Quite possibly, I do have a tendancy to just skim over things from time to time, especially in longer threads/posts (like Kulze’s in all honest, sorry…).
I don’t know, LE’s crafting being moderately deterministic compared to PoE’s or D3/4’s is an example of the evolution he’s talking about. As is PoE’s skill gem system.
Well, I tend to write a bit flowery and answer in detail, so those text-walls are a given.
Absolutely understood when it’s skipped over though at times, it’s… a lot sometimes 
It took me a long time to see that an exalted item of the implicit type you are looking for with just one T6/T7 affix that you like is nearly* the best item you can get. You get to choose all the other attributes. Yes, I’m slow on the uptake. Those items are pretty rare, but I look at every exalt that drops (I get bored of grinding, so I never really get much above 100 corruption, so the number of exalts that drops is pretty manageable). These items make me wonder if Heavy setup his filter to catch them, or if these gems are just littering the ground in all these games.
And that kind of broke my enjoyment of this game. The (near) best items are ones with almost no affixes? What?
I think, for my sanity, that I need to give this game another year in the incubator because I’m starting to hate the way it breaths and that probably isn’t fair.
*the best being an item with correct implicit and both a T6 and T7 that matter to your build. But I’ve only seen one T7 + T6 to date and it had all four affixes and the T6 and T7 had nothing to do with each other. Like Poison damage and health on kill. So, you know, crap.
you know that could be extremely useful and even save you
you might not even notice how much it helped you 
Something to think about - I am not sure if the current skill re-speccing system is the right way to handle it. I’d rather pay some gold for re-speccing instead of time. E.g. I’d love to experiment MUCH MORE with re-specs, trying hundreds of different combos, but ultimately I can’t do it as it is very time-consuming. So basically you (EHG) are shooting yourself in the foot by not allowing players to experiment with one of your best game system in a much more flexible and fun way. There is no clear reasoning for me, why you did it this way. Imho it doesn’t improve in any way the retention or engagement, it’s just an obstacle.
I will always think about how much it didn’t help me in a boss fight.
i was going to comment on this in my original post, but i wanted to see if you would bring it up .
there has been at least a few times people have died right after killing a boss, so although it may not help DURING, it could be the thing that saves you at the end
also, some boss fights spawn minions, where it could help even during the fight
see, there may be a silver lining to everything, maybe not in the way you want, but doesnt mean its not there 
Were you singing, “the sun’ll come out, tomorrow!, bet your bottom dollar…”, when you were typing that, lol
Please go & read and comment in one of the many pre-existing threads on the matter. We don’t need yet another one.
But did someone mention EHG shooting themselves in the knee in those threads?
I don’t think they did. Feet-shooting is a dime a dozen, but knee shooting, now we’re talking serious stuff. Oh sure, you’re young now, “knees-shmees”, you say. But you’ll rue that day young man!
I am not an English native speaker and in my native language this is exactly how it sounds. Foot, leg or knee, it doesn’t matter, you got my point I guess.
Is there any explanation from EHG in this regard? I couldn’t find any. I just found some arguments from hardcore players, who want the level of difficulty to be very high or even insane for all players, and in my opinion EHG pays way too much attention to this VERY vocal minority. If they follow this path it will limit the playerbase as the consequence. There is ZERO value in the current skill re-speccing system, just a very tedious and unnecessary exercise, hindering fun and making experiments with different builds (especially own inventions) a very complicated path, forcing many players into just stupidly following existing build guides etc. So why did they even develop such a sophisticated skill system then?
Yes, it is very commonly quoted by people replying in those threads. Basically, EHG don’t want respeccing skills to be too easy (eg, D3, or swapping skill gems in PoE) otherwise you’d have one set up to clear a map & a different set up to kill the boss. They do want to encourage trying out skill nodes though which is why skills have minimum skill levels & lower level skills gain xp faster. Both of these make relevelling skills significantly faster than it was a few years ago before they implemented them.
That has nothing to do with relevelling skills.
They don’t. They have their own opinion on difficulty & they have added many things to make life easier/quicker for more casual players.
Yes, albeit it’s a fairly old one.
I’ll repeat it though what they said in my own terms:
The respec is made that way to have a form of ‘friction’ and remove the ability to switch builds during content.
The skills reduce in levels to hinder people switching ‘on the fly’ between AoE nodes and single target nodes, which are some existing in the game.
Contrary the passives are only allowed to be changed while you’re in town and also with a small cost attached to give it some ‘weight’.
For EHG it plays into the concept which they say is ‘character identity’ there, enforcing that you create a character which can tackle the content ‘as is’ rather then adapting it heavily between areas.
This has one major upside which Path of Exile struggled with for a while where builds would switch between single-target and clear-speed gems (their skills) on the fly, this though - while more effective - leads to people not enjoying the playstyle as much while nonetheless doing it for the sake of efficiency, which lowers retention numbers actually.
Even if they’re a minority the moment EHG actively provided a playe for them (ladder) they’re responsible to also make the environment fitting to allow competitive play. This is currently still in a very bad state with the far too large disparity between ‘basic builds’ available.
How that even goes in line with respec is beyond me though.
Respec in the later levels takes 5-10 minutes at best, gold-cost for passives are a full non-issue then already.
So no, it’s not complicated.
And with EHG going the route of itemizing the blessings as well it’ll become even less so.
This game needs to build guides to be played up to the intended content limit. Which is ridiciulously low set at 300 corruption.
To provide variety, giving as many people a ‘flavor’ to follow.
Just to clarify : the inability to instantly switch builds is what makes the difference between playing your character and playing a generic character.
Let’s imagine I make a Druid character called “Cold Paw”. It is clearly intended to be made into a cold werebear build, and so I do make that build. If there is some friction to change build, I have some reasons to make another Druid character called “Scyther”, for a Swarmblade build. This gives them identity.
However, if there is no friction, then my “Cold Paw” character is already also that “Scyther” character. I am no longer playing “my” character, but a generic one and switching to flavor of the day on a whim.
I understand that there is an appeal to the second solution, but to a significant part of the community, losing that first solution is something that is highly likely to make us quit.
And honestly, at the moment, while the skill respec is mostly ok, the passive points respec feels pretty bad, as gold costs never allow a satisfactory hurdle.
currently, i also agree with the second, because why should i make a whole new character for literally 1 skill and trade 50% of a passive tree, as well as needing to build up corruption to just test something that may or may not work as planned.
it would be a different story if the entire other masteries were locked, because that actually makes sense.
no matter what happens, there will be people that leave, if its changed, people will leave, if its not changed, people will leave.
lets face it, people that want to leave would be leaving regardless, but they just waiting for that last excuse to make it sooner rather than later, if its not classes it will be something else.
simple solution is do a poll for any major system change like that, these things make some people feel all warm and fuzzy inside, because they contributed to a game changing decision.
200+ gold regularly from enemies +thousands even tens of thousands from reward chest or shrines is not enough?
easy 50k+ from 1 echo… hell, i have even had 30k+ drop in reward chest +19k from echo mini-boss, thats already like 50k without all the gold from random enemies or shrines.
how often are you wanting to respec? every minute, hour, half way through an echo?
just take the gold blessing if you have gold problems it is not permanent.
You are misunderstanding me. I want a hurdle. Gold is not a hurdle.
PS : If it’s a hurdle at high levels, then it’s unusable at low or mid levels to fix minor mistakes. In all cases, gold either is way too cheap at high levels, or is too costly at low levels.
Because that’s not the case. With the example of ‘Cold Paw’ and ‘Scyther’ there, I’ll pick it up:
If you reach level 90 with ‘Cold Paw’ then respec becomes quite easy, hence to try out if ‘Scyther’ would even word you go along and respec into it. It takes you roughly 40 minutes to do all of that as well as work around with some baseline gear you’ve picked for that build up along the way before switching back again and being right where you left off.
Hence you don’t need to make a new character, the only limiting factor there is a miniscule amount of time and the blessings… and the later will be adjusted in upcoming patches.
But… now you can’t play ‘Cold Paw’ and ‘Scyther’ at the same time nonetheless, it’s always a bit of time and effort away to switch between them… hence if you like both it necessitates a new character.
And that’s what EHG is going for.
Polls should only be done for things where the devs personally are on the edge and unsure what to do, never ever implement the community in major decisions in a regular manner. The majority of people are no devs and have no idea about the intricacies of game development. They’ll eagerly develop their own personal fun out of the game without realizing it.
They intentionally made the friction non-existent for late game and severe for the earlier stages in terms of passive points.
It enforces you early on - where the gold drops of all sources outside of shrines is low - to not have the ability to switch easily. Experiment when you’re through the campaign, that’s mid- to end-game stuff.
And it works just fine there.
The only issue with the respec system currently is that skills are a major way of building a character and you can easily choose wrong nodes which take far too long early on to adjust… unlike passives which you can switch around with a bit of effort - but not too much - if it becomes really necessary.
Did they really say anything about this? I suspect they just took the default stance of gold for respec and tried to balance around it by making costs more expensive the further along the passive trees you are.
And it’s not like respeccing at low levels is any real hurdle either. 5 minutes in, you should be able to respec almost as much as you want (as long as you are not respeccing every 30 seconds).
PS :
Just to clarify, I am for significant hurdles. Not massive ones, as I want fixing mistakes to be easy, but still hurdles so that a character isn’t simultaneously all characters. I like character identity.
No, not directly, it’s something I infered.
Albeit I imagine it’s fair given the variety of respec options currently available to take info from, even in the same genre.
We have PoE which makes respec nigh impossible early and only allows it fairly freely in end-game… and for example D4 which does it the other way around, a non-issue early but exceedingly expensive later on.
And unless they just threw a respec system in without thinking in-depth about it (which the character identity part leans agains) I would say it’s an intended feature.
But yeah, I’m also for reasonable but meaningful investments overall.
I read all comments above on respeccing of skills and passives and I see again the same problem, which I outlined above. Everyone should have his/her own playstyle possible. Nothing hinders players, who like the “singularity” of the char identity to focus on just one playstyle (e.g. “Cold Paw”), but for most other players the better way would be to have one character per mastery and experiment with it freely. E.g. I changed my Beastmaster already MANY times, to make him somehow competitive in the higher corruption, and every time it was just a waste of time waiting for the skills to get from 10 to 20 again. Totally meaningless activity. Same with my Necro, I changed my mind about what kind of skills I want to use with her many times already, and every time it was a waste of time waiting the skills to go from 10 to 20. Even worse it is in the lower levels, when you have a skill let’s say level 7, and want to respec it entirely, and then suddenly see that you actually need it, to start from level 1-2 again, when the leveling takes a very long time actually. There are no real reasons why to make this hurdle for a big part of the playerbase, and forcing them into hardcore ways of “character identity” is a regress towards the entire genre imho. Maybe another way would be to open up a new modifier league, similar to SSF, where the “singular character identity” would play a big role.