Does that mean that it’s just the gold for passive respec, or is there also a gold cost for the mastery respec itself?
Just asking to know if you will be able to switch back and forth 50 times a day (not that I think anyone will), or if there will be a higher cost associated so that you’re not just respeccing at a whim and it lends some weight to the respec decision?
I’m not sure, I just use the dev command to do it.
Ok, thanks for your answers. 
Not sure, how many hours are significant. But I hope for something friendly for new players and No! Not so fast! For high lvl players at the same time.
Quest reward item to everyone for 1st reset per character (during the campaign ?) and a way more harder stuff later on for 2nd or 3rd, some kind of monolith challenge and empowered monolith challenge. Something like this
It’s not moving goal posts, it’s just lazy gamers being lazy gamers & asking for moar changes to dumb the game down.
Some people have, yes, likely because he’s so prominent & the Senior Designer.
God bless you Mike, never change…
I just want to point out that you could have done that without a free-for-all respec system. You could have gone the D2 route, where you get 3 free respecs. This would allow someone to respec to the other 2 masteries and a final respec to whichever they prefer.
You might even also have rare materials drop (like rune of creation rare) that would eventually combine into another respec.
An unlimited system such as this seems to be seems more aimed at endgame players than at new ones.
Annnnnnd the slippery slope begins.
The game isnt balanced for load outs like this. Load outs of any kind imo should never touch this game. It will change how u currently as of now make builds in the game.
100% agree.
This would have been a much better solution. As well as a good one for new players and veteran players.
I’m not entirely sure I agree with that. I’m struggling a bit to see why an endgame player would use unlimited mastery changes since they know what they want & choise the “right” one off the bat. It would enable them to use that high level character to change to a different mastery if they wanted to play a new build at the cost of having to level their skills again (though we know that won’t take them long) plus they won’t have to fuck around with corruption/trudging through normal monos/etc. So, yes, I guess?
Exactly. It would enable people to switch builds without actually having to play the game. Which they already can, within the same mastery, but now the issue is three times “worse”.
As I said, the only thing this does is that people that do like to level up characters will look at the state of the game and feel like doing something for 10h+ that the game gives you in 1 minute is artifically inflating the game.
I can personally say that I enjoyed D3 a lot less once the armory was introduced. I know that I could still make alts, but the game was clearly telling me not to.
So this might not make me stop playing LE altogether, because it certainly has a lot of good things about it, but it will definitely cut on my enjoyment time. Once I’m done with one character, I don’t feel like I want to try another one. Instant switch turns me off and makes me want to drop that character and going out of my way to start over feels like a waste.
Most likely, instead of playing for 1-2 months per season, it will cut down to 1-2 weeks.
But that’s a me issue. I don’t blame the devs for doing this. I was just pointing out that this change could have been done in a way that would please the people that genuinely just want to switch a mastery because of a mistake and also please the people that feel like choices and identity are important.
To me this change isn’t solving anything. Imagine you made a game and players want all kinds of shortcuts to play your game less. I think there are more fundamental issues with LE and the devs should think about ways to make the experience more fun so people don’t think about playing less and want to play more.
So far I think this change helps blasters and people who have no idea what they do anyway. I think this change has little impact in the big picture but leaves a sour taste in some players mouths because little by little LE transitions into a direction that isn’t innovative but generic.
I still hope people are pleased with the changes and we see good player numbers and LE is here to stay. I just don’t think this change will have that big of an impact on player numbers as some people give it credit.
Well I was wrong many times and I hope I’m wrong again and everything works out awesomly and all the past experiences I made in over 2 decades of gaming are disproven.
This… so… soooo much this.
In general, not only for LE. The ‘cheap’ route is what far too many developers take.
Yes I know, but the current implementation was at least a middleground between what it used to be and how many people wanted it to be.
Now mastery respec coems out of nowhere with seemingly very few stipulations.
I always admired EHG for finding solutions to problem that a lot of people are happy with. Very good middleground for a lot of things. (Skill respec/xp gain, crafting shard vaccum, CoF/MG Factions etc.)
But then on the other side I also admired EHG for standing strong on certain other things, like mastery respec and not auto loot.
Changing certain things slightly as a compromise is completely fine and natural.
But with this mastery respec they opened a door that will never be closed again, this is a much more severe change where there is no going back once its in.
Well actually it does solve problem for a non-negligible number of players:
For everyone else, who cares if some people are changing masteries? If someone finds an exploit then it can be addressed.
Blizzard North was adamantly against letting D2 players reset their stats and talents. It wasn’t until they left the company that those things got added. And honestly I think it was an improvement.
For #1, having 3 respecs per character (and the chance of farming very rare materials for more) like in D2 fixes it without alienating the people that care about choices and identity.
For #2, you make it sound like any mastery has only one single build available. If one build gets nerfed (and I should note that even the builds that got nerfed are almost always still top performers), you have a dozen more builds available to your mastery. But even then, you’d still have those 3 respecs.
I am sorry Mike, but it doesn’t matter what you are aiming for when designing systems and features.
Even though the target for these as a solution might be different, this still contribute to the overall feeling of how characters are presented, not they are much more replaceable then before and this is clearly a step into the direction of build templates, even if you don’t aim at that with this change.
Even if you don’t think this is a slippery slope, that doesn’t change the fact that it already begun. This is not the first post I saw that is very clearly aiming into this direction and it will only get worse once this feature is actually in the game.
I am very happy if EHG will take a clear stance on this and say there are no plans for anythign like tempaltes/armory style features, but we are factually one step closer to that already. (whether intended or not).
But this is one of the things that will get brought up in the future more and more and more and even when EHG will distance themsevles from such features, it still leaves me with a sour taste, because that is exactly the same as I thought mastery respec will be. (Something that is brought up frequently, but then no plans to be implemented).
I really doubt there is anyway we are going back from here, but I personally would have liked a different solutions, even though one that is grander in scope.
I still belevie a “trainign area” where you get access to all masteries and skills to try and testt thigns would be the better solution. This can very easily be integrated into the story with timetravel and “discovering your potential futures”.
Not sure if this now would make any sense because it would not be worth the effort now and taking back mastery respec would generate a huge outrage.
Anyway, this is and will probably forever be the first major disappointment that I have with LE since I am following and supporting it, I really hope this will remain the only big one for the foreseeable future.
Those players exist. These changes will help keep them. That’s all.
If you care about choice then you can choose not to partake in changing masteries. If you care about identity, for now you can only play one build at a time. Each with it’s own identity.
Also, identity will remain as long as you can’t grab skills from other classes. So if someday you can have a few builds saved for a character(class) your identity is a rogue or sentinel or mage.
EHG took a very clear stance on mastery respec in the past, and yet here we are 
Having a limited number of respecs would also help keep them while also keeping the ones that don’t like mastery respec.
You haven’t read the thread, have you? I’ve already said why this will drive away players that care about this.
Saying that this is an option is the same as having an option to “get one shot with every hit”, because no one will take it unless they’re just looking for a challenge.
No, identity is about making choices that are important to your character. The only permanent choices in the game were limited to class and mastery. Now we only have class. Everything else can be undone.
The whole argument of “don’t use it if you don’t like it” is very very weak, for any game system. This is not specific to LE or ARPG.
Having certain stipualtions that the playerbase as a whole needs to obey is very good and makes the game much more streamlined and compareable between different players and player types.
Especially when it coems down to what is the most effective way to play a game. Right now there was no other way of leveling two different characters with different masteries. Now this becomes nulified. Even if a player (like me) doesn’t like it, we will hamstring ourselfs artifically if we just don’t use a features that everybody else has access too.
It just gives the game a very different feeling.
Identity is multifactorial, the skills you can use at one given time is only one of a few factors.
Identity also means what a character means to you personally and what you have gone through with it. This is something not “visible” from the outside but gives the game a much, much better and deeper connection when you have your Paladin and you have your Forgeguard, both have their own history.
I’m not arguing against limits. Before they announced they were adding mastery respecs I stated in “the thread that shall not be named” that I supported very limited mastery respecs.
I’m pretty sure that D2 doesn’t have the three respecs you mention as you can get the item on other chars and it only requires completing the Den of Evil I believe. D2 is also a very solved game. I wanted stat respecs for when I got my final gear with say lower str requirements I could min/max it without a full character reroll. But skill respecs are great for leveling with one build and switching to another later.
And yeah I read the thread and the number of people ragequiting over this being added is far smaller than those ragequiting because they picked the wrong mastery on their first char or hate the nerfs and would rather play a different mastery on the class.