I feel i’m in a minority at least on these forums so asking for changes i’m usually shouted down so to speak and the game seems not aimed at the casual crowd so i wasn’t sure the devs would even consider my thoughts tbh.
I do hope the game comes out amazing in the future and leaving now just means i’ll be taking a break as i’ve paid for the game anyway. I’ll pop back when my fav class female rogue arrives as thats very much why i bought this game on a whim.
I do hope the death penalties don’t ruin the freedom of this game though, i can deal with the skill resets not crazy death punishments.
either way enjoy the game i might see you in the future.
I enjoy the healthy debate so will definitely keep responses in UK awake time
Implementing a “D3 Armory” type system would involve
1- Saving an “image” of your current skill choices, passive choices, idol choices, gear choices
2- when you choose to go back to a previously saved image it then
a) swaps all current gear with previously saved gear stored now in inventory (and leave slot blank if that specific gear piece is not in inventory anymore)
b) does same swap for idols
c) sets all 5 skills to the previously saved setting ---- point to note is that if you saved immediately after respeccing all 5 skills (ie they are saved on 1/20 for all 5 then skills are reset to those 1/20 positions ----- if you subsequently re-save once fully levelled then reset will be to their saved position say at 20/20
d) does same for passive skill trees
And finally i would be personally happy with changing the skill respec penalty as i am unconcerned on whether it takes me 30min or 3 hrs to respec a char. What deters me from playing different builds in this game at moment is the fact that i loose all that investment if i change to another setup.
Yeah, it’s #c that wouldn’t work given the current state of respecing. That is kinda how I envisaged it to work & when you select a build to load it would give you a screen that states how much the respec would cost. It would work fine if respeccing skills cost some form of currency, it would tell you how much the respec would cost for passives (xxx gold) & skills (yyy currency).
Another potential issue with #c is that if you saved a “blank” build with all your skills lvl’d to 20 & then respeced would it enable you to only have to pay the respec cost once (or twice)?
i don’t think that is an issue as it is only saving the 5 skills you have chosen for your current build. This is then no different then to changing gear / idols which we can do currently anyway.
I will be putting my Engineering brain to thinking of potential solutions as i really think this will be a BIG problem come multiplayer online. If you assume that each of the 15 mastery will require 1) Solo speed farm build 2) Solo pushing build 3) Group support build 4) Group DPS build then that is potentially 60 separate character which need to fully complete campaign to get all idol / passive slots. And this isn’t counting having multiple solo builds eg Cpt America, Whirlwind, Turbo Vengeance etc for Paladin.
The one thing you cant have when online with communities / clans is “can’t join team now as it will take me 30-45min to respec my Cpt America into Support Paladin”.
I see where you’re coming from, but the current implementation for respecing would need to change for that to work as I mentioned before.
Lets say you wanted to respec your shield throw paladin to a support paladin to group up with some friends to run through some content. The gear (inc idols) & passives wouldn’t need any changes to fit into your suggestion, all it would be doing is automating swapping out gear & popping over to the passive respec vendor & if it presented you with the gold cost of respeccing your passives before doing it, that’d be fine. The issue is, as you say (“can’t join team now as it will take me 30-45min to respec my Cpt America into Support Paladin”) with skill respecs, in order for this to work, you’d need to have:
skill respecs require a currency in order to keep the skill point (spending the currency then changes your skill from 20 skill points allocated to x skill points allocated & (20-x) skill points unallocated), the currency would also need to be farmable (ie, not 1 respec after completing quest X)
skills keep their max xp when you unspecialise them (so that you could at some point level up your skills for your shield throw build & any different skills for your support paladin then spend the currency to respec between them)
I’m not sure what I feel about that. I kinda like it, but it’s different to what we have at the moment (which I’m ok with & change is bad).
Given we have no clue what multiplayer is going to be like yet, I see a few scenarios (probably more but my brain hasn’t had enough caffeine yet.)
Traditional Meta group style play, like D3 etc and the dreaded MMO. Then yes, an Armory with the current skill advancement doesn’t really work. If that is the style they go for then my guess is they’ll have ideas for how to make switching in and out a little more palatable for those who like this style.
Group dynamics in the form of old RPGS like Baldur’s Gate, etc. Here your characters are necessarily setup as some sort of meta build, well they do have ideal ways to make them, but it’s not nearly as important as the meta style in #1. If this is the method they go for then just like Baldur’s Gate in order to adjust you’d have to rebuild a completely different character (by characters here I mean the NPCs not the main characters.)
something in between.
RANT ON/FEEL FREE TO SKIP
honestly, no clue. I know I played so many hours on D3 probably upwards of 4000. I almost never played multi. I don’t like it. I don’t like the idea of a ‘meta’ anything to be perfectly honest. As an old school rpg (tabletop) player I just read an article two days ago from a big gaming magazine about the meta breakdown of Dungeons and Dragons characters. In other words the ‘role’ is dead in rpg. This is still an aRpg. I don’t like the idea that the mentality today is role=meta. And for what it’s worth, I am absolutely fine with them HAVING multiplayer because I know lots of people do like that. But I hope they don’t build their game AROUND multiplayer to much (i.e. armory skill swapping etc.) because it’s not my cup of tea. (huge minority opinion I know.)
RANT OFF
Would be nice if someone like @Sarno could comment on the current thinking of devs regarding multiple builds for one mastery, especially when multiplayer is live. So the most obvious example here would be a Group Support Paladin and a Solo Pushing build. Do they
Intend players to have separate characters for each different build
Intend for us to spend 30-45min reskilling to another build each time we want to switch
Have another system / design feature in mind which is coming later
On an not-particularly-related note, would it be possible to get an @Devs or @EHG for the forum which would flag a post to the devs in general rather than specific ones, kinda like reporting a post does.
Come on!
This game already 8 years old and remember better times then now.
Its far far above average arpg game. And while having many issues, i still think not many games can get to quality level of this game.
When Diablo 3 came out i switched to it, and it definitely overall better for me then Diablo 2.
thou those games are very different. Diablo 2 is old graphics and doesn’t have endgame except PVP
You are in the vast minority then. Every single poll on the internet has diablo 2 at the top and diablo 3 at the bottom when its about what aRPGs are best.
Just look at the PoE. Outside of some gimmicky builds, nothing like “support” build exists. I believe it will be same here. I know many players will have this wild idea, that ARPGs will work like MMORPGs, where you have tank, support builds and damage dealers, but in fact, parties will work best, when everyone is great damage dealer. So your Solo Pushing build will do just fine in multiplayer scenario.
In D3, there were few cases, when some groups pushed really far thanks to “support” builds, but it was more about breaking the game by insane synergies, which were never intended to work this way.
You could argue “But I want player support paladin build in a group” - and while this is valid request, support builds are not mandatory and they really can’t build game around every wish.
If you want have dual spec, talk about this. Or talk about how many specs you want to save and push this idea if you want, but don’t try to make it looks mandatory because “we need solo builds, support builds, group builds etc.” because we really don’t.
And while I am not dev, if you read some of their latest posts, it’s pretty clear they really don’t want players to have multiple builds per character, nor they want some free respecing quickly so you can jump from on build to another in a second based on situation.
