Just wanted to say thanks for finally implementing this. This is a feature that kept bothering me every time I played since beta.
I shall return! Thanks for taking feedback!
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Intresting to me is what happened with the idendity is important and so on and so forth talk of EHG. They add mastery respecc but still no auto pick up for shards or a reset all button for the passive tree?
To me this looks like itās against everything EHG ever wanted on top of starting at the wrong end of the community feedback. But thatās just my personal take on it. Iām happy for everyone who thought this change is important.
Canāt wait for what is happening next that will make the game more generic 
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Isnāt that already in game for a while now? Sorry if Iām wrong, but I remember they announcing something like that
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EHG always said they are listening to feedback and things change.
What bothers me, is that they now will add it without any bigger implementation, just a mere click of a button in a respec menu.
No stipulations, nothing.
This is like going from 0 to 100.
This is the 2nd major thing that will be added/changed that I personally massively diagree with (together with Stash Cost Reduction).
But with thi now, I am very worried that other things that I was very happy to see EHG having a firm stance will change as well over time.
The community will now move goalposts further and further.
The next thing people want will be a Armory, now that the mastery will no longer be an integral part of that one character.
With all the great upcoming changes, stuff like this leaves me with a bad taste.
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It is. Itās been available since 1.1, I think. Iāve used it a few times already.
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LoL then I overlooked this completley and clicked like a donky 
.
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I think theyāre panicking because of all of the negative forum posts, at this point. And itās becoming more apparent that the competition in the market is causing them to pivot.
Really, you think that? Cause those posts seem like a grain of sand in the desert out here.
Most of them are populated by the same 5~6 people who are actively requesting this, and none of them has a substantial amount of upvotes.
They could be packing over something else, definitely not over the very few negative forum posts on this matter.
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To be fair, the other side of the issue is also defended by the same 5~6 people (of which I am one).
Iād say EHG is more aware of the number of people on either side and their stance on it, collecting it not only from the forum but from discord, steam and discord.
Iāll check out the new season, but I have to say that a free mastery respec without any costs has placed a huge damper on my enthusiasm for it. Character identity is something that is very important for me and it pains me that the only really important choice you can make now is your class.
I find it quite likely that Iāll start consuming LE in much shorter periods at a time, like I did with D3.
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I have to assume youāre being sarcastic ā¦
Between LE official forums, and the steam discussion forums ā¦ It appears to me that their are much more complaint posts than anything elseā¦ Itās a lot of complaining, and then asking for help/advice.
Very fair argument, and one Iām fearing about as well.
Loadouts/Armory/whatever only makes sense if thereās a limitation in some way to realize a variety of builds. Given the change with the mastery respec though thatās gone, so itās not needed anymore as you can have your 5 characters in Legacy, Cycle, Cycle SSF, HC and HC SSF at the same time (The only one missing being Legacy SSF hence). Thereās no incentive for more anymore. The only improvement now would be to increase character limit to 30 to include Legacy SSF as well, and then theyāre ādoneā.
Thatās very fairā¦ but also very worrying.
The missing content for longevity is a bit thing to take into consideration which causes the negative notions in the forum. Also lack of qualitative implementation is the next. Because letās be fairā¦ campaign is in an awful state, dungeons are in an awful state, Arena is extremely barebones still (but has at least improved a bit over time) and quite repetitive, so only catering to a very small percentileā¦ and Monolith progression was also fairly barebones.
1.2 will fix the core loop to a vast degree if the web will be enjoyable and properly balanced.
But then weāre also in quality of provided content. We have the MG faction which isnāt āgreatā, dismantling itself and being a bother for Legacy hence, sufficing only for a ācommonā cycle-length to stay functioning.
We also have a crafting system thatās been adjusted from a āinvisible RNGā state (got no clue how to word it properly) to one which has switched to a fixed loss-state after a rather nominal amount of crafting tries. Which sadly donāt fit for the scarcity of provided loot drops, especially so given that the variety of top-end item options has increased since a while in quite a drastic way. The crafting re-work was fantastically fitting when it was implementedā¦ but with experimental affixes and the scarcity of them it became a little wonkyā¦ and with the faction implementation at release as well as overall drop-rate increase through CoF (and second-hand acquisition through MG) it simply became broken. Now with champion affixes on top itāll be outright decrepit. Similar to PoEās delve affixes and Incursion affixes. They are great, they are thereā¦ but actually getting an item which could become even ādecentā rather then just being garbage because of scarcity and crafting limitations is just so ridiculously small that itās not worthwhile to even try.
The issue I see is that the mechanics arenāt ācoherrentā to each other anymore. Each on their own is a good implementation, but interacting over time with each other they just fall flat. EHG does implement great thingsā¦ but without thinking what those great things will affect besides the direct stuff it does. Those other mechanics need all to be adjusted accordingly to fit into a grand big plan rather then standing on their own.
If itās that then theyāre pivoting away from what makes their game long-term successful though. Iāve mentioned it beforeā¦ EHG needs to choose who to cater towards. Weāve got long-term implementations with a clear focus on loooooong term grinding (crafting mechanic combined with champion affixes in the current state, Uber Aberroth) but also implementations for the casual market once more (Mastery respec).
Theyāre simply shooting themselves in the foot by not putting their stance down and dedicating themselves to a target audience. The gameās all over the place rather then coherent for a specific clientele.
Those topics are coming from people with low time investment, but regularly. Thatās a good counterpoint to that argument you make.
Casual players which deem it worthwhile to interact with the Forum will leave a post about stuff and then leave, at best following their own topic and maybe 1-2 more. Thatās why theyāre not overlapping with high vote counts.
Then we have āpolitical directedā themes rarelyā¦ but they always blow up. Rarely seen, but when they get massive amounts of posts and upvotesā¦ but implementing them will usually be nothing the majority cares about and a large portion of the posting and upvoting people will not even āconsumeā the product in any meaningful amount to substantiate success for the company.
And last we have the āregularā posts. Larger sized commonly, often more unique stances, can go either/or. Middling investment and often a few upvotes. But they donāt come up often as the casual ones and they also donāt tend to blow up āas bigā post-wise as the political ones. Butā¦ theyāre easy to see if liked or not instead.
So itās not as straightforward to discern things as the systems in place make it seems.
Iāll gesture over to PoE 2 in the potential future. Still very identity based, not as zoom-focused as 1, complexity reduced and issues likely to be gradually ironed out over time to a large degree where people struggle with in 0.1.
That might be the worthwhile one for that type of stance maybe. LE is in a limbo though, so still could go āeither wayā for the moment. But I agree itās been a detrimental long-term choice for longevity, as I mentioned in a few posts already.
If everythingās silent then everythingās fine commonly. People tend to engage with a topic especially if they either see a problem with something they would want to like to engage more (complain posts), or they simply want to engage more with the overarching topic (the game) but donāt feel like playing at the moment.
If youāre engrossed in the grinding addicition at the specific moment you donāt write anything, becauseā¦ wellā¦ kinda hard to do while hacking your way through hordes of enemies 
So silence is a feedback of āthe gameās extremely well receivedā.
Optimally the mass of posts then is showcases and asks for help rather then any discussions happening as we have here at this exact moment. With posts at the size of what I do write.
Wanting to engage with the game, not enticing enough, hence effort put into the Forum instead.
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To be fair. I can tell you with 100% certainty ascendancy respec is also coming to poe2. Further, many poe1 players continuously complain about poe2ās direction while the game gets more popular.
Most players do not care about stuff like āidentityā and design philosophy. They want fun and fun is what brings new players. There is a balancing act between it all of course, but even the last times I posted 6-8 months ago I was saying mastery respec was going to come. Not as a flex likeā¦āoh Iām rightā, just thatā¦it seemed super obvious.
Nothing interesting, or exciting, for the majority of in being hamstrung by developers dying on random hills of principle. Games should be for us, not them. This is evident in all the recent game failures. The gaming community, in general, is coming back to reality and realising that we donāt need to let developers decide for us based on their vision.
Same thing will happen in poe2, as well. They will change towers, they will change change map completion requirement, etc. All the things people complain aboutājust a matter of time.
Then there will be new things to complain about, haha!
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This just isnt true though? there is no real hard evidence for this. Some games do really well listening to feedback and making the game for the players. And others become cult hits specifically because the creators have a vision and dont listen to the masses.
My friend group understands the nuance of sometimes games just need to be made the wya the devs desire, and sometimes they are not for you and thats okay.
it can start to feel extremely lame when games are constantly warping into some weird sandbox because everyone these days is some munchkin gamer who wants to do 10billion damage and never have to relevel or do anything of effort.
I dont think mastery respec is a hill to die on exactly, but I do think its really silly. the amount of time it takes to level a new character is pathetically small. it still makes you consider the choices you make. Now there is no choice, you just make your sentinel and after it hits level 100 you never level another one again. Guides are going to become worse, ājust respec into this build, I have 0 idea how it works at levels 1-99 or with non perfect gearā because now you have no need to actual progress builds. you just pick the best one for farming, and farm and respec into whatever build you want down the line.
There is going to be lots of knock on effects for the community, leveling is going to get faster, farming is going to get faster, and the market is going to be pegged to whatever mastery is the best among a class because you can just respec, why level as VK if paladin is better? Hell in CoF why not respec for tough bosses like abby? gold is useless to you after a point.
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Yes, Ascendancy respec is no issue though. Itās neglecible.
In PoE the Ascendancy is a bonus mechanic to focus your character in a specific direction. It has no standing on which abilities you can use, only which make the most sense to use.
In LE mastery is the core defining of your character, itās a full-fledged class and provides you with your actual abilities. Itās not āimrpovingā usage, itās actively deciding what youāre even allowed to use.
Thatās a major difference.
Most people also donāt understand that game-design mandatorily causes in-built frictions to cause you to get your fun. Imagine playing a game with all resources at max, hence a cheat-engine where you have all progress already in your hands. Character slapped on with the best equipment, limitless gold, god-mode and one-shotting everything.
Nothing to do anymore, right? Aberroth is the same as your level 1 trash mob. No challenge, nothing to overcome.
Character identity is a measure of how much friction is existing related to creating a character. The more strict it is while more distinct options are there the more replay-value a game has.
If you need to choose between a warrior, a rogue, a mage, a cleric, a priest, aā¦ you get the gist. The more there is the more likely youāll start a new character to experience a game in a completely new way.
Removing masteries is reducing those choices to a third simply. No more 15 charactersā¦ now youāre done after 5. Your lightning throwing mage is similar to your fireball throwing mage after all.
Butā¦ your lightning throwing mage is not similar to a guy which needs to slap a mace into the face of the enemy, it changes the play-style fundamentally. And itās also not the same to having minions running aroundā¦ which is not the same to a trap-laying focused character, or a DoT-AoE laying character or a totem-placing character or a shapeshifting/stance-shifting character. Those are archetypes. LE has different archetypes through different masteries commonlyā¦ your Mage now can be close-range melee (spellblade) or direct-hit range at the same time. Only one char needed rather then before. Thatās reducing replay-value massively.
Itās not hamstringing. Itās a expansion of complexity similar to using resistance types rather then simply having āArmorā only. Or to include shield together with HP rather then solely having HPā¦ or to include DoT rather then causing everything to do direct damage.
It changes play-styles fundamentally, and the more you have the more often youāll pick up the game and say āYeah, thereās still something to exploreā as well as more options to have āyour styleā which is most liked included.
Not even remotely. Actually the contrary. Gaming gradually returns to providing more choices and more variety rather then putting that aside in favor of āshiny non-essential gimmicksā.
Why? Because the shiny games with no substance fail reliably while it doesnāt matter if people hate on a game as long as thereās a substantially sized group which enjoyes the gameplay itself. Content of a game matters the least, as long as mechanically it causes you to simply enjoy it.
Thatās why nobody cares that you shoot stuff in Palworld with a gun or enslave humanoid characters to work on your farmā¦ actually making jokes about it. But people rip apart games like the new Assassinās Creed because it provides basically the exact same mechanics like the first one (with a few improvements) but is solely hinged on graphics and story presentation.
Nobody cares about the Story in Minecraft because it simply provides good gameplay as a baseline and makes you addicted to the game itself. Everyone cares about the storyline of āOri and the Blind Forestā because thatās the core thing pulling people in.
And Iām not talking against SP games here, those aspects are mandatory and important for those games. Presentation matters always. But the priority of presentation takes a vastly lower position when youāre talking about a game meant to be played repeatedly, over years, optimally hundreds of hours per year per player, with ongoing costs.
Welcome to live-service games. They need to focus on mechanics or they fail, because a story pulls you in once and is told afterwards nearly forever, until you forget what it was about for mostā¦ and graphics also get āoldā to look at, watching the same sunset for 20 years is nothing people generally do, they want a new sunset to have a new feeling. Mechanics cause complexity and hence provide you with many many changing new feelings which fade away optimally that when you got to the end the first ones are once more āfreshā again. A - nearly - perpetual cycle is what games like LE thrive to achieve because they are enforced to achieve that.
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What do you mean? Every game that doesnāt perform well is because they misread consumer interest or they decided they thought they knew better. There is 40 years of hard evidence.
Becoming a ācult hitā is directly related of not performing wellāit means a specific group liked it, but not the majority. If sales are amazing, it is not a cult hitā¦it means the developer had a vision people liked and its a successful game. LE is a ācult hitā. They donāt want this because they are smart and want money.
Itās a bit more complex then that, but yes, a good portion falls into that category. Mostly large games nigh always do.
For small-scale productions itās mostly PR, positioning, general āpresenceā. Thereās a good chunk of failed games out there which simply had no customers because nobody knew they existed. And thereās functional games which should be at the top of the list for a genre but arenāt because people donāt know they even exist.
A prime example is actually Minecraft, which is a monolith of gaming. Some guy wanted to make a mod for it, came to the limits of the engine and decided to make his own game in the same style instead, called āVintage Storyā.
Itās vastly more immersive, more detailed, in-depth, allows more creative freedom, has a better lore implementation and far more meaningful mechanics for the survival aspect, which many people in Minecraft do argue about in that community still nowadays.
Why isnāt that nearly as big as Minecraft though despite sloooowly gaining traction? Because itās not on Steam (and hence nigh invisible) while also doing no PR. Butā¦ if someone enjoys Minecraft itās likely theyāll default towards Vintage story instead over long-term, and the game is still a Alpha game by far, offering āmoreā then Vanilla Minecraft does despite only having 2 of 13 chapters of the story included as well as a ton of planned feature not even being in the conceptual stage yet. And a really active modder scene too.
Other reasons are simply that a game is badly designed. Lack of ability or time invested from a developer. Often ātrash gamesā which have a wrong focus. For example thereās a ASCII style game called āCataclysm: Dark Days Aheadā out, open-source, which has a massive following despite beingā¦ wellā¦ ASCII style. Some dev decided to make a real-time version with better graphics, same style, vastly vastly less content and being extremely āclunkyā though, but following the CDDA style of design. Called āZED ZONEāā¦ and the game does badly despite being actively developed still.
Misreading consumer interest is a big one, and often worthy a facepalm. And āthinking to know betterā is also often worth a facepalm and is the same baseline reasoning, consumer interest. And while prevalent not the only reason by far. Actually the least likely as it needs to be qualitative viable and without ābetter competitionā around at the moment.
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Not really. Dark Souls has always been a cult hit and only became more mainstream with Elden Ring. The majority of people donāt like Dark Souls. And yet they have done pretty good.
And they have also refused to add a lot of basic QoL features that many players demanded, like quest trackers, for example.
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Agreed. I still donāt get how some people can be so opposed to this other than just being stubborn about things that have always been this way.
Even if the campaign is fun the first time around, obviously itās going to have less of an impact on subsequent playthroughs when youāve already seen all the twists and turns. Hence why they added some skips, but if they recognized that people had that desire to skip it, why keep the half-hearted compromise? If someone actually likes going through the campaign every single time they want to play a new buildā¦ then great. Do that. If you like it you shouldnāt need to be forced to do it right? So why would you care if others did what they found fun?
The only thing I somewhat dislike about this is the idea of there just being one leveling build for every class. But is that that different from how things are now? Right now we just have one leveling build for each mastery. Either way youāre playing one character for the first few hours before you get to change to the real character you want to play. So does it make that much of a difference if you swap mastery instead of merely swapping skills, passives, blessings, gear, etc? If anything the solution is just better balance and design. It sucks that a decent number of the skills are just noob traps if you try to use them before you can put together some specific gear late game. (And some just suck forever.) If all the skills were closer in viability while leveling it wouldnāt matter as much that thereās technically some optimal leveling build out there.
Because, while we might like to run the campaign, we also donāt like to feel ineffective. If running the campaign gets you to endgame in 10-15h and adventure mode (like in D3) gets you to endgame in 1-2h, then running the campaign feels bad. Even if you like it.
Likewise, if you like making alts, having a loadout system (again, like in D3) takes away that enjoyment. Why would you spend a bunch of hours making a new character, when you can simply click a button and switch builds at will?
Not to mention that this option kinda removes your need for choices. You simply make one build that is full single target and one build that is full clear and you donāt have to compromise to run the content. You just go all the way with either option and switch according to what youāre going to do next.
Having options isnāt always good. If LE implemented an option for a god mode where youāre immortal and one-shot everything, you wouldnāt have to use it. But it would effectively kill LE.
Lastly, itās about the game design and the target playerbase. Until now, LE was clearly targetted towards making alts. So players that like making alts and that like the feeling that choices matter were attracted to LE.
With this change, the identity of the game shifts. Itās no longer targetted at those players. There is a single choice that matters in the game and that is your base class. Nothing else is permanent or even has a great inconvenience.
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Because a massive part of a enjoyable campaign is ensuring you also provide a mechanical baseline challenge. If itās one utter boring unbalanced snooze-festival like LEās is then obviously people ask to just throw it into the gutter. Itās a hassle to do it.
Iām ok-ish with replaying the PoE 1 campaign, not a fan, I donāt mind it though. I gladly re-play the PoE 2 campaign because it challenges you every time againā¦ and I barely can stomach the LE campaign because I fall asleep while trying to ask myself āwhen is it finally over?ā
If my only goal is to āget to the good partā then that only means what Iām doing is ābadā, isnāt it?
Soā¦ campaign rework, not removal (skip) is my choice there. I see campaign skips as a failure of the devs to provide a proper product.
No, but the current stage is also bad. Switching a pile of poop with a pile of poop with a nice hat doesnāt make it better