With mastery respec is there gonna be build/ gear templates for quick switch?

General
41

Because it not only causes player retention to substantially reduce but also the market to become even worse then it already is.

Up to 1.1 if you wanted to be a ‘early adopter’ so to speak for MG, hence getting the highest amount of profit from it then your pick had to be something which will do well in the campaign and decently well in Monoliths. That was a distinct choice there. Playing for efficiency or playing for trying out something new?

Now that’s gone. This allows anyone to pick whatever works for the campaign and then switch over to something which does especially well in Monoliths. Causing quite the time-reduction in setting up a early cycle character of you know half-way decently what you’re doing.

Also it causes supply and demand of MG (which is already a mess) to become even further skewed. Top-end supply is nigh non-existent, low-end supply has utter overabundance… with the middle? Basically not existing at all. We got two extremes.
Now that means since you don’t need to play up an extra character that the demand of top-end gear will rise, with barely any change in supply. That’s not good with how everything is going currently.

Yeah, together with re-working the initial game and screwing up a few small things. Luckily the game has been half-way decently kept in a similar state otherwise.
It definitely caused your choices to be far far less meaningful though, not nice. But at least done in a way which isn’t making a complete 180 in how it handles stuff… like LE did here.

Absolutely. I agree 100% with that.

My first was MG. This is my second. Expect to be disappointed I would say, makes it less severe when it happens :stuck_out_tongue:

Nooot quite ‘that’s all’.
It also makes those caring about their choices and those usually focusing on multi-character plays during a Cycle either play quite a lot less (setting up a new char in the same base class isn’t 20-60 hours but… 2 minutes now) or simply will stop playing if they feel the change is severe enough.

Is it worth it to gather those leaning towards a more casual approach at the cost of those above?
I would argue ‘no’ since the game hasn’t been designed in a way to cater to that group of people majorly.

But… umh… that’s exactly what happened? :stuck_out_tongue: Formerly we had 15 classes, now we have 5. Sure, parts were shared between them… but the core combinations could only be done when you leaned into it. Now you’re a ‘generic’ Acolyte, you’re not a necro for example… you now play ‘Acolyte’.

Exactly what the lack of having the respec is supposed to avoid.

Really? Do you have any statistics? Can I see them? :slight_smile:
Oh… and since it’s kinda important as a 1k hour playing customer is valued roughly 10 times more then a 50 hour playing customers… do you also have overall medium play-time of the respective group affected?

Would be very interesting!

I can tell you the outcome though even without looking at it:
There’s more people quitting because the functionality wasn’t there then those quitting because it got introduced.
The loss in play-time overall though is higher.

42

I dunno about this part actually.

Right now it seems like snubbing your long term userbase for the quick cash flow of more purchases is how these games are rolling. Look at PoE2, id say the vast majority of hardcore poe1 players are not eating up poe2. poe2 is far more popular among new players, and GGG is happy to let the poe1 diehards suffer to collect more paychecks from the new players.

The 1k hour player has already spent money, with no promise of them spending more. New players always need to buy in as its not a f2p game, so im not so sure if there is a business connection with high hour players in this particular instance. like ill be honest, I have like nearly 2.5k hours now I think and all ive bought is the basegame back when you had to buy a supporter pack to get access, and then i upgraded to the whatever edition that gave you the two armor sets as a thank you for all the good hours, think my total purchase amount is something like 95 dollars lol, which is something like 26 hours per dollar spent, great value!

43

I did say we could also have rare materials that could be farmed for extra respecs. D2 has them but they’re rare to get and make serial respeccing impractical.
Also, D2R continues to get new content released, including balance changes, new runes, new items, etc. So it’s not solved and it still only has the 3 respecs (one per Den of Evil, as you pointed out, which is the very first quest you get anyway).

The reason players like me are disappointed is because there were ways to fix this without causing anyone to rage quit. And EHG has excelled in finding those types of solutions in the past.

This is actually also an issue for leaderboards. You get the #1 spot for Paladin. Where you had to make a new character and start over to get the #1 spot for VK, you now only have to respec and you can get it right away.
Blasters will get #1 spot for all 3 masteries immediately, throwing anyone out of the race.

Unless they change the leaderboards to not care about masteries anymore and only class.
But either way, I can’t see that this change is good for the competitive players.

3 Likes
44

It’s the mobile-game segment which does that mostly. Simple games with tons of user turnover. Easy to get into, loads of options to pay for stuff. Miniscule retention time.

The more complex and big a game becomes the more you want long-term solutions. Quick turnover rates are counter to learning in-depth mechanics. That takes time, but if you don’t provide a meaningful reason to stay for that timeframe then people don’t do it and simply get annoyed at ‘those mechanics which just suck’ despite being not designed for them but those which are active longer-term.

What are you talking about? PoE 2 is ridiculously well received by the PoE 1 community?

Quite the contrary. The biggest hurdle for a company is to make a player open their wallet once. When that happens they inhibition threshold to do it again becomes vastly lower. That’s a very well researched topic even.

I’m a penny-pincher… but I paid over 800€ over the years into PoE, the longer I played the easier it was for GGG to sell me something interesting.
I haven’t played those 7k hours in LE though, they got… 20€ besides my shelf-price from me for now. And very low reason to open my wallet for more still.

Now imagine someone with a lower inhibition threshold then me, as well as some funds to actually pay for stuff.

Which actively makes in-game purchases harder. ‘I already paid for the product, why should I give them more?’ is the general societal consensus for shelf-priced games.

F2P games contrary are expected to be paid further ‘It’s how they make money and even stay in business’, entirely basing it on player perception, often leading to much higher amounts of money being paid.
The downside is that the communities are respectively heavier on bots and RMT, as well as leaning towards being more toxic. Banned? Pfff… new account, didn’t use any money either! It has ‘no value’. Paid for it? ‘I better behave!’.

1 Like
45

Easily solved if it’s a big deal. Don’t put respecced characters on the leaderboard or only allow their best. The biggest content creators don’t even seem to care about arena leaderboards anyway. I don’t get the impression EHG cares about leaderboards much.

As far as retention issues, it’s because it’s been a VERY long time since season 1 launched and a lot of players quit early then anyway because they only had stuff to do for a week. POE2 is having massive retention issues after a much shorter period of time for similar reasons.

46

identity!! = identity (identity - 2) (identity - 4) …

(Yeah, I’ll find the door.)

3 Likes
47

Because Arena is a mini-mechanic at best and nothing ‘grand’ which keeps someone invested long term. Only a small sub-group can stomach that content for more then an hour.

Wanna check your percentile retention again? PoE 2 is one of the best retained games ever released in the H&S market… just saying… 20% after 2 months? That’s nigh unheard of. D3, D4 and LE would cry in happiness if that happens to them.

It’s one blatantly false statement. Especially since despite EA buy-in (making it a shelf-priced item for the moment) it retains 70k player during weekdays from the initial release peak of 580k. And a release peak is expected to loose 80% of players permanently over a 1 month period commonly. PoE 2 lost a bit more then 50% only.

48

It’s lost almost 90%

https://steamdb.info/app/2694490/charts/#max

PS: You guys are getting way too heated. I’m out.

49

Once more, false.

Peak was 580k on December 8th.
Weekend numbers of the last Sunday (strongest gaming day) is 92k
To be exact it retains 16,9% of the playerbase at the current time hence.

But yeah, should’ve said 15%, which is close to the 1 month drop-off normally. Not the 2 month drop-off.

As said, the common drop-off which is nominal is expected 80%. Everything below is deemed a ‘failure’ officially. Everything above 60% a ‘massive success’. December to January drop-off was 38,8% and January to February 49%

Both are substantially in the ‘massive success’ area. Albeit cummulative drop-off does get reduced over time, still keeps January to February in the ‘success’ range despite higher player-loss.

50

Most new players find some build enabeling stuff they think they need to use or to have fun with and chage the class because the item combination looks like fun. This happens again and again and again. For new players this changes nothing from my point of view because new players use what they get and most likely go back and forth without having a good build because they lack the gear to have meaningfull stats.
More choice isn’t always better. Mostly blasters and knowledgeable people will benefit from this change while new players will appreciate to be able to juggle classes without much benefit.
The problem I see with this is that new players will have a not so good experience because they will might end up with 3 not working builds instead of focusing on one build at a time.

That’s a very valid point. Then again swapping from a OP mastery to a normal mastery will leave people desatisfied. That’s what we know from the first season and other seasons in other games.

I care a bit about it because it offers nothing in the long run as mentioned above. All it does is making the game more bland instead of better BUT this is a question of personal taste and I understand everyone who likes the change. To me this is just the next bandaid change that is implemented without deeper thinking.

If I compare the feedback of people and that this was implemented by popular demand I ask myself why there is still no auto pickup for runes and stuff because people want this for years and there are far more topics about this then mastery respeccs.

It just makes little sense to me.

2 Likes
51

I totally agree with this. They did cave a bit with autotransfer.
But it is kinda baffling how such a polarizing issue like mastery respec, where EHG has taken such a strong stance in the past regarding the character identity aspect of it, is suddenly pivoted like this, whereas a topic that is almost universally agreed upon by all players like autopickup for materials is still a hill they want to die on.

As a sidenote, EHG has said in the past, very explicitly, that the reason they didn’t want mastery respec is because your mastery is your class, not a subclass/ascendancy type of thing.
So I guess class respec is coming soon(ish)? :laughing:

3 Likes
52

It’s not, they hate it. PoE 2 has a lot of players, but if you had taken a look at the Path of Exile 1 reddit, they were whining incessantly about PoE 2 (until talk about the sequel became forbidden there). IMO, PoE 2 has not been made for the PoE 1 community - the slower pace of the game is making the PoE 1 community furious.

53

Look at the influencers and their communities and you don’t have that.

Reddit is and always was a cesspool of a mess. You don’t get proper community consensus from there, it’s a decent way to at least see a direction but much like any other medium it needs to be taken with a salt of grain as negativity is the primary leading force of why people engage with those mediums. Exceptions obviously apply, but are not the majority norm.

And a game which is different then they game they got to love is obviously against many people’s enjoyment. It was designed to not be like PoE 1 despite being obviously PoE still in style. But the grand majority of the community is either neutral towards the game or positive. You just fell into the ‘the loudest ones aren’t the majority’ trap there.

54

Well, kinda. Ziz, Ghazzy and Rax, for example, have said repeatedly in their streams (and in their videos) that many PoE1 players in their community don’t like PoE2.
Is that a relevant enough number? We have no idea. But there is a sizable portion of PoE1 players that don’t like it. It’s not universally liked by that community.

1 Like
55

OK, then make it limited so you get to change your Mastery as often as you’d like until you hit lv 75 (good place to have experienced all a Mastery has to offer) and then lock it. Or go the D2 route and completing a quest gives you a single Respec and you get three of them across the character.

1 Like
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I just left you a massive reply on discord (at almost the same time as you put this here) but I’ll reply here too.

Why? Those are options that are on the table. I’m not opposed to some limiting factor like that at all. What’s the benefit to it though? What does it do for the gameplay experience? Can those things be done another way?

57

Yep! I saw it! Thanks again for taking the time to reply.

To answer the question: having some sense of character permanence adds to the replayability. Why would I make a second Rogue when I can just make one that can swap between masteries depending on my mood? I’ll never need more than 5 characters. I was ready and willing to make 15 characters, I’ve already gotten 6 done actually, but now I have no reason to have more than 5.

On top of the replayability, it also prevents situations like swapping masteries for specific tasks. We don’t see this much now because within a Mastery you’re better off building for a “general purpose” build since respeccing skills requires re-leveling them. But with Mastery Respec, I can make a build entirely focused on farming monoliths with some single target for bossing, then swap to a Mastery that’s got a much stronger bossing build for Abberoth (or future ubers) spend 15 minutes releveling my skills and I can now more easily farm Abby than I would have been able to with the original Mastery. I predict that meta builds based around the ability to swap masteries will become far more prevalent. I could be wrong but you see it a lot in games with free Respecs look at Diablo 3/4 for easy examples since swapping builds only requires swapping gear/skills.

Lastly, people will complain about how tedious it is to swap builds and since it seems like there was caving done on the fact that they couldn’t swap masteries I’m not convinced you won’t cave and provide skill loadouts and remove the skill Respec cost (another major complaint I’ve seen alongside the lack Mastery Respecs).

4 Likes
58

I think the big “why” is being answered by the main reason you guys at EHG decided to have the mastery be locked in the first place: It is a very meaningful and imapctful choice, which elevates your character in a way that can’t be undone, that makes it exciting for many people.

And while I can see and understand reasons to have a mastery respecced I really think that being able to change the mastery simply negates a lot of the impact and how “special” it is to master a specific class.

The benefit is, if you would implement some kind of limitation or stipulation that it will bring back a little bit of the “special thing”, which it wouldn’t have at all when its easily reverted or changed.

While I obviously would love to let the mastery stay permanent, if you really decided to change your mindset and philosophy on this one I at least would hope for some kind of stipulation/limitation.

I really just don’t wanna see a game where people change mastery left and right based on the flavour of the week.

We already have a couple of options on the table, which is good, I just really hope some of them get implemented in some way or another.

  • Make it once per character with some sort of quest
  • Make it so the quest to unlock empowered timelines entails a short quest that “imprints” the future of your character so you no longer can change your mastery from that point onwards.
  • Give us a “training room area” where you can test all masteries includign all skills, this would negate some of the “wrong decisions” some new players made because they thought skill X Y or Z looks good, but they find otu they dislike it

I really think that the “new players” that this change is aimed to be for, would be severle less impacted, because it either negates or dimishes the “wrong choice”, so it solves the problem of these palyers for the most part. If a new player tests outs the mastery they think fits the mbest and finds out it doesn’t, they can change that. I really don’t think a new player would change the mastery back and forth or multipel times, unelss they really want to test out all 3 first, before permanently deciding for one.
So with any of these abovie mentioned points that should be dealt with, while still having some sort of limitation for veterans and seasoned players. Even though there will still be exploitable scenarios where the meta will invovle some kind of changing masteries midway through your progression. And while I dont love that, that might be the pill I have to swallow here.

We really have no permanent chocies or consequences in LE, when this change comes and I truely think overall this is a net negative for the game as a whole, even though some people will enjoy it.
I also think there are a lot of people who will not like it, but because the option is there they will use it, because they would hamstring themselves in not utilizing all the tools they have.

Wheather or not how it will be implemented exactly and if it will change in future patches I will refuse to use this feature.

5 Likes
59

What does it do for the gameplay experience?

First it creates a sense of connection to your class and your fellow class enjoyers. I love paladin, I play a lot of paladin, paladin is considered decent in the early game and mid game, with mid level end game performance. other sentinels do better during the end game. So to me when you click the paladin mastery, you are accepting and theorizing around how to utilize that strength. Maybe you farm 300c early with no need for gear and you just cap out there. it allows you early access to the market and better able to position yourself. Or maybe you prefer a forge guard that needs specific gear to push higher, but eventually can hit 700c. And when you select forge guard you understand that you will be slower at progression but with a better top end.

Without mastery lock, why would I discuss the nuance of a build that is able to easy and quickly hit a good farm pace without a strong end game? instead thats just a given, your progression is paladin for campaign/early monos and then swap to your prefered end game build.

In an mmo I played I played a very bad character, a character who had an entirely different control scheme to the rest of the cast, I had to learn and discover my characters strengths. If I could just change class on the fly, I would have never bothered to learn how to play, id just simply swap to whatever was best for the given situation as thats the most logical course of action.

The benefit is exactly the same as the current restriction on why skills need to relevel. To prevent people from hotswapping left and right, ill just say right now, a gold cost is not enough of a cost, for MG players, they will have plenty of ways to get gold, and after a point for many CoF players gold is an after thought. So they wont mind spending 1m gold on swapping classes to blow up a boss.

I guess my questions is, why is swapping mastery for a small cost a non factor, but hot swapping + skill levels was made obtuse to stop hot swapping. its okay to spend 5 minutes + X amount of gold to completely trivialize a boss you were struggling with, but its not okay to do the same with a simple gear swap?

The logic does not add up.

I think if you limit the class swapping to characters under level 65, then you can easily open up some power leveling strats for those that want them(start paladin, swap to FG at monos etc) and allow new players to freely try everything.

I see 0 value or reason for why a level 100 character suddenly needs to become another class other then laziness/power gaming stand points.

You claim the choice was made for new players, new players have plenty of time to try everything out by level 65, ill even accept 75. Around 75~ you can be done with normal monos. if you “made a mistake” it should have been corrected by then. Hell TL:I lets you respec passives for free till level 90, even that is a decent starting point of “you can try everything, but dont get free reign forever”

This is akin to eating your entire hamburger then saying “well sorry i asked for no cheese, make me another”

Thats just my 2c on the matter, I much prefer games where you cant change class, as it means you as the player must learn and play your class to really understand it. its not a hill id die on either.

4 Likes
60

Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but this whole thing seems to be a “if it’s in the game, I’m going to use it because not using it would be sub-optimal”.

But isn’t that exactly what having to level another character up to change masteries is? Like if I wanted to play a shaman, and I don’t like my beastmaster, do I just abandon my beastmaster and reroll and relevel the same character until I can pick my new mastery?

I’m confused about people saying that there is no meaningful choice anymore. You don’t HAVE to use the mastery respec. You can totally leave your characters locked in stone and roll up another character for a different mastery. Is it sub-optimal? Sure, but you have that choice. If you chose to go down a more optimal route and respec instead, aren’t you just proving that the devs were right to put it into the game?