want to lose all the levels I’ve gained on my skill to try out the new one I unlocked?
Do I really want to reset the level of my skill just to experiment with a different branch?
I would suggest letting skills keep their mastery level if you “unmaster” them to try something different. You don’t get the benefits of the points you spent in them as long as they aren’t mastered, but if you decide you don’t like the new skill you started mastering then you can switch back.
I would also suggest respecing a skill to immediately refund all the points and then the skill loses X levels. This would be a cost in changing the spec, but the player doesn’t have to level the skill all over from the minimum level if they want to experiment with something different.
If you could specialize in every skill simultaneously they would have to implement some limitation of when you can switch skills.
I constantly switch sigils, shield Rush, shield bash, javelin, and rebuke on my bar based on what I’m doing but I don’t change any specializations. This would prevent doing that so I’m not a fan.
If you could specialize everything but had to choose 5 skills to have an active tree id be okay with that, but that’s pretty convoluted.
At least give us accelerated skill XP until level 20 instead of 16 if your character is e.g. level 100.
When I started playing I thought every 5 character levels give you 1 accelerated skill level and was massively disappointed when I realised it stops at 16 and you are punished for trying to experiment with them past that. As a result I followed an online build and won’t be respeccing because I don’t want to regrind what I already had and what was taken away from me.
It takes a good 10-15 minutes to get those 10 levels back after you respec end-game. All it really does is discourage you from changing specialization constantly as you level up. I kind of agree, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. It might be better to just unlock a base amount of skill points and be able to get them all back when you change abilities right away. At the same time, that would mean you’d basically have every ability if you wanted it, without needing to focus on any of them for very long. As it stands, it’s only an inconvenience if you figure out your build doesn’t work early game.
I guess a good compromise on this would be to tie this to your character level in some way where you get the first 10 points you’d earned back immediately when you swap skills but then have to earn the others back vis a vis the current system. I wouldn’t be opposed to that change.
