Yay, finally! Mastery respec. You brought me back!

General
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Early game rework is mostly balancing first and foremost. Sure, some things need to be re-made from scratch as they’re not fitting, but primarily it’s a good start to begin with pure and simple ‘values’. That would be a nice thing. Much like ‘values’ for baseline class balancing would be kinda nice to have handled.
We’ve got quite a bit of ‘outdated and never adjusted content’ from pre release, that all should’ve gotten a major workover latest with 1.0, but didn’t.

It’s because there is content… but it’s so bad you don’t wanna engage with it.

Now imagine it was good enough to enjoy engaging with it, so you basically have a choice to make. Adding content or improving content.
If we have 40 hour of content (for a decently quick player first-character) and 10 hours suck then you enjoy 75% of it.
Now you can baseline remove the need for the 10 hour non-fun stuff… so you’re left with ‘this game has 30 hours of content.’ Loosing basically 25% play-time total, which is kinda substantial, and noooot good with a live-service game.
Or you improve it at the cost of top-end content being added. So you make it ‘40 hours of play-time’ period.

The other 2 could’ve turned to 50 hours maybe, or more.

But that’s not quite the situation we’ve going on now actually when we look at it.

We got ‘10 hours suck’ and they suck, always. Because it’s still there after all. You just don’t have to repeat it now. But you’ll still have 10 sucky playing hours. That is the point which shouldn’t happen.
So actually ‘removing it’ would solve the issue, but no compaign, only Monoliths? Not kinda the direction to go, the most effort of the whole game is put into the campaign. Story, mini-cinematics, specific animations, NPC behavior, quests… all there, designed, implemented, tried to be balanced. That would simply have to ‘go’. No more story to actually avoid that and not look back to say ‘Yeah, those 10 hours felt kinda wasted’ every cycle.

That’s why I say ‘improve it’.
But… if you improve it… so it doesn’t feel crappy… why would you need to avoid it?

That’s the main point there.

It at least feels like it, yeah. That’s my worry there. Bad sign, but needed to be done. Nonetheless they’ll have to deal with the fallout of that and rightfully so.

In the grand scheme of things it’s a sort of ‘small no man’s sky situation’, Provide shitty product but improve it over time after initial sales with hype. Barely done properly, but has been done.
Still, shouldn’t have turned crappy from the start, and that time is viable to call out and say ‘Yeah, it wasn’t right back then, but they made up for it’. Now EHG has to ‘make up for it’ simply, nobody is denying them that… but until then they simply can’t expect for us to clap our hands and praise them… because it’s not praise-worthy simply.

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It depends. I think if the campaign were essentially the same structure/type of content, even if it were a really solid 10/10 first play experience… I’m still not sure I’d want to replay it. I’m just not the kind of person who replays games. I play lots of games that are built to be played a lot such as roguelikes, multiplayer games, and ARPGs (the endgame). But honestly I can’t think of a time I’ve replayed a whole single player game even if it was one I really enjoyed. I love the souls games but I have not done a second playthrough of any of them besides sort of Elden Ring, but that was because I was an idiot and went to NG+ so I had to get my character back to the DLC entrance. When the Halo MCC came out on PC I grabbed that because I had a lot of nostalgia for the series… but I never actually ended up finishing any of the campaigns. Oh I guess I did a second play-through of BG 3, but there’s enough variety in the choices you can make that it feels very different a second time through. (I managed to accidentally kill some characters on my first playthrough so I got to see some story lines I entirely missed lol.)

Some things are just meant to be a good experience once and that’s fine. It’s just a shame that I have to replay it in spite of that if I want to play the bits I do like to repeat. Even if it were good, campaign in an ARPG is just a time when you don’t get to do the thing you actually came to do: Play some cool build.

I’ve actually thought it might be fun if there were some way to make ARPGs a bit more rogue-likey. The thing I like about roguelikes as a repeatable game is that because you don’t know what’s going to happen before the run, you don’t have to do any planning. You just go in fresh, see what the game offers you, try to make it work and see if you can turn it into some awesome build. So as you play, even if you’re playing fairly similar content each time, your decisions always matter and if the game is deep enough you’ll find yourself in very different scenarios each run for a long time. By comparison, with ARPGs, despite the randomness involved in finding loot, you do play under the assumption that you’ll eventually get what you’re looking for outside of some ultra-rare chase items. So you can and should plan out your entire build, including what your ideal gear is, before you even start. It creates a big mental speedbump that makes it harder to start playing, but more relevant to this discussion is what it does to your experience playing through the game and experiencing variance. Since you aren’t looking to go with the flow, the randomness isn’t a source of variety, it’s just a random time variable for how long it’ll take you to find exactly what you want and anything else is just a dud. So the leveling experience essentially just becomes a holding pattern. You’re not making any decisions that you haven’t already planned out in advance and nothing can really happen during the campaign that’s going to make it feel like a meaningfully different experience. So there’s just not much replay value once you’ve seen the unique content and story.

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Well… then what’s the difference between playing 2 rounds of a rogue-like - which essentially is playing the same game twice - and a campaign?

Sure, one’s longer, but for the rogue-like you wanna either play differently or get further then before, or see how your RNG causes you to build this time, so the variety and fresh experience.

Campaigns generally do a bad job at providing this feeling, because they don’t need to, they’re meant to be played once, so the gameplay itself can be more ‘generic’ then what we see at the repeatable gameplay. The balancing also doesn’t need to be that good.
But here I can only gesture over to the PoE 2 campaign once more… which does a fantastic job - besides itemization issues - to cause you to enjoy it a second or third time because the content itself is not ‘babying you’. It’s not extremely hard… but it demands attention, you’re always at the risk of death (for missplays, not RNG issues) and especially at bosses it’s very mechanical and has fantastic telegraphs which still demand tight timing though without becoming overbearing. They did a fantastic job with that there.

So while a replay of the campaign there isn’t ‘great’, still the campaign… it’s at least not a ‘chore’ you wanna leave behind as swiftly as possible. You’re at least ‘fine’ with it. It’s not a detriment but a neutral thing there.

Yes, it is.
But it needs to be different if they’re meant to not be ‘once off’ things.

And that’s the aspect which needs to be at least a bit adjusted.

Optimally? Multiple routes, different personal outcome choices… it’s time-travel with the MC trying to fix the world, so the alternate timelines would make a good addition. Severe changes, branching options, basically ‘exploring the possible outcome choices and the butterfly effect coming from it’. No Emperor in one, in another the dragons take actually over and aren’t stopped, Eterra living but being corrupted… I mean… it’s time travel, the options are open. I would definitely enjoy for EHG to implement a way to re-visit your timeline played with fittingly dangerous enemies and respective rewards available, and the timelines you can create being expanded over time.

Because as you say:

That’s something which can change everything after all. BG 3 has such vastly different feeling outcomes because they worked on creating them, a player never seeing even a fraction of the available game.

Now imagine when there’s steady routes implemented, the majority would only be different zones and NPC interactions, but the animations of those NPCs would already all be made since they are already existing, so it’s a far quicker creation then making a full new chapter. And the playthrough would feel unique enough to warrant re-doing it several times, the more options there are… the more warranted it becomes. Long-term project which doesn’t need ‘a full chapter per cycle’ but rather adding 1-2 branches into it. Like… an alternative quest which then merges back to the original route… and over time going from there, making it a complex web of choices.

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I wasn’t really a fan of PoE 2’s campaign. I think it’s a great example of trying to mix genres that don’t gel well together. The damage in places seems tuned to make you need to use the newly added dodge roll as though it was going to be a slow and deliberate soulsy game. Except it’s not. It’s still an ARPG with hoards of monsters spewing clouds of particle effects. So expecting anyone to read what’s going on and dodge shit, especially in melee, is kind of absurd.

The funny thing is the bosses were actually the easier part of the experience for me. The trash areas had random difficulty spikes where things just deleted me and it didn’t feel like there was much I could do about it but farm some more. Meanwhile the bosses had nicely telegraphed attacks, but also my build was surprisingly good at bursting down a boss, so after a certain point I didn’t even need to fight most of them for that long.

As far as LE’s campaign, I’d love it if they did something like that, but considering they couldn’t even finish the campaign before 1.0 or even 2 patches down the line, I’m not holding my breath on them redesigning it to have a bunch of different paths and content. But yeah. The time travel part of the story is really under-utilized. There are all sorts of cool things they could have done.

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Yay, finally! Mastery respec. You brought me back!

Honestly for me it’s the opposite. I was excited for S2 to finally go back to LE, again put up with my crappy pc to play this game to now lost all motivation because of watering down the last meaningfull choice the game had. At this point i wonder why we still have Specialization at all, when you have half of each tree accessable anyway and now the specialization isn’t even final anymore and can be swaped any time, then why not just scrap it and let us freely invest in everything because that feature did become now a joke. Heck - why not even scrap class-choice, if it doesn’t even matter you pick your actual classes (specialiazion) then they also can add a respec function for baseline as well. You don’t wanna play acolyte anymore - respec to a rogue or primalist, it just doesn’t matter.

Good thing MH Wilds dropped recently so i’ve something to play until GD Expansion drop because i really don’t see myself playing this season.

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Yeah, it’s really close now to ‘Here, make generic male/female RPG blob’ and that’s it.

Mastery was a distinct limitation, but classes fall into the exact same category.

I have nothing against systems like FF14 does it, but there it makes sense and is well implemented. You have 1 character but simply play up with different classes for the same character. Nicely done.

But LE doesn’t have that… so allowing re-spec inside mastery is causing a character to become a formless mish-mash by a lot more.

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I agree, i’m also not in particular against Videogames doing either a complete classless system where you build your character from the ground, or have some unique spins like FFXIV, where you can learn and level all classes up. But it needs to be done pretty much from the getgo and fits the Concept/Game.

But it feels kinda ‘meh’ when you have Games which are out (actual release not EA/Beta - obviously WIP and Subject to Change) for a while change fundamental stuff like that. And don’t get me wrong, i’m not too stuck in the past either that i’m against all forms of respec where you might be screwed just for a simple mistake… and there are examples out there which IMO do a pretty decent job of making it open enough so you can experiement and put effort into it, but still have more then enough friction that it doesn’t ruin the meaningfull choice, class,- and character identity and replaybility.

I was pretty open about QoL Stuff and other if it comes down to other aspects with respeccing, i can see a Game like LE can be a bit too complex in that regard with all the passive-tree plus skilltree for skills, ontop of that the crafting and other elements like the Dungeons, weaver will items and stuff. But i just hoped atleast the one basic fundamental thing, the actual class coice (which i’d argue specialization are - in what universe a necromancer isn’t threated as a class) should be an actual final, meaningfull choice. And as far as i see / understand it’s not even something you put work or effort in, or there is still a certain limitation like - y’know you can only respec one or twice mastery, or you’ve to grind for a super rare items for. It’s seemingly “do it just on the fly”.

So yeah i’m happy for people who begged for it since a while(and i hope it pays atleast of for EHG to make this change, and not have the opposite of effect), for me it’s right now something however which i’m like: i’m sorry but nope i’M gonna opt-out on this. Maybe i check back at future seasons and adjust to it to a dagree, but i’m really not a fan of this change.

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Not a fan either… especially because of how it was done, completely hidden with no communication of this to the community at all…
I wonder if they made a Poll (you know, like the ones they did before implementing such big and fundamental changes within the game), how would it turn out?
I don’t know… I just don’t see many people requesting this for it to be justifiable…

Damn Tencent… :sweat_smile:

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You may as well complain that people had been able to respec skills, and go from a build focused on AoE when doing monoliths to a build focused on single target damage before fighting Abberoth. People are already able to adapt their builds, the question is whether that’s worth it at all.

Really, being able to respec masteries make sense when comparing Last Epoch to similar action RPGs. Diablo 3 doesn’t have 15 classes, it had 5 when the game was released, same as Diablo 2 and Diablo 4. Last Epoch also has 5 classes. In Path of Exile 1, there aren’t 19 classes - there are 7 classes, each with a few distinct specializations players can change through. Last Epoch is now basically the same.

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The devs have explicitly said, multiple times, that Mastery = Class in Last Epoch. The system is more similar to Grim Dawn/Titan Quest than anything else. You pick a Base class, Defense in Titan Quest for example, then at a specific level/point in the story you pick your second class, Earth in Titan Quest, this makes you a Juggernaut. You gain access to both class trees in their entirety and you can mix and match skills to make your build.

In Last Epoch you pick your base class, Sentinel, and at a specific point in the story you pick your Mastery, Forge Guard, this is your new class you retain access to all Sentinel Skills and Passives as well as all of Forge Guard skills and passives and half of the Void Knight/Paladin skills and passives.

Why even allow mastery Respec if there’s no cost. Just unlock all the skill trees, give access to all the Mastery specific skills/passives and then just let players make builds with the available passive points. There’s literally no difference between the upcoming Mastery Respec system and a system where you have full access to all the Mastery trees.

You’re not a Void Knight anymore. You’re a Sentinel. It goes against everything the team stood for when designing the game the way they did.

You mention that D3 didn’t have 15 classes it had 5 and PoE has 7. Grim Dawn has 45 (54 with the upcoming expansion) possible Mastery combinations, guess what? They’re a permanent choice despite the many people asking for the ability to Respec their masteries. The devs decided that it needed to be a permanent choice even when you can Respec every other aspect of your character. The gender and Mastery selections are permanent.

The next step down this slippery slope is people asking for Loadout Slots so they can hotswap between builds. Despite the fact the EHG already said that they want there to be some penalty to swapping skills, they’ve already gone back on there being a permanent choice with the class Mastery, so why not. Let’s let skills be a free Respec with no penalty and allow players to make loadout with gear/skills/passives/Mastery being changeable. And while we’re at it. Let’s make classes changeable too, there’s no need to have permanent choices in an RPG after all. Some people want to change classes so let’s go against the design philosophy and just let them change classes too.

Edit:

That would require EHG to actually be active on their official forums instead of just reddit/discord.

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Agreed. Not just a single click and a pouch of gold to erase End of Time Gaspar’s “choose wisely!” over and over again. It should be something limited. Something meaningful. Even lowering corruption requires a fight against statues, but here - nope. Click n coin - here u goin! :see_no_evil:

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What’s your point?
I mean… the general direction is ~5 classes otherwise. But… what is the meaning of this amount? Have you thought about that?

In D2 it was mostly because back then development took a substantially longer time for the same things (less sophisticated tools to aid developers) which caused this amount to exist. In D3 it became already a detriment as replay-value substantially reduced with the respec options available there combined with the very simplified way of how you actually define the character.
One would expect improvements of older systems, not regressions or major deviations for a franchise after all. Still, it’s a good casual game, much unlike D2 which needed quite hefty investment and preparation.
D4 has the exact same issue, but unlike D3 it’s worse for longevity even as their - once more adjusted - method of building a character causes them to feel extremely ‘flat’ so to say.

Then we got PoE 1, which yes, has 7 classes, also not many more, right? But first of all… that’s already 2 more then the ‘norm’ and secondly combined with the ‘content focused approach’ (speed-clear, specific content catered, boss-builds) you reduce incentive to re-spec already, combined with the substantially higher effort needed compared to D3 and D4 for the respec, added with the cost attached to it it provides enough impediment to make it seem not worthwhile in the majority of cases.

Now we can look over to LE where passive and skill respec is basically ‘free’. So what impedes you instead to make those decisions? With only a single playstyle available currently? The pure restriction on Mastery, that’s what did it.
To make up for the felt necessity to re-create a character from scratch like in PoE - because the alternative seems not worthwhile - LE provided 15 distinct classes which were not interchangeable. That created the long-term option to get alternative characters up.

Now that’s been reduced to 5, which together with the basically free respec for skills and passive brings the replay valua substantially down, like the Diablo franchise, and provided with the lifetime of the mechanics in the game (long-term itemization which provides extremely few upgrades or even upgrade possibilities in end-game) that have a similar design philosophy for longevity as PoE does it now mismatches simply.

Plainly spoken the better option currently, I agree. Because it increases build variety without major downsides.
The mastery being a simple pick on focus direction, providing that unique effect for choosing it.

It lost all value beyond. Which is a shame.

I’ll do that actually, given that EHGs solution to ‘too little character slots’ is neither unlocking extra ones through monetization (viable and acceptable for more database space and hence applied cost) nor increasing their ability to allow for more characters to be created… they can simply go the full way. Because with the respec they’re simply in the ‘Neverland’ in-between. Not far enough to substantiate ‘free choice at every corner’ but too far away from ‘choices have meaning’ to please those people.

It’s overall an awful decision.

Which is the next thing. The major presence on third-party sites rather then their damn in-house one is such a nonsensical approach I can’t even describe it.

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Diablo 2 had a very significant difference: it had limited respecs. This meant that, if you were tired of your blizz sorc and wanted to change to a lightning sorc, you could respec it once. But if you liked both blizz and chant sorc, you had 2 characters, because it wasn’t feasible to respec between them back and forth when you wanted to switch between them.
As opposed to D3/D4, where you can just have one character and switch with a click of a button.

So while you had only 5 characters in D3/D4 (assuming you liked all classes), in D2 you had several more.
The biggest difference is that in D3/D4 you have a character that is a whole class (it’s your sorc character and therefore it’s all sorc builds at once), and in D2 you have a character that is a build (it’s your blizz sorc/chant/fireball/etc).

PoE specializations have several big differences from the way mastery works.

First, specializations only give you a few bonuses. They’re like a really big passive node. LE Masteries, though, do a lot more. Namely, they give you access to 3 skills (plus the mastery passive bonus) and lock you out of 6 other skills. Plus it gives you half a passive tree while locking out the other two halves. Specializations in PoE would only be comparable to masteries if they locked parts of the passive tree and they unlocked new skills while locking you out of other skills.

Lastly, and this is a very important distinction, specializations in PoE are set apart from your leveling process. You don’t get them via xp or killing stuff. You get them by doing a separate mechanic that gives you a one-time reward (once for each difficulty). They’re set apart in your passive tree and one could argue it’s there only for UI reasons, because it could have a separate window of its own and no one would find it strange.
Whereas masteries are an integral part of leveling. You don’t stop your leveling process, you just continue getting xp and killing stuff to progress them.

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Finally i can do what i want

If i dont want respect mastery and keep identity (this is my fire paladin) i can

If i made mistake because i didnt have everything planned out i can respec my 70 character

If i want to test different stuff and dont want to just to re-roll characters i can do that too

Dunno, maybe some sort of high cost or limited respects then but can’t agree current iteration about ”meaningful choice” at beginning of your journey you need to see as new player what your build is gonna be is just bad IMO

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No one disagrees with this. @DJSamhein has made very detailed suggestions in other topics on adding a “try before you buy” area where you get to play around with unlimited Respecs and fight things in an arena area before selecting and locking in your Mastery.

Edit: and, personally, I’d be more okay with a “you get one free Respec for finishing the campaign” with additional Respecs being a whole endeavor to unlock. But this “here’s some coin, give me the Void Knight Mastery in exchange for this Paladin Mastery” whenever you want is just… Absurd.

I keep hoping to see a dev response to the concerns expressed on this topic and keep getting disappointed

Edit 2: had a thought. Just… Add a 4th “dungeon” that’s sole purpose is to be a journey of the PC fighting against the shades of the alternate timelines like how Mastery Selection used to have (but make it actual content instead of “race to the finish”). The boss could be the Mastery you’ve chosen to become as if you’re taking his/her place in their timeline while the dungeon would be full of shades who failed as trash mobs with weaker-stronger variations of the three masteries for that character as champion/elite enemies. This would be really thematic and make swapping masteries an actual trial.

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Gender is not a selection. You get the gender of the class you choose.

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Uh… no?
TBF, he’s talking about Grim Dawn there, in which one can choose the gender when creating a character.

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I thought he went back to taking about EHG devs. Does GD also have Mastery?

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It does. You pick two masteries to make your class. The only two choices that are permanent are the gender of your character and the Mastery combination you choose.

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Choosing Kymon vs Death Vigil is also a permanent choice which can be important depending on your build.
And a few other unimportant choices, like which smith to save, are permanent as well, but those aren’t relevant for this topic.

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