Either way, I still don’t think people are going to do it because levelling the skills will take too long.
Not really? When you’re high level you get your skills leveled in 2-3 echoes, at most. That will be enough to prevent switching every time you want to fight a boss, but not enough to prevent lining up all bosses in several timelines and then switching once to do them all. It’s not “profitable” to do it for one boss, but it should be if you’re doing many in a row.
However, this is already possible with the current system. Mastery respec doesn’t change this, it just increases the options (and potential temptation) threefold.
I want to make it clear that I’m not asking that this should be removed. Respec is basically a spectrum with no respec at all in one end (like old D2), going through very limited build respec, easy build respec, mastery respec and ending with class respec at the other end.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with placing yourselves at any point of this spectrum. Each player will have their comfort zone at some point of it and this will determine whether they enjoy the way it is in any game or not.
My only issue with this is that you’ve always said mastery is your class, it’s an important part of the character identity and that you had no plans to ever change this. And I identified a lot with this stance.
Pivoting on this makes it seem like you don’t care about character identity anymore and that feels disappointing to me.
Like Heavy said, the fact that we don’t need to commit to a mastery makes masteries feel less exciting somehow.
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Its good that the team will keep an eye on how mastery respecing goes. And hopefully make changes to it as time goes.
Tbh it having a gold cost oh lets say 1mil (we do not know exactly what the cost will be in gold) isnt enough even 5mil imo isnt enough. Why? Merchants guild. Heck even 1mil gold for CoF player (like myself) is easy to come by. Mastery respecing shouldnt be easy to do imo
Why? Players in MG will have far more of an ability to flip flop masteries at will vs CoF. Which in turn changes things for players that otherwise do not want to trade but do want to experiment. Item factions was about do u want to trade or not. A gold cost for mastery respec changes this.
The frequent switching is something that will happen in MG as well as make non trade players go trade that otherwise wouldnt just to swap on the fly.
What im trying to say is if the team wants mastery respec to be for new players or to fix bricked builds. Gold cost isnt enough of a downside to it. There needs to be more weight to the decision to switch. Especially when u look at the system together with MG players.
Imo the switch frequency is there with how mastery respecing is going to cost gold. If the team doesnt want that flip flopping like the team was concerned about with item factions. Mastery respec just needs more of a punishment to prevent that Especially for MG players.
Best way to prevent all of what i said is to do something similar to diablo 2 respecing. And remove gold completely as the cost to respecing mastery. Id also agree with the person that said using those shades. And making it a 4th dungeon but for mastery respecing as the reward. That we use to face before getting to pick our mastery class. Lvl locking ur mastery selection oh say around lvl 65 is another good way to prevent this frequent switching. Gold here would still work up to the lvl where ur mastery becomes locked in.
These suggestions others and i have said. Would fit alot better with the teams goal of help new players and bricked builds. Currently gold cost to switch isnt going to bring about the intentions the team has for mastery respecing at least IMO.
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I think folks here are severely exaggerating the potential issue that would come with being able to freely swap.
It’s easy sit around and nit-pick any changes prior to implementation. I understand the “rose-tint” which creates some resistance to change, but Mike (and dev team), lets be honest … It is the same people on these forums that are the ones resistant to the change, not the general community/average Joe gamer.
While its important to keep the long-term players and supports happy, the general population does not care if respec aligns with a “previous vision”, or not. They want to enjoy a seasonal game they might play for 1-2 months per season. That is great that people here do, and want to preserve something, but I want more people to play this game. not less.
Those people that don’t like respec’s…can just not do it?
3 Likes
For some reason, that’s not a good enough argument for the people who are against it.
It’s almost like they could have done a community poll and addressed this major change in philosophy on a grand scale, something they’ve done before for other important issues (Patch 1.2 Timeline, 1.1 Event Updates, and Cycle Poll).
They’ve literally done this song and dance before. Announce something. There’s backlash from part of the community, they release poll. Just skip the backlash and release a poll. “hey guys, we’ve been reconsidering our design philosophy on Mastery Respecs, here’s a poll to get a pulse on how you, the community, feel about this change.” throw in a handful of options to get a general idea of how the community feels, and decide based on that. If the 5-10 of us in this thread upset by the change are the only people in the community who would be upset by it, then I’d completely concede my point. But the fact is it’s been a point of debate for over 5 years and even as recently as November 2024 the devs had no intent to make this change.
Edit: as I’ve said though. What’s done is done. It will be implemented whether we like it or not. I just hope that things don’t get worse because of Flavor of the Month changes like this and WASD taking up dev time from actually important changes like finishing masteries that are missing skills and the lack of class identity for masteries like Shaman.
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Relevel is not that hard. It will stop from mastery respec a very lil % of players. And nearly 0 % of them are hardmode meta blasters. They will find how make it back to 20 in less then a minute. Probably somehow with coop play and Exp echoes 
Because it isnt. Thats like saying u dont like having a campaign skip like d3/4 dont use it. When that is the most efficient way to get to end game.
Same thing with mastery respec. (We dont know how much gold it will cost. We do know it will cost gold) why would i wast my time rolling a new character when i can just respec my mastery.
The other issue is masteries for 5+ yrs where considered ur class. LE had 15 now its foing to be only 5. EHG took a hard stance on this. EHG has a hard time closing the door on things and keeping it closed. Mike says offten nothing is off the table.
So now what is the next thing they have taken a hard stance on that will now change.
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The general community would gladly take cheats and bugged broken builds a lot of the time 
just because something is wanted by the majority does not mean its good for the game.
The majority want campaign skip, if they add that we are basically on the d3 pipeline where basically seasons will be over in 3 days because anyone who isnt extremely casual can just beat it in 3 days.
Majority want 4lp to drop like candy, at the end of the day, I fall somewhere in the middle. but at this point its just a matter of philosophy.
Removing mastery lock is a limited form of campaign skip, because its 10 less campaigns someone who wanted to play all classes at level 100 needs. Rather then improving the campaign experience or early end game experience, the fix is to just let you change. Hit level 90 on a class you dont want anymore? just swap because “ewww i dont wanna have to play all the boring parts of the game” perhaps maybe we should make those parts not boring?
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Just an hypothesis but maybe they didn’t do it because of the lull the game is in, right now ? The playerbase is scattered across all ARPGs since we are 8 months after the last official Cycle/Season. A poll would maybe be ‘skewed’ by the fact that it’s only a few thousand of players, probably mostly uber veterans, engaging with the game nowaday.
Yeah, there is a streamer that already evoked a few days ago the idea of switching between a mono-grinder and a boss killer build. Of course, that was already possible within a mastery but the number of effective builds to switch to was quite limited; now it’s three times that number and finding a combo like that is easier than ever. Of course, it would be such a ‘try-hard technique’, but when content becomes hard enough that it’s better to have specialized builds, I think that’s realistic to say that we will see that kind of behavior. Pushing the limits in a not-so-fun way, just because it’s optimal.
And I agree with people here saying that that lessens the character identity feeling. I was hoping that EHG was going to eventually reinforce the character identity, not lessen it. Find ways to make each character more unique, not more interchangeable.
For exemple, maybe a customizable ‘Title’ that you gain when you complete X thing (Campaign? Aberoth kill?) that you choose from preselectioned keywords ? Even if the multiplayer / social aspect is very limited (and it’s not an mmo), I’d like to see on my character sheet “Bob, Voidshatter Beast”. Customizable BUT permanent title; once choosed, you can only toggle it on and off, not changing it on a whim.
Or maybe a customizable non-tradeable item for killing Julra at X tier ? After killing Julra, a second altar, similar to the one for crafting legendaries, appears in the backroom. It’s a one-shot (once per character that killed Julra) machine that changes the appearance and the name of the item. Here again, the name must be chosen from a list of keywords. But warning : the item becomes character-bound; so even within a league, only ‘Bob, Voidshatter Beast’ would be able to equip the ‘Nightmare Rose’, a legendary Dreamthorn with 3 juicy affixes that I slapped on it. The Rose would have the skin of the Katana and a black tint or glow to it. (Please let me be a 12 years old edgy kid for a second.)
Of course, that’s just brainstorming suggestions but that’s the kind of direction I was (and still am) hoping to see LE go towards. More meaningful customization that helps makes my character unique and memorable, instead of being an interchangeable Mr. Potato Head.
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That is because the people that use it don’t seem to have the capacity to understand the other side and dismiss it. There were already plenty of justifications on why this isn’t a valid argument.
But I’ll give it another go:
Imagine Elden Ring and the rest of the souls games from FromSoftware. Hard games that brutally punish players. Lots of people love them because of that. Lots of people also hate that it’s so hard and want them to be easier.
If FromSoftware were to implement a difficulty slider into Elden Ring so you could have a casual playthrough, the current fans of Elden Ring would have the option not to use it. However, most would simply leave. And why?
Because Elden Ring would stop being a “brutally hard game that punishes and challenges players” and would start being “an accessible game that has a hard mode”. It would be an entirely different game that appeals to entirely different people.
It wouldn’t necessarily make Elden Ring better or worse. Just a different game. And changing it after it being out for a year or 2 would cause the people that currently love it to go away, even if they still had the option to use that slider all the way to max. Because not being easy and not having an easy mode is a big part of the game’s identity.
Likewise, this change makes it so LE stops being a game that encourages altoholics (which it did) to one that doesn’t. So altoholics that liked LE because of that, now don’t enojoy it as much anymore. Some even enough to stop playing altogether. Even if they have the option to not to do it.
Because, and this is important, the majority of players don’t enjoy playing a game in a way the game doesn’t want you to.
6 Likes
So I guess the key question ends up being, “will this change chase away more players then it brings back?” and the only people that will know that are EHG.
1 Like
Yes, that has always been the question. On the multiple threads we’ve had about mastery respec over the years it’s been stated multiple times that it’s all about game identity and who EHG wants playing the game.
It was true before mastery respec and it remains true after mastery respec.
Although the question isn’t simply player numbers, but also player retention. Meaning how long do they actually play each season. After all, plenty of players that don’t like mastery respec might still keep playing, but just play 50 or 100h when they previously played 200h or more. And new players may come but that only play for 20h.
As you said, only EHG can know if it was worth it for them or not to change.
But do you finally understand why simply having the option not to do something isn’t enough to please players, why this might drive some away, and why this isn’t a good argument?
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I totally understand why you and others feel that to be the case, but so far, nobody has offered any actual proof to support the claims. Honestly, we don’t have that data, and the only people who would have it are EHG themselves, and unless they are willing to provide that data, both sides are just taking about personal opinions/ tiny sample sizes.
This single forum is a great example. The tiny amount of people posting on it have different opinions on if this is good or bad for the game/ community.
1 Like
My point was never if it was good or bad for the game or the community as a whole. That is EHG’s decision to make and they made it.
My point was simply that “You don’t have to use it” isn’t a good argument for people that don’t like that option. That’s all.
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Completely agree with this.
However it is a great addition for those who have an incredibly limited amount of time to play due to their life being very busy. This is the only benefit I think it will have, and I believe the downsides heavily outweigh this.
I liked the idea of slowly building up and making a character for each class, partly because of a “completionist” drive, but also because it was necessary to fully explore every corner of each class. Now that I can respec the mastery whenever I feel and then spend 60-100k gold of my tens of millions to instantly max out the tree it just really dampens that enjoyment and will also lessen my future playtime considerably.
3 Likes
I just watched the Ziz/Rax interview with EHG and their proposed solution seems pretty good, except for one detail.
Basically, your mastery respec cost goes up with each level. I think they said at 80-ish it’s about 500k gold. So I do have to give props to EHG once again. This system is bound to please both sides of this issue.
However, tying it to gold seems to be inherently unfair to CoF players. MG already has an easier time getting stash tabs (when CoF are the ones that actually need them more). This just gives them one more advantage over CoF.
At this point I’m on board with Kulze’s idea of removing gold as the MG currency, because it seems that the inequalities only tend to increase over time.
Anyway, I’m happy with this system for mastery respec (especially if you do remove the MG/CoF inequality). We invest in our characters and once you’re a high enough level the cost is significant enough that you won’t be doing it lightly and it still retains the identity.
And if you do decide to respec a mastery, the high cost will also make it a meaningful choice.
My apologies to @EHG_Mike for doubting you guys.
3 Likes
That’s a good thing for those people. Said people are normaly hit with the “if you don’t have time don’t play time intensive games… duh!” club of the narrowminded.
Then again the calculation is rather easy. Before the change you had a maximum timeframe of playing 15 toons to 100 and now it’s enough to play 5 to 100. Sure this example is very simple but the ammount of needed time to get every class to 100 was cut down by 2/3 because we are able to switch masterys. I think the least ammount of people will go for the maximum from now on.
This is a win for people with little to no time and most likely a retention loss over all in the long run. So I played my Necro now I make my Lich… waaaait a second I just click one button.
No offense here DJ, but you seem to be very easy to please with a solution like that.
That was already expected and you are still “giving props” for them for a very basic solution that isn’t anything special and was very obvious.
The only thing to make me personally happy on top of having such a decent gold cost associoated with it to make me happy withou any more nouanced systems as discussed here earlier or in other threads would be either one or both of these:
- Have the cost ramp up extensively per mastery respec used on a given character
- Give it a hard cap amount of how many times you can do it. (3 times, that would be enough to swap 2 tiems to test the otehr 2 masteries and the 3rd swap to go back to whatever mastery you enjyoed the most)
4 Likes
I have to agree with Heavy here, 500k isn’t insignificant for lv 80, but it’s also not so significant that I’d rather just start a new character. I have two characters in the current cycle a lv 10 Sentinel and a lv 64 Necromancer. I finished the campaign and the first Normal Monolith Timeline and I’m sitting at 291,968 Gold.
A single echo (Rare Axes) where I sold a single full inventory took me roughly 6m30s to clear and brought me to 300,170, earning me 8,202 Gold or ~1.2k/min
And that’s with normal monoliths at lv 64. It would take me ~7 hours of farming to earn 500k at these rates. That’s without a gold shrine, without an actual loot filter, and without having an actually strong build. 7 hours of playtime per Respec, while again, isn’t insignificant, it’s definitely faster than making a new character
Edit: it’ll prevent hotswapping for content for most players, but it doesn’t give the character any identity back