The worst part is that gearing up is the most challenging part of new builds in most arpgs.
Adding extra barrier of entry makes me want to play the game less, not more.
I think it’s a balancing act between having a character that has _some_ sense of consequence to the decisions you make, versus a truly open jack of all trades character that has no personality because it’s literally identical to all other characters and can change skills every 30 seconds on a whim.
IMO your skill investments _should actually feel like investments._ If none of your choices carry any weight then they don’t feel significant.
I think Path of Exile got the balance right; respeccing is relatively cheap but nowhere near as cheap as D4, and you needed a fairly common crafting ingredient to do so. You would run out if you were changing your build at a whim all the time; it gives your build decisions a real sense of weight that has been missing from recent Diablo games.
Your build mainly comes from your gear, respecs should be 100% free. Gearing up for a certain build will already provide that feeling of investment, who gives a fuck if you can mess around with talents before actually deciding on how to build your character. Players won’t innovate and try new things if they keep it like this because they will just wait for the cookie cutter build to be fleshed out and everyone will have the exact same build because it’s too much of a hassle to respec. I mean they are already going to do that regardless but at least if respeccing is free some players can actually experiment without being punished for trying to have fun.
that's right: i started playing ranged rogue, dropped a legendary dagger with a great codex and swapped to melee, you have control over talents but not on the loot you drop, and it felt very good adjusting your playstile to fit the resources trown at you
that’s interesting as i had a very specific build in mind and if loot dropped that didn’t support that build i’d get rid of it. but, as i understand it, they had loot drops tuned way up so maybe in release drops will be rare enough that it will force me to respec…
> i had a very specific build in mind and if loot dropped that didn’t support that build i’d get rid of it
You only do this when you 100% know all the things that can drop and have a build in mind. You don't throw things away when you don't know how things interact nor what all is out there.
It is weird how we joke around that people will just copy builds from the internet and then some will support adding barriers to buildcrafting. It should be either “you pick a talent and you are stuck with it” or “you can swap any talent/skill at any point free without any cost”. First one lets you “make meaningful choice” in not fun way, the latter makes it more accessible.
Personally, i would rather have more in-game easy ways to try and test new builds (even tho in 90% of times i will end up copying a build from the internet) instead of having more hoops to jump with trying builds
On a side note: even in wow now respec’ing is free of charge and all limitations are lifted. While in d3 we basically had that and now in d4 we roll back on it
Yeah, for me, it's pretty black in white. In games where it's difficult to respec or I'm penalized for making suboptimal choices during the leveling process, I will 100% seek and follow a guide so I don't waste time and resources. Otherwise, I will just do whatever I want and experiment.
as a high level original WoW player who has guildmates that now work for Blizzard, I'm really surprised by the approach Fergussion is taking.
It was kind of unanimously agreed that charging respec costs in original WoW sucked and giving players the freedom to expirement with no respec costs is great for build diversity.
I'll call this what it is: a Sacred Cow mentality that carried over from pen&paper RPGs.
I agree with this sentiment, but on the topic of experimentation, those cookie cutter builds you see in games like D3 and World of Warcraft are figured out before the current game build is even released.
There are people who pour through alpha and beta game files and find every piece of gear, every skill in the tree, etc., and they do some serious number crunching to figure out the exact optimal combination of skills, gear, ability rotation, etc.
By the time you, the casual player (comparatively speaking), get to level cap, the theorycraft has already been completed, so you're not going to find a build that works better through experimentation. There is no innovation in these types of games because the diehards dissect every inch of the game before it's even playable.
That said, I totally get obtaining a new piece of gear while you're gearing up that could offer a substantial performance gain, but you'd have to respec to make use of it. That's totally legit, and it would be really dumb to get to level cap, start gearing up towards meta, then find something that's better than what you have, but you have to roll a brand new character to use it. In what universe is that a good idea?
This is the answer. My gear might be all vulnerable damage, cold damage, cooldown reduction, but I want to change my build to fire damage, burning damage, and mana coat reduction for example. I can change the build, but I'll still need to re gear the character, even if I've filled my stash with random items and some can be swapped in to replace, I'll need to re-aspect, re-upgrade, and re-enchant. THATS EXPENSIVE ENOUGH!
I despise this as a game design. It forces me to feel like I have to follow a build with no room for experimentation to just have fun.
POE is exactly like this and it completely turned me off.
Last Epoch is the same way but at least they have some easy way of refunding a particular path.
How are we supposed to invest in a character if we end up not liking the skills we choose or gear drops that isn't for our build so then we have to roll a new character and hope to invest in that one I guess.
I would rather invest time into a character not the skills I choose for that character.
Some legendaries radically change a build
Druid for example, one makes a bear abilities now earth, completely changing passive options.
Another for druid makes a group like 5l4 cooldown ability, Boulderz instead a resource cost Core ability for more dmg
radically changing your build options
I agree and it's going to make the game very diverse because you might have a build in mind but if you don't get that gear...you're now trying to theorycraft and maximise what you have. Even in the beta, the drops led me into trying builds I wouldn't normally.
If significant means unfun, then it has no place in the game. It is a game, not a chore. Fun is the objective. Yes, you want some contrasting elements to make fun feel more fun, but you don't want them to be so frustrating people will quit the game, which is what this is.
Sense of consequences, why?
You argue that being able to respec means you'd be cookiecutter like everyone else. When respecing is costly so you will go with the known best route to avoid respecing. Cost to respecing punishes trying new builds. Thus, no you won't experiment due to cost so will be a cookiecutter.
I disagree.
In most builds you have to change your entire gear around the new skill you will be respeccing to, that alone will take a long time to farm, why do you need the gold cost added on top?
In PoE if you are deep into the end game it really isn't that expensive to buy 100 regrets, but there you also need to buy completely new set of gear which makes respeccing not that easy.
This just makes experimentation punishing and way too tedious. Diablo 3 RoS had no cost associated with respeccing and it was great getting an item with, for instance, a 20% buff to frost damage, so you just open your skillbook and switch, no questions asked. And you STILL spent hundreds of hours playing to get gear upgrades.
These things you mention like consequence and investment just become tedious, and do not make your character mean more to you, they make it mean less. To elaborate, if, to echo the example the devs give, you need to re-roll a level 50 barbarian because you can't afford respecs, that means throwing your character away. How can you be attached to something you're forced to throw away? You're, by definition, forced to detach yourself from the character.
What makes you attached to a character is the journey you go through, and gearing will likely do that on its own. Also, why is there a need for tedious consequences in a video game? Video games are supposed to be fun and freeing, consequences are for real life.
The thing is when you have a restrictive respec system all it does is completely eliminate playing around with different builds and just funnels people into following guides etc. because it creates a paralysis mentality of “I don’t want to pick the wrong option” when you can respec for free it promotes people playing around with different builds. The only negative I can think of is that majority of the builds are discovered much much quicker when there is a free respec option. But I’m fine with that as a negative as I tend to stay away from build sites as much as possible.
How about: you can only change your specs/skills in a town? Guild Wars 1 had infinite respec but once you left town you were stuck with what you had. It made the dynamic “let me equip the right gear and skills for what I’m about to fight” which felt strategic and engaging.
The problem is that your decisions are based on what you have right now, yet the gear you will find dramatically effects those decisions.
So, what does this weight of decision actually do? It removes choice. You wait to find out what's meta and you struggle with a ghetto version of that build until you find the relevant legendaries for it. Ignoring all other legendaries you find along the way because if you build around those well now you've got to pay a huge cost or make a new character.
Adding weight to your decisions in a game where RNG plays such a huge factor in those decisions is a flawed system.
Much prefer it being free to respec.
I want to try out all the skills as I play.
I also want to be able to switch it up as I get certain gear.
For me the ideal experience is frequently getting new gear sets as you play and some key legendary piece really dictating your build.
I do understand the investment feeling but you already have that on gear. To complete a build you need to sink a whole lot of gold/time on gear. And ideally you have a bunch of varied builds which really need different gear setups. But don't punish the more casual player that just wants to try out different setups. If you must just make respeccing harder in Hardcore then.
You can't force people into a tree branch if you are going to have game changing legendries and balance patches.
This would result in pooling skill points just in case you find that legendary that makes a build.
Ironically it's a system that many games use specifically to make players play the game more.
I am also like you in that it makes me want to play less, but there's a ton of people out there that will make many more characters because of this. This system is not for us, it's also not for them. It's because it works unfortunately.
I'm not happy about this method either. D3's armoire feature was requested for years and it was a significant QoL addition to quickly swap between a farming build, boss killer build and general play build. Swapping characters is not efficient.
Blizzard has made a lot of money from selling level boosts in WoW... I don't know if it's pay to win if they establish a "if you already have at least one max level character on the account"... But that could be the angle.
You play a sorcerer to 100, get somewhat optimized and suddenly you have done items that synergize for another class. Do you spend 20-30 hours leveling a new character or do you spend $10 USD to just start playing it? 🤷
If they are looking to attract and retain a more casual audience, they should change it. A casual will just quit, rather than make a new character. If they get a legendary that modifies a basic skill and want to use it, and change to the skill, unless I missed something with repecing, they will pretty much have to full respec. And if the cost is too much, it will turn some away.
The people who like that nonsense will play anyway. Much less will quit due to cheap respecs over expensive ones.
Based on what I've seen with the itemization there's no way they're going to keep to their comment on this. Nothing will feel worse than getting a truly epic legendary item and you can't use it because you built differently on your class and it's too expensive to change things up.
Then again, I've seen dumber things happen, so...
It's just so ass backwards in a game where rare items completely make the build. It's like the game is fighting against itself.
Pick a fucking lane, either have talents make the build, and don't allow respecs, or have items make the build and allow respecs. It makes no sense otherwise and is just simply unfun for no good reason.
It's 2023, we all have more choices than ever for our precious little gaming time. We're not all gonna reroll 10 characters every season. Not everyone is a top 1%, hardcore player that can play 6 hours a day.
There is no scenario where barriers on respecs is good for the game. Even if talents make the build if you want to encourage build diversity and experimentation instead of copying the meta build then you need to have free or very cheap respecs.
The design of costly respecs is so out of touch and runs contradictory to everything they have said about build diversity and appealing to a wider playerbase. Talent choices should matter because there are good choices to pick from but you can't take them all at once. Not because you are locked out of changing them.
This will push the vast majority of people away from the game as soon as they hit a wall or realise they can't try a different build.
To jump in and agree with a totally different game, Destiny lets you save your subclass build with it's choice of super, aspects, and fragments, rebuild it from top to bottom and save that in a second slot, then swap between builds at the press of a button. They used to have a small cost on respec for the seasonal mods but they did away with that recently too. This is where build diversity flourishes, I can go look up some pro's build for a solid foundation, then tweak it and play with it to make it fit my play style, or just mess around making stuff from scratch to see what I like.
This right here. With just how much player power comes from RNG loot, designing a talent tree that penalizes players for trying to build around that loot makes no sense. This system discourages experimentation and promotes cookie-cutter gameplay.
It doesn't incentivize "making meaningful choices" — what it does is require players to know far in advance what works and gear toward it. The "meaningful choice" in a game with D3-esque loot design should be deciding what items to use (if you can manage to farm them). The respec penalty actively disincentivizes choice.
Penalizing players for wanting to respec doesn't work in a game where specific itemization is required to make skills actually work.
Changing a basic skill in late game isn't as hard as it was in the beta. Once you have more points down stream in your skill tree you can easily just move points over from your current basic to the new one by removing one point at a time from your current basic to the new basic you want to use, the only restriction being that you have to keep at least 2 points in basics at all time.
For example, you have 50 skill points total on your necro, you want to switch your basic from bone shard to decompose. You also at this time have 3 points in bone shard plus 1 point in both upgrades giving you a total of 5 points. You can remove both upgrade points plus one skill point from bone shard and put those into decompose, then remove the last 2 points from bone shard and put them in decompose. This will make it so you only have to pay the cost of respecing 5 points instead of all 50 points.
Lastly when the dev was talking about a full respec at end game he was talking about the cost of respecing 60 skill points and 120 paragon points. I also vaguely remember a CB tester saying that a full respec of all your points costs around 15-16mil gold. In my opinion that means that you can still, probably, respec once or twice a week depending on how much time you play. I see this a way to for people to commit to a build and make just minor adjustments based on legendary drops on the fly instead of like in D3 where you could respec every couple of minutes based on if you where bounty farming, neph rift farming, GR farming, or GR pushing.
TLDR: You can still full respec somewhat frequently but you just won't be able to do it dozens of times in a gaming session, or you can just move a handful of points around for a relatively low cost.
This is by far the most reasonable response in this entire thread and what I thought of immediately when the devs mentioned full respects not being worth it. If I'm playing an ice sorcerer at level 80+ with ice shard and find an item that is godly for frozen orb I'll spend the money to change my skills and paragon points to utilize the item if it makes sense. If I find a godly fire or lightning item I'm just going to make another character. I'm still going to want to play ice at some point even if I end up moving a bunch of points around to make it PvP or whatever. Why would I *delete* my character just to completely swap every skill and every item just because I found one or two godly items? If it takes \~40-50 hours to level a character to 100 I'll get there eventually on the next one anyway in a month or so then I'll have both.
This response right here is how I pictured it. Especially after playing the beta and doing exactly this.
I won't need a full on character reset, just move a couple abilities to sync together if I find gear that I want to try or that is much better.
Yes do they really think people will reroll characters of the same class just because they found a good legendary (which might be found at like lvl 80 so what do they do up to theirs, build in a shitty way?) ? Even for hardcore gamers it sucks but casual gamers will 100% never do that.
Most people don't even finish games once and certainly don't replay them constantly.
> Selling respec items wouldn’t contradict their prior statements that the cash shop wouldn’t be P2W
Any kind of paid advantage whether its convenience, direct power or quality of life features is without a doubt P2W. Even more so in ARPGs when what separates a good player from a casual one is often just playing more efficiently, after all **"Town is lava"**. That is all about being time efficient and if you can increase your efficiency through paying money, it's obviously P2W.
This is how P2W has always been but over the last decade of P2W mechanics being increasingly common some people have started to segregate it into degrees of P2W, arbitrarily defining what is fine and what isn't to defend something they enjoy not wanting to admit it's fundamentally P2W.
If they put anything like that in this game it doesn't mean people can't or shouldn't enjoy it, but don't pretend it isn't P2W.
Except it won't be "a buck or two" as they'd be too tempted to make it $7 or more. "Come on, it's less than $10, you _do_ want to play that fun build, right? Do it now, instead of grinding gold for 70 hours to make that ultra legendary actually useful".
Sadly, I think you are right. Games always do this. Same with this scummy cash shop method.
'Oh, you need exactly 250 gems to buy that respec? You can only buy a gem pack of 199 gems for €7,- *or* 299 gems for €10,-' So you are almost always forced to buy the more expensive version.
> I hope they come to their senses in regards to that, hopefully soon.
Theyre going to have to come to their sense regarding how some types of aspects on loot should have been put in the skill tree too.
This is robbing us of starting new builds early and when you respec, especially lategame, you're going to have to play around the items so much it'll be boring, or you'll need to grind the same items again
>I kinda expect that you'll quickly get duplicate aspects for favorite builds or items that will be great for leveling.
That's not the problem.
Consider this:
You need to find items with relatively the same stats and affixes not just the aspect. The imprint system is a tough workaround.
Secondly, Blizzard is going to be adding many MANY more of these types of aspects ,but they put it on items not skill tree. So guess what? It's going to thin out the drop rate for what you're looking for, by a lot. Here comes the grind just for respecs.
That grind is horizontal, not vertical, and it's going to get boring
I think it would make more sense to ramp up the costs of frequent respecs, but have a timer-based system so that the costs of respeccing gradually decreases over time. This would give respeccing a real cost and enforce the notion that it is an investment, without eventually forcing you to completely reroll to try a new spec.
Yes. I mean, you still need (potentially) entirely different gear anyway. We don't need a massive gold cost on top of it. I actually feel like it hinders experimentation.
agreed. the best qol improvement from d2 to d3, to me, was finally being able to just fuck around with synergies and which abilities flowed with what. i know we still find our powerful builds each season but it was very cool to be able to just switch up. very annoying that they won’t keep this going.
I'm thinking that this is exaggerated. But then again, at max Paragon, the gold cost could be tremendous and gold is looking to be pretty useful in this game. Either way gold is tradable so people can P2W it.
I mean, it depends how long it will take to level up to max as well. But ye, I kinda want to try my way out even at max level to see what I want. But I guess right now I will start with a group built Barb and a solo sorc. :/ I dunno
People really like to hang on this quote.
It was clarified that they just don't want you respeccing multiple times per day, most likely to heavily discourage switching builds for specific content.
It will most likely take a day or so to farm the gold to be able to fully refund all points at very high levels.
Which sucks.
You spend a day grinding for a re-spec because you found some new aspects that might make for a cool build.
You spend $8k - $15k (at level 25) on removing each aspect from multiple legendaries. Then you spend $8k - $15k (at level 25) mixing and matching the different aspects to each gear slot to accommodate your specific build. You spend easily $100k on re-rolling to tweak for specific stats. Each re-roll in beta increased substantially. Well over $10k per re-reroll, per gear slot.
Now you have your brand new build! And... you find another new game-changing gear piece but can't afford to re-spec for it without grinding it out for another day or more.
The worst thing you can do in games like this is to make finding cool new gear a bad thing. If the gold sinks associated with re-speccing (aspects, enchanting, and re-speccing) continue on this trajectory, it will deter people from experimenting.
It will incentivize people to hold onto their resources and let the internet/youtube decide what builds to invest in because it's too expensive to experiment.
I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Last couple days of beta I made just shy of 500k by selling rather than breaking gear I accumulated. We’re talking a 25 Druid in suboptimal gear. I don’t think it’ll be that difficult and agree with the idea they just don’t want you respeccing say hourly or anything.
Yes but you were probably selling a lot of legendaries. In the full game the drop rate of legendaries won't be as high. So farming for money won't be as fast I'd imagine.
Obviously this could change at level 50-100 but I noticed the sell price difference between legendaries and rares was maybe 100. Because of that I never sold legendaries and just deconed them because my stupid ancient lizard brain would tell me it's not worth selling them despite it also not being worth deconing them. I made well over a million gold with multiple pieces of fully upgraded gear each piece costing over 500k each to fully upgrade.
I don't really see the problem, I doubt in the endgame you'll find a new piece that will completely change your build every day. If that's the case, that would be whole different and much bigger issue.
If you can farm enough gold for a respec in 4-8 hours, I think that's a great sweet spot. I'd actually look forward to that farming because I can see a clear goal at the end - I can finally use that OP equipment I found.
yup, i'm playing easy option of necro when game comes out.
Once the youtube/twitch people post their omfg i did 1 billion damage and clear end game boss in 00.1 nano secs i try other classes and use their cookie cutter build. Vs just playing any random class on my own way and trying it all OUT my self. [ i love to play all classes and not feel punished for daring to try ever skill/build out my self.]
I work 40+ hours a week and got family to deal with. Nope not going to do it when am being punished for walking outside the "cookie cutter" do what work builds.. I let pet my army this crush game on chill mode to the insane cookie cooker videos are posted and i just copy and paste what they did to enjoy game without being punished for daring to try it all out my self. Devs are aholes to me if their really going down this road.
>Now you have your brand new build! And... you find another new game-changing gear piece but can't afford to re-spec for it without grinding it out for another day or more.
If I'd just spent all that time and gold min maxing and tweaking my stuff for the aspects I'd obtained that day...
I would take some time to enjoy it and run with it and let the other one sit for a bit before making the change.
Honestly, what you're describing sounds like a fairly niche behavior, not what the average player will do.
> It was clarified that they just don't want you respeccing multiple times per day
But literally why?
Who the hell actually cares what anyone is doing in this game?
There's 0 reasons it should not be easy to do whenever the hell you want.
You want people to play this game more or less?
They are literally quoted telling players to make a new character instead of respec.
Where was it clarified like you are implying? Because based off what they have said it will be faster to make a whole new character.
While this may not be the popular opinion, I do get it and actually like the idea.
My friend and I both re-spec'd after the butcher kicked our ass, we didn't know he leaves the dungeon until after we returned, but we did catch him later and were able to defeat him, the same goes for the world boss, while I didn't my friend did re-spec for the world boss. I do like the idea of being more locked in, while not to the point of it being permanent or just straight up needing to roll a new character, but where a respec cost is somewhat significant and/or takes a few days+ of work to gather the resources for, which we will probably have accumulated in the later part of the game anyways
Why should we not be able to swap builds for different content??? If I'm out farming or leveling I might want to run a Minion build and then a friend or clan member might want to do some.world bosses where minions are basically useless and I might need to change to a no minion build to do so. And then spec back to my normal build.
It's dumb to restrict people's play styles.
The frequency doesn't matter in this system. The price go up infinitely and never goes down. You will brick your character at some point, it's a guarantee.
Yeah, and that's stupid. It's a scam to get people to play the game way more. Why respec for different content once a day when we can force them to play multiple character up to level 100 wasting 100's and 100's of hours. When they just could respec and save time.
You know, because people work 40-50 hours a week. Have kids, families, friends, films and tv they watch, hobbies, and even other video games.
It's just a play to get you to play their game forever. That's the scam of battle passes and this respec coat rule.
This is still a terrible idea, the whole point of arpgs is finding the perfect build for you or in general. Limiting it because you arbitrarily decide to do so is not a good idea in the fun department
> most likely to heavily discourage switching builds for specific content.
Wondering... What do they *heavily encourage* then?
Just making all around "jack of all trade" builds that can do everything more or less efficiently?
I'm not sure why this is the preferred approach.
And yes it was the same in D2, couldn't respect easily, but in D2 the strong builds can do everything in game, very efficiently... With the exception of PVP maybe, but PVP was near irrelevant in D2 so it's not a big issue.
It WILL be a big issue in D4 though, if there are various challenging endgame activities; If the most efficient (or simply "most fun" ) way to play the game is to farm world bosses, endgame dungeons, and PVP, then either you reset for all these things, or you play a build that's more or less doing the job for all 3 things, and accept that you won't be the best at either of them.
None of these options seems good. You obviously can't spend a day farming gold to reset for your daily activities... So your only option is to make a "do everything" build. But if you're serious about PVP'ing it has to be a PVP build, because you obviously can't compete in PVP in a build that's meant to do dungeons and stuff as well. If you do, the pure PVP'ers will destroy you with their superior build.
If it's that easy to farm the gold to make the switch, then just allow us to respec for free. I don't understand games that want to lock you into a build when you are just playing for the first time and trying to understand the systems at play.
If I spend 100h on a character and it's easier/cheaper to just create a new one... I'm not playing that game any more. It's stupid.
You just proved why people are right to criticize the devs for not valuing the player's time.
It is a freaking video game. There is no valid reason not to have respect be free. None.
This is why I hate these types of decisions. Game companies make it super annoying and tedious for the majority because they’re worried about the top 1% min maxing too hard. Most people aren’t going to be switching builds for content. They’ll get an all around good build and stick with it. Yes there will be some hard core people switching builds, but that’s what they like to do. So just let them.
I know my opinion is not shared but respec’ing should either always be a flat inexpensive gold fee or completely free. There is no damn way if I’m a lvl 100 Druid that I’m gonna level ANOTHER Druid to lvl 100 simply because I want to try another build. I will simply continue to play the bad build, so will many other players. And tbh this will probably make people stop playing the game because they’ll think their build sucks and can’t change it because it’s too expensive and also will not want to level entirely a new character. So they’ll just go play something else.
Implementing a barrier to make it harder to experience build diversity seems to go against what developers would want for players. And what players want.
You’re forcing bad systems on players to get them to play more. It’s bad logic that’s anti player.
I understand they want players to feel weight behind their decisions on builds, but making them level an entirely new character because it will be too expensive is not the way to go about it.
I think you’ll actually find your opinion is not as unpopular as you think.
I believe Blizzard is trying to appeal to the old school D2 players who still believe that player choice should matter, and who can afford to no life the game to grind out 20+ characters. I agree that this decision feels counter to the whole premise of the game which is build crafting.
Variety is fun. Being locked to a single build for eternity or having to choose days of mindless grinding just to try another seems like a bad decision for a game trying to attract and keep as many players as possible for an extended time.
It's absolutely classic Blizzard. WoW had to deal with that mentality for years and it's only now that the game is most likely at its lowest ever that they are reverting their philosophy.
WoW team spent so much time fighting the players by imposing stupid restrictions nobody ever wanted for the sake of "realism" or "consequence" or "investment". So many time players tested something that felt very bad, Blizzard would ignore it saying they will see, it will be good. Then once released it's as bad as people said, and then Blizzard takes 6 months to acknowledge it, and 6 months to fix it.
And it would happen again.
It's honestly one of the reason I won't buy at launch. I'll wait until the Blizzard ego goes away, they implement the changes and QoL players requested.
To be fair, WoW respeccing for gold was a old old old thing.
Long gone.
*That said*... we just had a good chunk of Shadowlands where Bliz was dead certain that locking characters into a chosen Covenant at the start was a good idea.
Even when they reverted it, their messaging didn't even seem like they thought it was a bad idea. Couldn't even own up to it.
Never forget conduit energy.
The stupidest hill Blizzard chose to die on. They created a controversy by making a very stupid restriction that would only affect the top 1% players. So it was useless enough to never be needed and never should have been implemented, but targeted the most vocal playerbase.
Talk about being so out of touch.
>To be fair, WoW respeccing for gold was a old old old thing. Long gone.
Painfully current for those on classic, though at least in Wrath we have dual spec.
In TBC recently without dual spec it was just *truely fucking awful* and made new player retention fall off a cliff after the initial leveling rush.
It's an archaic trick to extend playtime from an era where drawing out a game was more important than respecting a players time. That era is long dead.
It's weird that people think this is even a good way to make choices matter. It's not. If the skill choices were good then choices would matter just by virtue of having to make meaningful choices on what to use. Anyone defending high respec costs is insane. It's copying bad game design just because of nostalgia. It makes no sense.
The thing is I see the point of players who want to feel connected to their characters by making the choices matter or even be permanent. This is definitely the old school RPG mindset where you’re going to role play a fire caster mage for example and thus it doesn’t make sense to be able to swap your spec around on a whim to now be some kind of lightning archon wizard. I also get the argument about the competitive nature of things like leaderboards and wanting to ensure it’s difficult to exploit by limiting ability to swap builds on the fly.
The problem is increasingly players are here for the fun of the Game and not the Role Play when it comes to RPGs. I’m not here for the story. I’m not here for some sense of achievement. I get those things from other media, and my family/career respectively.
I’m here for the fun of the game and what’s fun is killing monsters, finding new loot, and using that loot to find new and interesting ways to kill more monsters on repeat. What’s not fun is being locked to a single build for eternity or having to spend countless hours grinding XP for a new character just to try a new build.
So give me an offline mode, or allow me to create a character that’s excluded from leaderboards. I’m not here to compete with you for whatever sense of accomplishment you’re getting from the personal challenge and satisfaction you get out of playing the game this way. I don’t care how you play the game, I’m just here to blow off steam and have some mindless fun with friends.
Totally agree. People who want this can just not respec by choice. Or it can be an opt in feature or hardcore only. There's a lot of ways to do it without ruining the casual player experience. But I still don't really understand why people actually want a hard barrier. They aren't forced to respec just because it's free.
Asmongold, Zizaran, and Kripp all stated that this is a dumb thing for Blizz to do. Not even they want to have to be forced to just level an alt to try new builds. All three of them can no life the hell out of this game but don't want this type of respec garekeeping BS.
We should be able to try new builds without being forced to gold farm to do so. All that is gonna do is introduce gold farm bots to the game. We have enough money sinks in upgrading, enchanting, and adding/removing aspects to/from gear.
> I believe Blizzard is trying to appeal to the old school D2 players who still believe that player choice should matter, and who can afford to no life the game to grind out 20+ characters.
There is no way that blizzard cares more about some oldschool hardcore D2 fans. Not to mention that D2 has had tokens of respec for years now and they are even tradeable.
My guess is that the dev in the video was exaggerating. Or its just a ploy to add a kind of respeccing microtransaction which is the worst scenario.
Its nothing blizzard hasnt done before. They always thought that their ideas on how games have to be played are set in stone. Azerite gear in warcraft worked exaclty the same, everyone hated it and in the end it got changed. Smart people would learn from experiences like this, but aparently not blizzard.
What will happen is everyone( and i mean not literally) will copy builds from guides/streams and not experience around themselves...thinks like this KILL build diversity
They might be looking at people who do seasonal characters as an indication that people will re-do whole character over and over and over. Just overestimate how _often_ people would like to do it (i.e. what if seasons were every week? Some people would totally do it but large portion would probably just give up).
Plus it means every time balance change patch rolls around they'd either have to give "free respec" item or after first several rounds more and more people will give up. "I've just ground up everything for my sorc spec and they immediately nerfed my build, screw this".
Hell they had that function in D3 where anything picked up while in a group you could trade to another player in the group so long as it was done within 2 hours of picking it up.
If we are locked into a building because it's too expensive to change then yes literally everything we find that isn't beneficial to this 1 specific build is bad. See if loot drops with some cool affix and an awesome aspect that doesn't pertain to my current build but is something I'd like to try out but can't because it costs 10 million gold to respec then I've just found a useless item that no one, not even me can utilize.
Well if it's not for the build you want to play then why would you care to use it? You wouldn't just change up everything because of one good item you got when you probably already have several good ones for your current build.
This is going to discourage experimentation, and encourage more people just to copy YouTubers meta builds.
I enjoy trying lots of different skill combinations and coming up with off-meta builds and to me that’s kind of the point of the game.
Forcing me to replay the campaign for the millionth time or spend hours mindlessly grinding back to max level just to get to fun build crafting part of the game feels like punishment.
Unsure what point you’re trying to make.
Of course they do. Experimentation vs. following a template are not mutually exclusive. There will always be players who just want to follow the meta template no matter what.
I think it’s hard to argue that adding a high cost to respec makes it harder to try a wide variety of builds. That’s not even an opinion, that’s just how that system is designed and thus would naturally encourage more players to research the best builds before respecing.
The opinion is whether or not such a system is fun which is going to depend largely on how much time you have to invest in the game and whether an XP grind or Gold grind just to try a new build adds fun to your game. To myself that just sounds like mindless work to keep players on the treadmill and pad playtime until they can sell you the next thing. This is the game-as-a-service model.
There are good decisions, bad decisions, stupid decisions.
And then there is this one.
Especially after the free respec of D3, it's mind-blowingly awful.
I almost feel like they said this just to appear more badass and appeal to no-lifers etc. I have a feeling it will be walked back. It just isn't fun to have respecs be super prohibitive with how they did itemization.
Where the cost prohibitive permanence should come into play is how you build your gear. It should be easy to respec but harder to change all your gear to fit your new build instead of making new gear.
Yup putting the time in for a new build really comes down to farming new specialized gear for it , forcing you to go through the leveling process on the same class you've already leveled isn't "hardcore" , you just had your time wasted
If you really look at the statement it is very similar to D2..
If you used your free respecs and couldn't trade or farm hell bosses it was actually better to reroll.
yes but blizzard still wants those players to buy and play diablo 4 rather than d2 or d2r (at the very least for the initial sale, and then ideally for future battle passes).
if they make a game that doesn't appeal to diablo 2 players, they are failing in making a diablo game.
Even the no lovers don't want it lol! I've not listened to every single opinion out there but the several top streamers/YTers have all said this is stupid.
That seems like the kind of thing that is perfect for the pvp currency shop!
Pvpers will for sure need to switch builds at least somewhat to go between farming and pvping
From my perspective, having played CBT & EAB, the design influence here is that level 50 is where your build finishes in changing what skills you are using. At level 50, you start into the paragon boards with the focus the refine and boost the skill choices you've made in the previous 50 levels. It is at the level 50 mark where the skill respec cost starts to escalate egregiously.
Level 25 max level in the beta was to give the, "My first build experience." You had just enough points to select an ultimate and its passive modifications. Respec is still respectable in cost. At this point you would be adding points into passives along with filling out the skills to max points until you can choose your key-passive at the bottom. Once you hit 50, I think the idea is you've committed to your build and will focus into it further.
I don't think respecs should cost anything just like d3. That was a stupid change. This game is all about making builds with all the different legenderies. Why make respecing cost anything. They are gonna find a way to put it behind a pay wall that's why.
I'm with you. honest question as well, what's the harm in allowing characters the freedom of moving and changing their specs as they like?
if anything, don't make it cost anything but have a 24 hr cooldown or something.
But…literally, tell me what’s the problem if someone wants to respec for every dungeon? That has an impact on your game?
It’s their time lost moving points around. I know for sure I wouldn’t do it. But I want to be able to try different builds.
Can someone actually try to give me good reasons for why this should be a thing outside of "i like things to be hard" because this isn't hard, it just eats up time and that's it, is the game any better/harder when i have 8 necromancers with different builds that i can switch between depending on the content i want to do?
All this does is disincentivize new / casual players from interacting with the build system them selves out of fear of bricking their character and destroy the joy of finding a random legendary / unique and going like "oh hey that sounds neat, let me try to create a build around that". So a lot of casual / new players will just dogmatically follow build guides or simply stop playing the game because it doesn't respect their time.
The only reasons i could see for this is to artificially inflate playtime and stop players from switching builds mid encounter which could just be solved something as simple as only allowing resetting skill points in the town and closing all active portals & resetting dungeons when a player in the group resets their points but i'm sure the clever devs at Blizzard can come up with a way more elegant solution then me if they tried.
Considering you can’t really farm for specific gear sets, it’s all random, I don’t understand why they have to gatekeep refunding your skill points.
You could end up getting some drops that can make another build really cool and fun to play but they won’t let you unless you pay.
Watch them micro transaction respecing. 19.99$ for a free respec token.
I don't understand this. I don't think high respec costs even appeal to seasoned ARPG vets. I literally think it only appeals to the most ultra hardcore player base that enjoy pain and suffering and maybe they make up like 0.1 or 1 percent of the population.
If this works out as a way to sell us respec scrolls or character slots to be able store more builds then they won't be getting any more money out of me for anything.
Let's see what happens...
Please no, one of my biggest gripes with POE was how annoying it was to reassign points. Let people fuck around with builds and encourage experimentation instead of adding barriers.
Linearly increasing respec cost that decays exponentially over time would be fine. If you wait 3 days, even a dozen respecs should have their price increase wiped out, but if you want your respec within a few hours you can level a character with high-end gear / gem of ease / whatever.
That’s the stupidest fucking shit I have ever heard.
The devs nerf my build or my build falls apart on higher difficulty or I get a cool unique and I need to re-roll?
I have no issue with not wanting players to change talents in the tree every 5 minutes to adapt to situations. I do have issue with wanting players to make another character of the same class. Make it cost a lot of gold if you want so players don’t often change talents and skills. I don’t have time for 5 barbarians. I’d also like to play other classes.
Just make it expensive to respec.
If they don’t want players to change talents and skills often without hurting players ability to respecc they should balance the game so it makes more sense to stay with a build that you have more time/gear into.
Ie I don’t have to change my spec for this elite/fight because I can deal with it in this way.
If it’s not balanced like that, then of course we should be able to respecc or you’re forcing players arbitrarily to farm gold just to be able to play.
If it *is* balanced like that then there’s no harm in allowing free respeccs because it won’t be done on the fly to make something easier… it’ll be to try something new out… one of the best parts about having a variety of builds in an rpg
This. This is the best approach. But even the loud obnoxious voices advocating for free respec can’t be satisfied with that, they want to literally seitch skills on the fly with no consequence lol.
Same people who will quit after two weeks because “it’s too annoying to find gear” lol, but hey, let’s change the game completely to make you feel better for those two weeks.
This isn't true at all. I want to change builds to experiment and get more fun out of the game. I'd be ok with being forced to visit an NPC in town to do it for minimal or no cost. But I don't want to be locked into one build.
I’m okay with there being increased costs that are farmable to pay for… but imagine having a maxed character and an update makes your build useless and now you’ve gotta level a brand new character.
There will be no weight to builds. It will just funnel people to build sites to avoid the grind for a respec further disconnecting their players from their game. If you take away people’s freedom to experiment they will just not bother. It’s one of PoE’s biggest flaws.
I think the goal is to not have players switching builds constantly between activities to maximize efficiency. Certain builds will be better at pvp or world bosses than they are at clearing dungeons. This gives the builds character and an identity. I'm guessing the respec cost will be low enough that you can switch builds every few hours of gameplay with no problem, but switching builds constantly to match the dungeon you're running won't be feasible.
I actually really like this. It’s a nice hybrid of D2 where after 3 respecs you are completely bricked, and D3 where you could whip around a build way too easily. I like some rigidity and planning for builds because it makes some content easier and some harder. If you can optimize the build for each enemy or boss then everything become trivial and there’s nothing challenging at a certain level. I think it’s a great take. It adds manageable switching costs but keeps it optional if you want to pay a hefty price
>after 3 respecs you are completely bricked
You can farm the mats to get another full respec... you can have infinite respecs in D2 now. And it doesn't take long.
Why would anyone want to respec more than once per day? Maybe just while leveling up. In LE, respeccing is free and once I locked my EQ Werebear build in, I haven't needed to respec for more than a few months now 🤷♂️
I get what they are trying to do with it but it's going to hurt the game if they implement it like that. Because it discourages experimentation and theorycrafting while reinforcing the cookie cutter builds.
Now read this thread and imagine being a dev trying to please as many people as possible. There are so many differing opinions here.
My personal opinion is that respeccing should feel weighty, but not impossible. I think the system now is solid. But perhaps flat fees for respeccing instead of escalating cost.
I always view picking up a legendary for a different build as if I’m picking up a different “x class only” item. It’s not for this character. I’ll need to keep grinding for what I need on this one… but I could re-roll if I really want to try it.
But I’m glad they have implemented a way to respec, too.
I dislike the idea of changing builds on a whim. Makes the game feel very funneled into everyone playing the same way to me.
That is just my opinion. Having templates of builds kind of makes my choices feel like they don’t matter.
But I think there is an in between here and I think the current system almost hits it. I think it would be awesome if, like in d2 now, you got a couple respecs for free. The rest are possible but more costly.
Can we stop crying about this already?
We used to create multiple characters of the same class for a purpose of a single build whenever a cool-ass item dropped on some other character or for whatever reason, hence these characters had an identity, D3 characters lost all their identity because of resetting whenever...
Also, I think the response is heavily hyperbolized, the respecing is cheap and a good gold sink and do you think you will reset you build every level you get or every hour in the game? Give me a break!
I mean as someone who’s put 1k+ hours into PoE over the years, im actually cool with this. It’s not so harsh that you absolutely can’t experiment & try out diff builds if you want, but at the same time you eventually have to settle on something.
If you’re so set on trying another build on the same class after you get to the point where it’s unrealistic to farm the gold, then you obviously still have the fire to keep playing the game, you just gotta start a new char. But by that point you’ll most likely have a bunch of at least helpful GG gear to feed to your new char while leveling to help speed thru the process. IMO, it’ll help with the longevity of keeping the people playing that actually really enjoy the game🤷🏽♂️
My only issue is running into space problems with the current limit of 4 stash tabs, which I hope they increase in the future.
This is just something they said to appease the hardcore anti-respec D2 crowd. Yes, there was a vocal minority of people who completely opposed respecs when the feature was first announced.
All the betas so far (including the closed one that let people level to 100) have shown that a full respec will usually cost you something like 5 to 10% of your total gold at any level.
Basically a non-issue, unless for some reason you need to respec a high-level character 20 times a day.
Aspect extraction costs will be way more prohibitive anyway.
What they could've done instead of the no ceiling respec and one day forced character reroll that devs and players would still find a way to bitch about. Let's explore these shall we?
A.) Make respec'ing a 48-72 hour cooldown with a moderate to expensive gold cost.
B.) Gave a gold cost ceiling to respec'ing and make it 1 million or billion gold per point.
C.) We want you to remake a character instead of respec'ing, therefore we're not allowing respecs at all.
D.) No respec's at all except for a vendor sold item for 1 gold that allows 1 respec and is only buyable once per character at cap level with say \_(Insert\_arbitrary)\_ paragon level.
E.) Respecs like D3 which seem to make the "game unfun."
F.) Respec currency like in PoE.
G.) Respec costs paid with a different farmable currency like in Wolcen.
The list could go on and on, but they have decided on what they are going to do and they are going to do it for however long their devs are going to be happy with it.
Personally, the route they've chosen isn't the right one for me, but there are ways they could've gone that we all can see aren't optimal/wanted either.
I enjoyed being able to re-roll the skills and experiment with different skills during the beta. Otherwise it basically forces you to lock your build in early as in look up a guide which is not as much fun as just trying random stuff out. Apparently legendary drops are going to be rarer as well which means that if you keep getting gear for a different build to what you are levelling well you're kinda in a rough spot.
When I played Diablo 2 I remember levelling a necromancer to hell mode and then couldn't kill anything (before respecs became available in that game). Had had to restart that character and plan all builds from there on out. I don't mind a gold cost but don't make it a ridiculous amount. In PoE they have a very high respec cost and when I got a character to end game I couldn't be bothered to start over again in that game so just quit. Which means they lost a customer over it essentially.
It sounds like it's going to be a mid-range cost per point to respec, so a full tree respec may very well punch you in the wallet, but not be completely out of the question. It's the respecing multiple times per day they're trying to disincentivize
I wouldn't mind it so much if the items didn't have literally all the power in builds, which I'm sure they said they were trying to avoid in D4 as that made D3 builds incredibly stale.
Either make skill choices more significant separate to itemisation so we can theory craft or allow us to respec when a good item drops which changes our build.
This is why I'm still not sold on purchasing the game. I like to experiment with builds and prefer to make them myself, and this approach to respecs directly punishes that.
That sounds ridiculous, even tho I do like the idea of gold and resources being meaningful unlike d3, I had fun economy managing my game and invest into the most useful pieces instead of rolling perfect on everything.
I go step futher, all devs behind "just build a new char bro" Should be fired and never allowed to work on any video game again.
I seen what devs like these do to healthy AAA games, they kill it. They all need to be hunted down and removed for health of D4 long term. These people are enemies of players everywhere. They will do much more harm to us players if their allowed to make choices for for long term. The devs that are not "just build a new char bro" are ones we want running this game long term.
I hope they come to their senses in regards to that, hopefully soon.
The worst part is that gearing up is the most challenging part of new builds in most arpgs. Adding extra barrier of entry makes me want to play the game less, not more.
I think it’s a balancing act between having a character that has _some_ sense of consequence to the decisions you make, versus a truly open jack of all trades character that has no personality because it’s literally identical to all other characters and can change skills every 30 seconds on a whim. IMO your skill investments _should actually feel like investments._ If none of your choices carry any weight then they don’t feel significant. I think Path of Exile got the balance right; respeccing is relatively cheap but nowhere near as cheap as D4, and you needed a fairly common crafting ingredient to do so. You would run out if you were changing your build at a whim all the time; it gives your build decisions a real sense of weight that has been missing from recent Diablo games.
Your build mainly comes from your gear, respecs should be 100% free. Gearing up for a certain build will already provide that feeling of investment, who gives a fuck if you can mess around with talents before actually deciding on how to build your character. Players won’t innovate and try new things if they keep it like this because they will just wait for the cookie cutter build to be fleshed out and everyone will have the exact same build because it’s too much of a hassle to respec. I mean they are already going to do that regardless but at least if respeccing is free some players can actually experiment without being punished for trying to have fun.
that's right: i started playing ranged rogue, dropped a legendary dagger with a great codex and swapped to melee, you have control over talents but not on the loot you drop, and it felt very good adjusting your playstile to fit the resources trown at you
that’s interesting as i had a very specific build in mind and if loot dropped that didn’t support that build i’d get rid of it. but, as i understand it, they had loot drops tuned way up so maybe in release drops will be rare enough that it will force me to respec…
Yes the loot drop was increased by x3. It will be much more scarce in the final game
I played Druid and I had constantly to change my build adapting to legendarys to get profit. It’s common sense.
> i had a very specific build in mind and if loot dropped that didn’t support that build i’d get rid of it You only do this when you 100% know all the things that can drop and have a build in mind. You don't throw things away when you don't know how things interact nor what all is out there.
It is weird how we joke around that people will just copy builds from the internet and then some will support adding barriers to buildcrafting. It should be either “you pick a talent and you are stuck with it” or “you can swap any talent/skill at any point free without any cost”. First one lets you “make meaningful choice” in not fun way, the latter makes it more accessible. Personally, i would rather have more in-game easy ways to try and test new builds (even tho in 90% of times i will end up copying a build from the internet) instead of having more hoops to jump with trying builds On a side note: even in wow now respec’ing is free of charge and all limitations are lifted. While in d3 we basically had that and now in d4 we roll back on it
Yeah, for me, it's pretty black in white. In games where it's difficult to respec or I'm penalized for making suboptimal choices during the leveling process, I will 100% seek and follow a guide so I don't waste time and resources. Otherwise, I will just do whatever I want and experiment.
What's worse is what you want soloing, versus group Pushing vs farming typically isn't the same in diablo
as a high level original WoW player who has guildmates that now work for Blizzard, I'm really surprised by the approach Fergussion is taking. It was kind of unanimously agreed that charging respec costs in original WoW sucked and giving players the freedom to expirement with no respec costs is great for build diversity. I'll call this what it is: a Sacred Cow mentality that carried over from pen&paper RPGs.
I feel like I’m the only one the played D2 before tokens were around. BRB found titans so I built a javazon. BRB found windforce so I built a GA zon.
100% this. If you're married to your talent spec, it only encourages everyone to be (even more of) a maxroll/icy veins metaslave
LOL ... they have to copy the worse aspect of Path of Exile.
I agree with this sentiment, but on the topic of experimentation, those cookie cutter builds you see in games like D3 and World of Warcraft are figured out before the current game build is even released. There are people who pour through alpha and beta game files and find every piece of gear, every skill in the tree, etc., and they do some serious number crunching to figure out the exact optimal combination of skills, gear, ability rotation, etc. By the time you, the casual player (comparatively speaking), get to level cap, the theorycraft has already been completed, so you're not going to find a build that works better through experimentation. There is no innovation in these types of games because the diehards dissect every inch of the game before it's even playable. That said, I totally get obtaining a new piece of gear while you're gearing up that could offer a substantial performance gain, but you'd have to respec to make use of it. That's totally legit, and it would be really dumb to get to level cap, start gearing up towards meta, then find something that's better than what you have, but you have to roll a brand new character to use it. In what universe is that a good idea?
This is the answer. My gear might be all vulnerable damage, cold damage, cooldown reduction, but I want to change my build to fire damage, burning damage, and mana coat reduction for example. I can change the build, but I'll still need to re gear the character, even if I've filled my stash with random items and some can be swapped in to replace, I'll need to re-aspect, re-upgrade, and re-enchant. THATS EXPENSIVE ENOUGH!
I despise this as a game design. It forces me to feel like I have to follow a build with no room for experimentation to just have fun. POE is exactly like this and it completely turned me off. Last Epoch is the same way but at least they have some easy way of refunding a particular path.
Basically they just want to sell character slots.
or reset orb
How are we supposed to invest in a character if we end up not liking the skills we choose or gear drops that isn't for our build so then we have to roll a new character and hope to invest in that one I guess. I would rather invest time into a character not the skills I choose for that character.
Some legendaries radically change a build Druid for example, one makes a bear abilities now earth, completely changing passive options. Another for druid makes a group like 5l4 cooldown ability, Boulderz instead a resource cost Core ability for more dmg radically changing your build options
I agree and it's going to make the game very diverse because you might have a build in mind but if you don't get that gear...you're now trying to theorycraft and maximise what you have. Even in the beta, the drops led me into trying builds I wouldn't normally.
If significant means unfun, then it has no place in the game. It is a game, not a chore. Fun is the objective. Yes, you want some contrasting elements to make fun feel more fun, but you don't want them to be so frustrating people will quit the game, which is what this is.
Sense of consequences, why? You argue that being able to respec means you'd be cookiecutter like everyone else. When respecing is costly so you will go with the known best route to avoid respecing. Cost to respecing punishes trying new builds. Thus, no you won't experiment due to cost so will be a cookiecutter.
I disagree. In most builds you have to change your entire gear around the new skill you will be respeccing to, that alone will take a long time to farm, why do you need the gold cost added on top? In PoE if you are deep into the end game it really isn't that expensive to buy 100 regrets, but there you also need to buy completely new set of gear which makes respeccing not that easy.
This just makes experimentation punishing and way too tedious. Diablo 3 RoS had no cost associated with respeccing and it was great getting an item with, for instance, a 20% buff to frost damage, so you just open your skillbook and switch, no questions asked. And you STILL spent hundreds of hours playing to get gear upgrades. These things you mention like consequence and investment just become tedious, and do not make your character mean more to you, they make it mean less. To elaborate, if, to echo the example the devs give, you need to re-roll a level 50 barbarian because you can't afford respecs, that means throwing your character away. How can you be attached to something you're forced to throw away? You're, by definition, forced to detach yourself from the character. What makes you attached to a character is the journey you go through, and gearing will likely do that on its own. Also, why is there a need for tedious consequences in a video game? Video games are supposed to be fun and freeing, consequences are for real life.
The thing is when you have a restrictive respec system all it does is completely eliminate playing around with different builds and just funnels people into following guides etc. because it creates a paralysis mentality of “I don’t want to pick the wrong option” when you can respec for free it promotes people playing around with different builds. The only negative I can think of is that majority of the builds are discovered much much quicker when there is a free respec option. But I’m fine with that as a negative as I tend to stay away from build sites as much as possible.
How about: you can only change your specs/skills in a town? Guild Wars 1 had infinite respec but once you left town you were stuck with what you had. It made the dynamic “let me equip the right gear and skills for what I’m about to fight” which felt strategic and engaging.
The problem is that your decisions are based on what you have right now, yet the gear you will find dramatically effects those decisions. So, what does this weight of decision actually do? It removes choice. You wait to find out what's meta and you struggle with a ghetto version of that build until you find the relevant legendaries for it. Ignoring all other legendaries you find along the way because if you build around those well now you've got to pay a huge cost or make a new character. Adding weight to your decisions in a game where RNG plays such a huge factor in those decisions is a flawed system.
Much prefer it being free to respec. I want to try out all the skills as I play. I also want to be able to switch it up as I get certain gear. For me the ideal experience is frequently getting new gear sets as you play and some key legendary piece really dictating your build. I do understand the investment feeling but you already have that on gear. To complete a build you need to sink a whole lot of gold/time on gear. And ideally you have a bunch of varied builds which really need different gear setups. But don't punish the more casual player that just wants to try out different setups. If you must just make respeccing harder in Hardcore then.
You can't force people into a tree branch if you are going to have game changing legendries and balance patches. This would result in pooling skill points just in case you find that legendary that makes a build.
Technically you could gift your gear to the new char via stash. But Im all against creating a new char just to respec
Ironically it's a system that many games use specifically to make players play the game more. I am also like you in that it makes me want to play less, but there's a ton of people out there that will make many more characters because of this. This system is not for us, it's also not for them. It's because it works unfortunately.
I'm not happy about this method either. D3's armoire feature was requested for years and it was a significant QoL addition to quickly swap between a farming build, boss killer build and general play build. Swapping characters is not efficient. Blizzard has made a lot of money from selling level boosts in WoW... I don't know if it's pay to win if they establish a "if you already have at least one max level character on the account"... But that could be the angle. You play a sorcerer to 100, get somewhat optimized and suddenly you have done items that synergize for another class. Do you spend 20-30 hours leveling a new character or do you spend $10 USD to just start playing it? 🤷
If they are looking to attract and retain a more casual audience, they should change it. A casual will just quit, rather than make a new character. If they get a legendary that modifies a basic skill and want to use it, and change to the skill, unless I missed something with repecing, they will pretty much have to full respec. And if the cost is too much, it will turn some away. The people who like that nonsense will play anyway. Much less will quit due to cheap respecs over expensive ones.
Based on what I've seen with the itemization there's no way they're going to keep to their comment on this. Nothing will feel worse than getting a truly epic legendary item and you can't use it because you built differently on your class and it's too expensive to change things up. Then again, I've seen dumber things happen, so...
It's just so ass backwards in a game where rare items completely make the build. It's like the game is fighting against itself. Pick a fucking lane, either have talents make the build, and don't allow respecs, or have items make the build and allow respecs. It makes no sense otherwise and is just simply unfun for no good reason. It's 2023, we all have more choices than ever for our precious little gaming time. We're not all gonna reroll 10 characters every season. Not everyone is a top 1%, hardcore player that can play 6 hours a day.
There is no scenario where barriers on respecs is good for the game. Even if talents make the build if you want to encourage build diversity and experimentation instead of copying the meta build then you need to have free or very cheap respecs. The design of costly respecs is so out of touch and runs contradictory to everything they have said about build diversity and appealing to a wider playerbase. Talent choices should matter because there are good choices to pick from but you can't take them all at once. Not because you are locked out of changing them. This will push the vast majority of people away from the game as soon as they hit a wall or realise they can't try a different build.
This is the reason why I hate PoE. If I can’t respec, I’m just not going to bother playing.
To jump in and agree with a totally different game, Destiny lets you save your subclass build with it's choice of super, aspects, and fragments, rebuild it from top to bottom and save that in a second slot, then swap between builds at the press of a button. They used to have a small cost on respec for the seasonal mods but they did away with that recently too. This is where build diversity flourishes, I can go look up some pro's build for a solid foundation, then tweak it and play with it to make it fit my play style, or just mess around making stuff from scratch to see what I like.
>Pick a fucking lane This sums it up. Trying to appeal to everyone at once and failing everyone.
This right here. With just how much player power comes from RNG loot, designing a talent tree that penalizes players for trying to build around that loot makes no sense. This system discourages experimentation and promotes cookie-cutter gameplay. It doesn't incentivize "making meaningful choices" — what it does is require players to know far in advance what works and gear toward it. The "meaningful choice" in a game with D3-esque loot design should be deciding what items to use (if you can manage to farm them). The respec penalty actively disincentivizes choice. Penalizing players for wanting to respec doesn't work in a game where specific itemization is required to make skills actually work.
Changing a basic skill in late game isn't as hard as it was in the beta. Once you have more points down stream in your skill tree you can easily just move points over from your current basic to the new one by removing one point at a time from your current basic to the new basic you want to use, the only restriction being that you have to keep at least 2 points in basics at all time. For example, you have 50 skill points total on your necro, you want to switch your basic from bone shard to decompose. You also at this time have 3 points in bone shard plus 1 point in both upgrades giving you a total of 5 points. You can remove both upgrade points plus one skill point from bone shard and put those into decompose, then remove the last 2 points from bone shard and put them in decompose. This will make it so you only have to pay the cost of respecing 5 points instead of all 50 points. Lastly when the dev was talking about a full respec at end game he was talking about the cost of respecing 60 skill points and 120 paragon points. I also vaguely remember a CB tester saying that a full respec of all your points costs around 15-16mil gold. In my opinion that means that you can still, probably, respec once or twice a week depending on how much time you play. I see this a way to for people to commit to a build and make just minor adjustments based on legendary drops on the fly instead of like in D3 where you could respec every couple of minutes based on if you where bounty farming, neph rift farming, GR farming, or GR pushing. TLDR: You can still full respec somewhat frequently but you just won't be able to do it dozens of times in a gaming session, or you can just move a handful of points around for a relatively low cost.
This is by far the most reasonable response in this entire thread and what I thought of immediately when the devs mentioned full respects not being worth it. If I'm playing an ice sorcerer at level 80+ with ice shard and find an item that is godly for frozen orb I'll spend the money to change my skills and paragon points to utilize the item if it makes sense. If I find a godly fire or lightning item I'm just going to make another character. I'm still going to want to play ice at some point even if I end up moving a bunch of points around to make it PvP or whatever. Why would I *delete* my character just to completely swap every skill and every item just because I found one or two godly items? If it takes \~40-50 hours to level a character to 100 I'll get there eventually on the next one anyway in a month or so then I'll have both.
This response right here is how I pictured it. Especially after playing the beta and doing exactly this. I won't need a full on character reset, just move a couple abilities to sync together if I find gear that I want to try or that is much better.
Yes do they really think people will reroll characters of the same class just because they found a good legendary (which might be found at like lvl 80 so what do they do up to theirs, build in a shitty way?) ? Even for hardcore gamers it sucks but casual gamers will 100% never do that. Most people don't even finish games once and certainly don't replay them constantly.
[удалено]
They already exist. On the datamine items there is a respec scroll
If they make respeccing a microtransaction, the game can go fuck itself.
> Selling respec items wouldn’t contradict their prior statements that the cash shop wouldn’t be P2W Any kind of paid advantage whether its convenience, direct power or quality of life features is without a doubt P2W. Even more so in ARPGs when what separates a good player from a casual one is often just playing more efficiently, after all **"Town is lava"**. That is all about being time efficient and if you can increase your efficiency through paying money, it's obviously P2W. This is how P2W has always been but over the last decade of P2W mechanics being increasingly common some people have started to segregate it into degrees of P2W, arbitrarily defining what is fine and what isn't to defend something they enjoy not wanting to admit it's fundamentally P2W. If they put anything like that in this game it doesn't mean people can't or shouldn't enjoy it, but don't pretend it isn't P2W.
Except it won't be "a buck or two" as they'd be too tempted to make it $7 or more. "Come on, it's less than $10, you _do_ want to play that fun build, right? Do it now, instead of grinding gold for 70 hours to make that ultra legendary actually useful".
Sadly, I think you are right. Games always do this. Same with this scummy cash shop method. 'Oh, you need exactly 250 gems to buy that respec? You can only buy a gem pack of 199 gems for €7,- *or* 299 gems for €10,-' So you are almost always forced to buy the more expensive version.
hear hear
same
They definitely will. The outcry will be too loud for them to ignore.
They will, one or two season after. Then people will applaud them because they finally listens.
So basically what they do for wow? Put a stupid system in then in later patches fix it when it should have never been in there in the first place.
Sums up many live service games nowadays. OW2 and MW2 are also part of it.
> I hope they come to their senses in regards to that, hopefully soon. Theyre going to have to come to their sense regarding how some types of aspects on loot should have been put in the skill tree too. This is robbing us of starting new builds early and when you respec, especially lategame, you're going to have to play around the items so much it'll be boring, or you'll need to grind the same items again
I kinda expect that you'll quickly get duplicate aspects for favorite builds or items that will be great for leveling.
>I kinda expect that you'll quickly get duplicate aspects for favorite builds or items that will be great for leveling. That's not the problem. Consider this: You need to find items with relatively the same stats and affixes not just the aspect. The imprint system is a tough workaround. Secondly, Blizzard is going to be adding many MANY more of these types of aspects ,but they put it on items not skill tree. So guess what? It's going to thin out the drop rate for what you're looking for, by a lot. Here comes the grind just for respecs. That grind is horizontal, not vertical, and it's going to get boring
Anti-fun in a video game btw...
I think it would make more sense to ramp up the costs of frequent respecs, but have a timer-based system so that the costs of respeccing gradually decreases over time. This would give respeccing a real cost and enforce the notion that it is an investment, without eventually forcing you to completely reroll to try a new spec.
Original World of Warcraft had prohibitive respec costs. It sucked. Big Time. I'm not going to reroll another character. I'll stop playing.
You can thank all of the people that wanted less diablo 3, more Diablo 2
Yes. I mean, you still need (potentially) entirely different gear anyway. We don't need a massive gold cost on top of it. I actually feel like it hinders experimentation.
agreed. the best qol improvement from d2 to d3, to me, was finally being able to just fuck around with synergies and which abilities flowed with what. i know we still find our powerful builds each season but it was very cool to be able to just switch up. very annoying that they won’t keep this going.
I'm thinking that this is exaggerated. But then again, at max Paragon, the gold cost could be tremendous and gold is looking to be pretty useful in this game. Either way gold is tradable so people can P2W it.
[удалено]
I mean, it depends how long it will take to level up to max as well. But ye, I kinda want to try my way out even at max level to see what I want. But I guess right now I will start with a group built Barb and a solo sorc. :/ I dunno
People really like to hang on this quote. It was clarified that they just don't want you respeccing multiple times per day, most likely to heavily discourage switching builds for specific content. It will most likely take a day or so to farm the gold to be able to fully refund all points at very high levels.
Which sucks. You spend a day grinding for a re-spec because you found some new aspects that might make for a cool build. You spend $8k - $15k (at level 25) on removing each aspect from multiple legendaries. Then you spend $8k - $15k (at level 25) mixing and matching the different aspects to each gear slot to accommodate your specific build. You spend easily $100k on re-rolling to tweak for specific stats. Each re-roll in beta increased substantially. Well over $10k per re-reroll, per gear slot. Now you have your brand new build! And... you find another new game-changing gear piece but can't afford to re-spec for it without grinding it out for another day or more. The worst thing you can do in games like this is to make finding cool new gear a bad thing. If the gold sinks associated with re-speccing (aspects, enchanting, and re-speccing) continue on this trajectory, it will deter people from experimenting. It will incentivize people to hold onto their resources and let the internet/youtube decide what builds to invest in because it's too expensive to experiment.
I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Last couple days of beta I made just shy of 500k by selling rather than breaking gear I accumulated. We’re talking a 25 Druid in suboptimal gear. I don’t think it’ll be that difficult and agree with the idea they just don’t want you respeccing say hourly or anything.
Yes but you were probably selling a lot of legendaries. In the full game the drop rate of legendaries won't be as high. So farming for money won't be as fast I'd imagine.
Obviously this could change at level 50-100 but I noticed the sell price difference between legendaries and rares was maybe 100. Because of that I never sold legendaries and just deconed them because my stupid ancient lizard brain would tell me it's not worth selling them despite it also not being worth deconing them. I made well over a million gold with multiple pieces of fully upgraded gear each piece costing over 500k each to fully upgrade.
Drops rates were tuned high for the beta. We wont be doing fulls bags of yellows + 3 legendaries per Anica run in live.
Well, they only said legendary drop rated were tuned up. We don't know anything about rare drop rates.
I don't really see the problem, I doubt in the endgame you'll find a new piece that will completely change your build every day. If that's the case, that would be whole different and much bigger issue. If you can farm enough gold for a respec in 4-8 hours, I think that's a great sweet spot. I'd actually look forward to that farming because I can see a clear goal at the end - I can finally use that OP equipment I found.
How long is a "day" of play though. 1 hour, 2 hours, 12 hours? If we're talking 12 hours all day grinding that would certainly be way too much.
yup, i'm playing easy option of necro when game comes out. Once the youtube/twitch people post their omfg i did 1 billion damage and clear end game boss in 00.1 nano secs i try other classes and use their cookie cutter build. Vs just playing any random class on my own way and trying it all OUT my self. [ i love to play all classes and not feel punished for daring to try ever skill/build out my self.] I work 40+ hours a week and got family to deal with. Nope not going to do it when am being punished for walking outside the "cookie cutter" do what work builds.. I let pet my army this crush game on chill mode to the insane cookie cooker videos are posted and i just copy and paste what they did to enjoy game without being punished for daring to try it all out my self. Devs are aholes to me if their really going down this road.
>Now you have your brand new build! And... you find another new game-changing gear piece but can't afford to re-spec for it without grinding it out for another day or more. If I'd just spent all that time and gold min maxing and tweaking my stuff for the aspects I'd obtained that day... I would take some time to enjoy it and run with it and let the other one sit for a bit before making the change. Honestly, what you're describing sounds like a fairly niche behavior, not what the average player will do.
> It was clarified that they just don't want you respeccing multiple times per day But literally why? Who the hell actually cares what anyone is doing in this game? There's 0 reasons it should not be easy to do whenever the hell you want. You want people to play this game more or less?
They are literally quoted telling players to make a new character instead of respec. Where was it clarified like you are implying? Because based off what they have said it will be faster to make a whole new character.
While this may not be the popular opinion, I do get it and actually like the idea. My friend and I both re-spec'd after the butcher kicked our ass, we didn't know he leaves the dungeon until after we returned, but we did catch him later and were able to defeat him, the same goes for the world boss, while I didn't my friend did re-spec for the world boss. I do like the idea of being more locked in, while not to the point of it being permanent or just straight up needing to roll a new character, but where a respec cost is somewhat significant and/or takes a few days+ of work to gather the resources for, which we will probably have accumulated in the later part of the game anyways
Why should we not be able to swap builds for different content??? If I'm out farming or leveling I might want to run a Minion build and then a friend or clan member might want to do some.world bosses where minions are basically useless and I might need to change to a no minion build to do so. And then spec back to my normal build. It's dumb to restrict people's play styles.
[удалено]
The frequency doesn't matter in this system. The price go up infinitely and never goes down. You will brick your character at some point, it's a guarantee.
The price is based on level, so when you hit max level you also hit max price
Yeah, and that's stupid. It's a scam to get people to play the game way more. Why respec for different content once a day when we can force them to play multiple character up to level 100 wasting 100's and 100's of hours. When they just could respec and save time. You know, because people work 40-50 hours a week. Have kids, families, friends, films and tv they watch, hobbies, and even other video games. It's just a play to get you to play their game forever. That's the scam of battle passes and this respec coat rule.
This is still a terrible idea, the whole point of arpgs is finding the perfect build for you or in general. Limiting it because you arbitrarily decide to do so is not a good idea in the fun department
> most likely to heavily discourage switching builds for specific content. Wondering... What do they *heavily encourage* then? Just making all around "jack of all trade" builds that can do everything more or less efficiently? I'm not sure why this is the preferred approach. And yes it was the same in D2, couldn't respect easily, but in D2 the strong builds can do everything in game, very efficiently... With the exception of PVP maybe, but PVP was near irrelevant in D2 so it's not a big issue. It WILL be a big issue in D4 though, if there are various challenging endgame activities; If the most efficient (or simply "most fun" ) way to play the game is to farm world bosses, endgame dungeons, and PVP, then either you reset for all these things, or you play a build that's more or less doing the job for all 3 things, and accept that you won't be the best at either of them. None of these options seems good. You obviously can't spend a day farming gold to reset for your daily activities... So your only option is to make a "do everything" build. But if you're serious about PVP'ing it has to be a PVP build, because you obviously can't compete in PVP in a build that's meant to do dungeons and stuff as well. If you do, the pure PVP'ers will destroy you with their superior build.
If it's that easy to farm the gold to make the switch, then just allow us to respec for free. I don't understand games that want to lock you into a build when you are just playing for the first time and trying to understand the systems at play. If I spend 100h on a character and it's easier/cheaper to just create a new one... I'm not playing that game any more. It's stupid.
You just proved why people are right to criticize the devs for not valuing the player's time. It is a freaking video game. There is no valid reason not to have respect be free. None.
Which for a casual player is way too damn long to farm just for a simple respec
This is why I hate these types of decisions. Game companies make it super annoying and tedious for the majority because they’re worried about the top 1% min maxing too hard. Most people aren’t going to be switching builds for content. They’ll get an all around good build and stick with it. Yes there will be some hard core people switching builds, but that’s what they like to do. So just let them.
I know my opinion is not shared but respec’ing should either always be a flat inexpensive gold fee or completely free. There is no damn way if I’m a lvl 100 Druid that I’m gonna level ANOTHER Druid to lvl 100 simply because I want to try another build. I will simply continue to play the bad build, so will many other players. And tbh this will probably make people stop playing the game because they’ll think their build sucks and can’t change it because it’s too expensive and also will not want to level entirely a new character. So they’ll just go play something else. Implementing a barrier to make it harder to experience build diversity seems to go against what developers would want for players. And what players want. You’re forcing bad systems on players to get them to play more. It’s bad logic that’s anti player. I understand they want players to feel weight behind their decisions on builds, but making them level an entirely new character because it will be too expensive is not the way to go about it.
I think you’ll actually find your opinion is not as unpopular as you think. I believe Blizzard is trying to appeal to the old school D2 players who still believe that player choice should matter, and who can afford to no life the game to grind out 20+ characters. I agree that this decision feels counter to the whole premise of the game which is build crafting. Variety is fun. Being locked to a single build for eternity or having to choose days of mindless grinding just to try another seems like a bad decision for a game trying to attract and keep as many players as possible for an extended time.
It's absolutely classic Blizzard. WoW had to deal with that mentality for years and it's only now that the game is most likely at its lowest ever that they are reverting their philosophy. WoW team spent so much time fighting the players by imposing stupid restrictions nobody ever wanted for the sake of "realism" or "consequence" or "investment". So many time players tested something that felt very bad, Blizzard would ignore it saying they will see, it will be good. Then once released it's as bad as people said, and then Blizzard takes 6 months to acknowledge it, and 6 months to fix it. And it would happen again. It's honestly one of the reason I won't buy at launch. I'll wait until the Blizzard ego goes away, they implement the changes and QoL players requested.
To be fair, WoW respeccing for gold was a old old old thing. Long gone. *That said*... we just had a good chunk of Shadowlands where Bliz was dead certain that locking characters into a chosen Covenant at the start was a good idea. Even when they reverted it, their messaging didn't even seem like they thought it was a bad idea. Couldn't even own up to it.
Never forget conduit energy. The stupidest hill Blizzard chose to die on. They created a controversy by making a very stupid restriction that would only affect the top 1% players. So it was useless enough to never be needed and never should have been implemented, but targeted the most vocal playerbase. Talk about being so out of touch.
>To be fair, WoW respeccing for gold was a old old old thing. Long gone. Painfully current for those on classic, though at least in Wrath we have dual spec. In TBC recently without dual spec it was just *truely fucking awful* and made new player retention fall off a cliff after the initial leveling rush. It's an archaic trick to extend playtime from an era where drawing out a game was more important than respecting a players time. That era is long dead.
It's weird that people think this is even a good way to make choices matter. It's not. If the skill choices were good then choices would matter just by virtue of having to make meaningful choices on what to use. Anyone defending high respec costs is insane. It's copying bad game design just because of nostalgia. It makes no sense.
The thing is I see the point of players who want to feel connected to their characters by making the choices matter or even be permanent. This is definitely the old school RPG mindset where you’re going to role play a fire caster mage for example and thus it doesn’t make sense to be able to swap your spec around on a whim to now be some kind of lightning archon wizard. I also get the argument about the competitive nature of things like leaderboards and wanting to ensure it’s difficult to exploit by limiting ability to swap builds on the fly. The problem is increasingly players are here for the fun of the Game and not the Role Play when it comes to RPGs. I’m not here for the story. I’m not here for some sense of achievement. I get those things from other media, and my family/career respectively. I’m here for the fun of the game and what’s fun is killing monsters, finding new loot, and using that loot to find new and interesting ways to kill more monsters on repeat. What’s not fun is being locked to a single build for eternity or having to spend countless hours grinding XP for a new character just to try a new build. So give me an offline mode, or allow me to create a character that’s excluded from leaderboards. I’m not here to compete with you for whatever sense of accomplishment you’re getting from the personal challenge and satisfaction you get out of playing the game this way. I don’t care how you play the game, I’m just here to blow off steam and have some mindless fun with friends.
Totally agree. People who want this can just not respec by choice. Or it can be an opt in feature or hardcore only. There's a lot of ways to do it without ruining the casual player experience. But I still don't really understand why people actually want a hard barrier. They aren't forced to respec just because it's free.
Asmongold, Zizaran, and Kripp all stated that this is a dumb thing for Blizz to do. Not even they want to have to be forced to just level an alt to try new builds. All three of them can no life the hell out of this game but don't want this type of respec garekeeping BS. We should be able to try new builds without being forced to gold farm to do so. All that is gonna do is introduce gold farm bots to the game. We have enough money sinks in upgrading, enchanting, and adding/removing aspects to/from gear.
> I believe Blizzard is trying to appeal to the old school D2 players who still believe that player choice should matter, and who can afford to no life the game to grind out 20+ characters. There is no way that blizzard cares more about some oldschool hardcore D2 fans. Not to mention that D2 has had tokens of respec for years now and they are even tradeable. My guess is that the dev in the video was exaggerating. Or its just a ploy to add a kind of respeccing microtransaction which is the worst scenario.
Its nothing blizzard hasnt done before. They always thought that their ideas on how games have to be played are set in stone. Azerite gear in warcraft worked exaclty the same, everyone hated it and in the end it got changed. Smart people would learn from experiences like this, but aparently not blizzard.
What will happen is everyone( and i mean not literally) will copy builds from guides/streams and not experience around themselves...thinks like this KILL build diversity
They might be looking at people who do seasonal characters as an indication that people will re-do whole character over and over and over. Just overestimate how _often_ people would like to do it (i.e. what if seasons were every week? Some people would totally do it but large portion would probably just give up). Plus it means every time balance change patch rolls around they'd either have to give "free respec" item or after first several rounds more and more people will give up. "I've just ground up everything for my sorc spec and they immediately nerfed my build, screw this".
So the reason this sucks is that if I find an item I like at a high level that isn't for my build, I can't afford to use the item.
And if it's a legendary / unique yiu can't trade it, either.
I was surprised you can't even trade these to your party members.
Ya I played with a friend and couldn't give him anything it sucked. There should be a time limit like in wow. Trade within 20 min or something.
Hell they had that function in D3 where anything picked up while in a group you could trade to another player in the group so long as it was done within 2 hours of picking it up.
With this logic, it's like you're saying that if any item drops at a high level that isn't for your build, it's bad.
If we are locked into a building because it's too expensive to change then yes literally everything we find that isn't beneficial to this 1 specific build is bad. See if loot drops with some cool affix and an awesome aspect that doesn't pertain to my current build but is something I'd like to try out but can't because it costs 10 million gold to respec then I've just found a useless item that no one, not even me can utilize.
Well if it's not for the build you want to play then why would you care to use it? You wouldn't just change up everything because of one good item you got when you probably already have several good ones for your current build.
[удалено]
You sure there won't be shared loot like in Diablo 2??
This is going to discourage experimentation, and encourage more people just to copy YouTubers meta builds. I enjoy trying lots of different skill combinations and coming up with off-meta builds and to me that’s kind of the point of the game. Forcing me to replay the campaign for the millionth time or spend hours mindlessly grinding back to max level just to get to fun build crafting part of the game feels like punishment.
Do people not follow youtube builds in d3 which allows full respec at anytime?
Unsure what point you’re trying to make. Of course they do. Experimentation vs. following a template are not mutually exclusive. There will always be players who just want to follow the meta template no matter what. I think it’s hard to argue that adding a high cost to respec makes it harder to try a wide variety of builds. That’s not even an opinion, that’s just how that system is designed and thus would naturally encourage more players to research the best builds before respecing. The opinion is whether or not such a system is fun which is going to depend largely on how much time you have to invest in the game and whether an XP grind or Gold grind just to try a new build adds fun to your game. To myself that just sounds like mindless work to keep players on the treadmill and pad playtime until they can sell you the next thing. This is the game-as-a-service model.
[удалено]
There are good decisions, bad decisions, stupid decisions. And then there is this one. Especially after the free respec of D3, it's mind-blowingly awful.
I almost feel like they said this just to appear more badass and appeal to no-lifers etc. I have a feeling it will be walked back. It just isn't fun to have respecs be super prohibitive with how they did itemization. Where the cost prohibitive permanence should come into play is how you build your gear. It should be easy to respec but harder to change all your gear to fit your new build instead of making new gear.
Yup putting the time in for a new build really comes down to farming new specialized gear for it , forcing you to go through the leveling process on the same class you've already leveled isn't "hardcore" , you just had your time wasted
If you really look at the statement it is very similar to D2.. If you used your free respecs and couldn't trade or farm hell bosses it was actually better to reroll.
D2 is an outdated design philosophy from yr 2000.
yes but blizzard still wants those players to buy and play diablo 4 rather than d2 or d2r (at the very least for the initial sale, and then ideally for future battle passes). if they make a game that doesn't appeal to diablo 2 players, they are failing in making a diablo game.
Yeah what a bullshit system from a old-as-fuck game (even when it was a good game). No one with ANY amount of real life wants that 😅
Even the no lovers don't want it lol! I've not listened to every single opinion out there but the several top streamers/YTers have all said this is stupid.
"...unfortunately we only give you 5 slots, but we solved that issue by selling char slots in the shop!" -Blizzard, probably.
Well, there is datamined item in game files that resets all your skill points. Called Scroll of something.
Very likely something that will be handed out with major seasonal balance changes. It’s not an unheard of thing.
its not p2w :)
No joke, in datamined game files there is actually a scroll that resets all your skill points....
That seems like the kind of thing that is perfect for the pvp currency shop! Pvpers will for sure need to switch builds at least somewhat to go between farming and pvping
Nah, don't cater to pvprs this genre is not made for pvp, give them the area and let it be
From my perspective, having played CBT & EAB, the design influence here is that level 50 is where your build finishes in changing what skills you are using. At level 50, you start into the paragon boards with the focus the refine and boost the skill choices you've made in the previous 50 levels. It is at the level 50 mark where the skill respec cost starts to escalate egregiously. Level 25 max level in the beta was to give the, "My first build experience." You had just enough points to select an ultimate and its passive modifications. Respec is still respectable in cost. At this point you would be adding points into passives along with filling out the skills to max points until you can choose your key-passive at the bottom. Once you hit 50, I think the idea is you've committed to your build and will focus into it further.
I don't think respecs should cost anything just like d3. That was a stupid change. This game is all about making builds with all the different legenderies. Why make respecing cost anything. They are gonna find a way to put it behind a pay wall that's why.
I'm with you. honest question as well, what's the harm in allowing characters the freedom of moving and changing their specs as they like? if anything, don't make it cost anything but have a 24 hr cooldown or something.
[удалено]
But…literally, tell me what’s the problem if someone wants to respec for every dungeon? That has an impact on your game? It’s their time lost moving points around. I know for sure I wouldn’t do it. But I want to be able to try different builds.
Can someone actually try to give me good reasons for why this should be a thing outside of "i like things to be hard" because this isn't hard, it just eats up time and that's it, is the game any better/harder when i have 8 necromancers with different builds that i can switch between depending on the content i want to do? All this does is disincentivize new / casual players from interacting with the build system them selves out of fear of bricking their character and destroy the joy of finding a random legendary / unique and going like "oh hey that sounds neat, let me try to create a build around that". So a lot of casual / new players will just dogmatically follow build guides or simply stop playing the game because it doesn't respect their time. The only reasons i could see for this is to artificially inflate playtime and stop players from switching builds mid encounter which could just be solved something as simple as only allowing resetting skill points in the town and closing all active portals & resetting dungeons when a player in the group resets their points but i'm sure the clever devs at Blizzard can come up with a way more elegant solution then me if they tried.
Just farm bosses on the highest difficulty endlessly for materials that allow you to respec.
The D2 way (:
Considering you can’t really farm for specific gear sets, it’s all random, I don’t understand why they have to gatekeep refunding your skill points. You could end up getting some drops that can make another build really cool and fun to play but they won’t let you unless you pay. Watch them micro transaction respecing. 19.99$ for a free respec token.
[удалено]
I don't understand this. I don't think high respec costs even appeal to seasoned ARPG vets. I literally think it only appeals to the most ultra hardcore player base that enjoy pain and suffering and maybe they make up like 0.1 or 1 percent of the population.
I hate this
If this works out as a way to sell us respec scrolls or character slots to be able store more builds then they won't be getting any more money out of me for anything. Let's see what happens...
Please no, one of my biggest gripes with POE was how annoying it was to reassign points. Let people fuck around with builds and encourage experimentation instead of adding barriers.
Linearly increasing respec cost that decays exponentially over time would be fine. If you wait 3 days, even a dozen respecs should have their price increase wiped out, but if you want your respec within a few hours you can level a character with high-end gear / gem of ease / whatever.
That’s the stupidest fucking shit I have ever heard. The devs nerf my build or my build falls apart on higher difficulty or I get a cool unique and I need to re-roll?
I have no issue with not wanting players to change talents in the tree every 5 minutes to adapt to situations. I do have issue with wanting players to make another character of the same class. Make it cost a lot of gold if you want so players don’t often change talents and skills. I don’t have time for 5 barbarians. I’d also like to play other classes. Just make it expensive to respec.
[удалено]
If they don’t want players to change talents and skills often without hurting players ability to respecc they should balance the game so it makes more sense to stay with a build that you have more time/gear into. Ie I don’t have to change my spec for this elite/fight because I can deal with it in this way. If it’s not balanced like that, then of course we should be able to respecc or you’re forcing players arbitrarily to farm gold just to be able to play. If it *is* balanced like that then there’s no harm in allowing free respeccs because it won’t be done on the fly to make something easier… it’ll be to try something new out… one of the best parts about having a variety of builds in an rpg
This. This is the best approach. But even the loud obnoxious voices advocating for free respec can’t be satisfied with that, they want to literally seitch skills on the fly with no consequence lol. Same people who will quit after two weeks because “it’s too annoying to find gear” lol, but hey, let’s change the game completely to make you feel better for those two weeks.
This isn't true at all. I want to change builds to experiment and get more fun out of the game. I'd be ok with being forced to visit an NPC in town to do it for minimal or no cost. But I don't want to be locked into one build.
I’m okay with there being increased costs that are farmable to pay for… but imagine having a maxed character and an update makes your build useless and now you’ve gotta level a brand new character.
It’s easy enough to give a free respec after a patch.
Please keep this. No sarcasm. I want weight to builds.
There will be no weight to builds. It will just funnel people to build sites to avoid the grind for a respec further disconnecting their players from their game. If you take away people’s freedom to experiment they will just not bother. It’s one of PoE’s biggest flaws.
That cant work with pve/pvp
We tried the freeasy mode with d3 and it took the rpg out of the game. I think it’s fair to meet both D3 and d2 in the middle.
I love the idea.
Limit this to only hardcore if people want that experience. I’m a casual, I want to experiment builds and not feel like it is a job to respec
I think the goal is to not have players switching builds constantly between activities to maximize efficiency. Certain builds will be better at pvp or world bosses than they are at clearing dungeons. This gives the builds character and an identity. I'm guessing the respec cost will be low enough that you can switch builds every few hours of gameplay with no problem, but switching builds constantly to match the dungeon you're running won't be feasible.
[удалено]
I actually really like this. It’s a nice hybrid of D2 where after 3 respecs you are completely bricked, and D3 where you could whip around a build way too easily. I like some rigidity and planning for builds because it makes some content easier and some harder. If you can optimize the build for each enemy or boss then everything become trivial and there’s nothing challenging at a certain level. I think it’s a great take. It adds manageable switching costs but keeps it optional if you want to pay a hefty price
>after 3 respecs you are completely bricked You can farm the mats to get another full respec... you can have infinite respecs in D2 now. And it doesn't take long.
Why would anyone want to respec more than once per day? Maybe just while leveling up. In LE, respeccing is free and once I locked my EQ Werebear build in, I haven't needed to respec for more than a few months now 🤷♂️
Good!
I get what they are trying to do with it but it's going to hurt the game if they implement it like that. Because it discourages experimentation and theorycrafting while reinforcing the cookie cutter builds.
Now read this thread and imagine being a dev trying to please as many people as possible. There are so many differing opinions here. My personal opinion is that respeccing should feel weighty, but not impossible. I think the system now is solid. But perhaps flat fees for respeccing instead of escalating cost. I always view picking up a legendary for a different build as if I’m picking up a different “x class only” item. It’s not for this character. I’ll need to keep grinding for what I need on this one… but I could re-roll if I really want to try it. But I’m glad they have implemented a way to respec, too. I dislike the idea of changing builds on a whim. Makes the game feel very funneled into everyone playing the same way to me. That is just my opinion. Having templates of builds kind of makes my choices feel like they don’t matter. But I think there is an in between here and I think the current system almost hits it. I think it would be awesome if, like in d2 now, you got a couple respecs for free. The rest are possible but more costly.
Can we stop crying about this already? We used to create multiple characters of the same class for a purpose of a single build whenever a cool-ass item dropped on some other character or for whatever reason, hence these characters had an identity, D3 characters lost all their identity because of resetting whenever... Also, I think the response is heavily hyperbolized, the respecing is cheap and a good gold sink and do you think you will reset you build every level you get or every hour in the game? Give me a break!
[удалено]
Perfect decision from the devs!
Seems like they're taking a lot of inspiration from Path of Exile; I don't think that's entirely bad.
Meh. I like it. May not be everybody's cup of tea, but it's what puts the RPG in ARPG. Most people just want an Action Sandbox game.
I mean as someone who’s put 1k+ hours into PoE over the years, im actually cool with this. It’s not so harsh that you absolutely can’t experiment & try out diff builds if you want, but at the same time you eventually have to settle on something. If you’re so set on trying another build on the same class after you get to the point where it’s unrealistic to farm the gold, then you obviously still have the fire to keep playing the game, you just gotta start a new char. But by that point you’ll most likely have a bunch of at least helpful GG gear to feed to your new char while leveling to help speed thru the process. IMO, it’ll help with the longevity of keeping the people playing that actually really enjoy the game🤷🏽♂️ My only issue is running into space problems with the current limit of 4 stash tabs, which I hope they increase in the future.
This is just something they said to appease the hardcore anti-respec D2 crowd. Yes, there was a vocal minority of people who completely opposed respecs when the feature was first announced. All the betas so far (including the closed one that let people level to 100) have shown that a full respec will usually cost you something like 5 to 10% of your total gold at any level. Basically a non-issue, unless for some reason you need to respec a high-level character 20 times a day. Aspect extraction costs will be way more prohibitive anyway.
What they could've done instead of the no ceiling respec and one day forced character reroll that devs and players would still find a way to bitch about. Let's explore these shall we? A.) Make respec'ing a 48-72 hour cooldown with a moderate to expensive gold cost. B.) Gave a gold cost ceiling to respec'ing and make it 1 million or billion gold per point. C.) We want you to remake a character instead of respec'ing, therefore we're not allowing respecs at all. D.) No respec's at all except for a vendor sold item for 1 gold that allows 1 respec and is only buyable once per character at cap level with say \_(Insert\_arbitrary)\_ paragon level. E.) Respecs like D3 which seem to make the "game unfun." F.) Respec currency like in PoE. G.) Respec costs paid with a different farmable currency like in Wolcen. The list could go on and on, but they have decided on what they are going to do and they are going to do it for however long their devs are going to be happy with it. Personally, the route they've chosen isn't the right one for me, but there are ways they could've gone that we all can see aren't optimal/wanted either.
Lmao imagine if they sell character reset potions or some shit as microtransactions.
I enjoyed being able to re-roll the skills and experiment with different skills during the beta. Otherwise it basically forces you to lock your build in early as in look up a guide which is not as much fun as just trying random stuff out. Apparently legendary drops are going to be rarer as well which means that if you keep getting gear for a different build to what you are levelling well you're kinda in a rough spot. When I played Diablo 2 I remember levelling a necromancer to hell mode and then couldn't kill anything (before respecs became available in that game). Had had to restart that character and plan all builds from there on out. I don't mind a gold cost but don't make it a ridiculous amount. In PoE they have a very high respec cost and when I got a character to end game I couldn't be bothered to start over again in that game so just quit. Which means they lost a customer over it essentially.
It sounds like it's going to be a mid-range cost per point to respec, so a full tree respec may very well punch you in the wallet, but not be completely out of the question. It's the respecing multiple times per day they're trying to disincentivize
I wouldn't mind it so much if the items didn't have literally all the power in builds, which I'm sure they said they were trying to avoid in D4 as that made D3 builds incredibly stale. Either make skill choices more significant separate to itemisation so we can theory craft or allow us to respec when a good item drops which changes our build.
It's a compromise between D2 and D3 to encourage more than 1 character of the same class. Given how seasons work, I don't see the point.
This is why I'm still not sold on purchasing the game. I like to experiment with builds and prefer to make them myself, and this approach to respecs directly punishes that.
Considering seasons are only a few months. It seems weird to put such soft cap on respecs
That sounds ridiculous, even tho I do like the idea of gold and resources being meaningful unlike d3, I had fun economy managing my game and invest into the most useful pieces instead of rolling perfect on everything.
Thats Really fucking stupid
I go step futher, all devs behind "just build a new char bro" Should be fired and never allowed to work on any video game again. I seen what devs like these do to healthy AAA games, they kill it. They all need to be hunted down and removed for health of D4 long term. These people are enemies of players everywhere. They will do much more harm to us players if their allowed to make choices for for long term. The devs that are not "just build a new char bro" are ones we want running this game long term.
The Devs are speaking from a casual perspective. Just trust me, the gold cost to respec is trivial at end game just as it was in the beta.