Allow Skill Overleveling (to allow 1 time full respecs)

I think it would be cool if you could “overlevel” a skill. Say to a cap of 40, so that way you could respec infrequently and immediately have the additional points to fill it up. These additional levels should probably have increasing XP requirements.

You could also allow these overlevels to persist at 50% through un-specializing a skill. Meaning if I have 20 levels when I despecialize it, and I respecialize the skill later, I immediately have 10 points to spend in it. If I had 40 when I unspec, I can immediately re-spec it later with all 20 points and need to overlevel it to 40 again. This would allow a 1-2 time respec of your entire character if you want, while it stays fully functional and allows it to remain viable for endgame pushing to test the limits of a new build like this. While still keeping frequent respecs require more investment.

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This is would be nice imho. I suggested something very similar some days ago.

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i agree in some sense, respecing at lowers levels is a good thing they went with respecing at higher levels is better and this just leads to players just going with the current youbtube builds to be safe vs experimenting on build viability, which leads to less testing on OP builds when some passives just don’t work.

For early levels it is really hard to experiment. I am playing my first Primalist right now. And while I could follow a guide I wanna explore everything on my own at first. The one skill I like the next is not fitting right. It takes relatively long to skill and you have a long time with 2-3 skills to specialise. That leaves no room for experiments.

But also you don’t need that perfect skill synergies at lower levels. This is important for lategame when releveling is easier.

Maybe the gap between time needed to level skills at high and low level is to big. Could be faster at low levels to feel less punishing when you switch.

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it’s hard to do anything at low levels… just level up and solve that issue! u can do whatever u want with skills once u can get to arena wave 50+

I am not a fan of this idea at all, This removes the weight of making the choices with skill specializations.
Yes its inconvenient but “overcapped” leveling doesnt seem worthwhile and serves to cheapen the system as a whole and move it more towards something like the D3 rune system and would create more a feeling of loadouts instead of a fleshed out character.

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This is NOT the case. With “overleveling” you have the exact same mechanic as before. You have to earn skillpoints to spent. But instead of only earning after you respecced you can learn some of them before. You can then spend them instantly when you respec. But you can only spend the number of points you earned before.

Also you could cap the number of points you can over level to 20, 10, 5, …

Still meaningfull. You are just not struck that hard the moment you respec a skill.

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If anything, it incentivizes you to stay with a choice for longer to max out the overlevels incase you want to respec the skill later. I don’t think it removes the weight of a choice at all. It just makes that choice have immediate payoff when you decide to do it, if you only are changing your choices infrequently. If you change frequently, this system basically doesnt exist or change the game at all from how things currently function.

Yeah, it just shifts the levelling “pain” to before you respec rather than after you’ve respeced. Plus it will allow you to have a more useful skill after respecing (briefly, 'cause levelling skills is pretty quick when you’re at a level that you would have lvl 20 skills).

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i think it’s better if we’re simply allowed to remove all our skill points and reallocate them wherever we want, into any number of skills, just like what we can do with our passive tree points
in lategame, u can swap to any skill u want, there is barely any punishment for doing that, it’s just 5~10 minutes of killing creeps with another skill that overkills creeps
so what the current system does is this: it makes life hell for underlevel people, making them suffer from not reading/thinking carefully+throughly enough
it also helps us recognize the people who don’t know anything about this game in under 1 second
if they r having trouble with swapping skills… u know instantly that they r low level people who don’t know much at all…

The system was implemented to avoid a PoE/D3 problem of people using clearing builds for most of a map/rift and then swapping to a bossing build and back again. If you allow the swapping of nodes at any time it makes that intention moot. Is it difficult to respec in the early game? Yes. Is that a bad thing? In my opinion, no. It does somewhat inflate playtime by forcing you to either create more characters or wait until higher levels to try everything but that’s a good thing from both a developer and a player standpoint.

u;re right, it is kinda cheap if people can swap builds instantly to do different things, that’s like having multiple characters
but…
1 they can still pull this off in late game
2 at least when i build, i always aim for having both aoe for map sweeping and high damage for bosses, this is what the arena in this game asks of us, u need aoe + ability to kill those fat meaty beetles
3 i think it’s real punishing when i don’t put skill points where they belong when i’m lvling new characters…
so… maybe we can come up with something in between??

1 they can still pull this off in late game

But they can’t while in the middle of a monolith or between arena waves which is the point and shows the system is working as intended for late game.

3 i think it’s real punishing when i don’t put skill points where they belong when i’m lvling new characters…

I’ve found success going through everything up to Chapter 7 content with solo found gear and 3 unoptimized skill trees just messing around with skills. That’s around level ~45, and in Chapter 7 enemy damage seems to spike pretty hard. So I don’t know if it’s just me but the only thing I’ve found punishing is if you’re trying to completely respecialize your damage skill while you’re still in the areas before Elder Pannion. That I can agree sucks.

I haven’t found a suggestion for revamping the skill system I’ve liked yet because most of them boil down to “let me respec the skill when I want to without any repercussions”. In my opinion you should take a dip in power to change builds. Late game yes it’s more trivial, but late game you’re less likely to completely overhaul your character.

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the first two run-thrus i felt ok, later on, i kinda lost patience for lvling up new characters… (they move really slow, becuz they can’t equip good boots, very aggravating…)
so this skill tree thing kinda frustrates me…

You are completely right. With having overleveled skills you could exactly do this what’s not intended.

And also I have no problem at later levels with the respec. And when you are at the point you have lvl 20 skills to overlevel you don’t need it because respeccing isn’t that punishing anymore. So maybe the route I suggested is not the best option.

I just struggle a little bit at the very beginning. A brand new player without the knowledge of the system maybe overwhelmed with the skills to choose.

Early game you have to do many choices. You get several new skills. You only get 1 skillslot for leveling a skill so you have to choose what skill you wanna advance with. This is the most important choice imho. Next is what route you go with the chosen skill.

When playing a completely new character I didn’t know before in LE I find me swapping skills very frequently. Because I wanna see how skills alter when leveling.

I don’t know how many times I leveled lunge to lvl 10 and swap it because it did not feel good (still the utility of this skill is a little bit awkward for me - it’s a attack skill mostly used for defensive purposes…) and swapped back because I missed the fast engagement.

I personally had no issues with this even when feeling punished. I like the system. I just fear that early game should be improved for people who are easily getting frustrated when things don’t pay off as they thought.

So maybe grand respeccing instantly for earl levels till you’ve chosen your mastery? Or make it the first time respeccing for very skill is free (you get all points back once in a lifetime)?

So, I read the initial post but I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thread. I’d just like to shed a little light on one of our design goals with this system. This isn’t a hard fast rule and this system could change but this is just where we were coming from when it was designed.

  1. We want players to be able to respec their builds if they feel like they have made a mistake. We don’t want people to feel like if they make a decision, it could be a wrong decision and absolutely need to go look up a build before making any choices. I love Diablo 2 but before they added respecs, when I was a kid, I would level up without spending my skill points and look up what to do. Ideally we don’t want people to feel this restricted.

  2. The time investment for respecing a skill should occur after the decision to respec happens. This means that you can’t save up some resource to be able to flip your build on the fly. If it was possible to quick swap your build, you could have a trash killing build and a boss killing build that you switch between given what situation you are in.

We are open to feedback on these two requirements and we are open to suggestions on how to change them. I can’t guarantee that we will but we’ve changed systems before that we didn’t think we would change.

The third thing that almost makes it on to this list is experimentation. We do want people to be able to experiment with their builds and see what they like best. It’s almost an extension of point 1. It does however begin to conflict with point 2. It’s for sure a balancing act that we tweek every patch and will continue to change until we feel it’s right.

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I really like the first point that you made and the way you devs look at it. People should finally feel free again to create their own build, a build that fits well to THEIR playstyle. I don’t like it when people say they made a ‘‘mistake’’ because the number 1 player on the leaderboard used that note over there, and i havent got it on my tree. This really forces players to get away from their own strenght, their own playstyle and focus on something they actually dont wanna play and have fun with.
For example i always play Maelstrom only with max 1 stack, all points in aoe and duration just to make it more comfortable for me, prob stacking all those stacks will give me more dmg, but i don’t care, i enjoy my playstyle. And you guys give us the freedom to build around that way. Thank you, that’s all i can say!

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Regarding the possibility of experimenting at low levels (or time spending), i’m split.

I agree that it feels like it takes time to up your first skills but it’s a good way to experiment slowly some skills (and their evolution with first nodes, hence general style).
Moreover, at low levels, you don’t need to have a perfect build (as you said) and you have less impact on playstyle from your passive tree (less obligation of synergies). What i want to say is that you already have a form of freedom (relative / higher lvl), as the contraints are less important (a good thing for a start).

And, if you have faster skill level up at low levels, obviously you’ll test more things, but in which context ? You’ll probably elude a lot of future builds because you can’t see, at first sight, some potential for endgame where requirements are often differents (dps/protections/synergies with passive tree etc…) .
And those who can have probably already plan their leveling until lvl 100, so it doesn’t matter for them :smiley:

I proposed (in the other topic) a soft variant of the overleveling with a learning feature. If you already have spent points in a skill, the next time you choose it, it will cost you less experience (proportional at the point already spent, obviously capped). It could be a simple recollection of the knowledge you had (memory of your character).
It will allow you to try different things and, if you preferred one of your previous builds/skills, you could go back inexpensively.

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You are propably right. And as Mike said this is intended for a certain purpose. I am also not 100% sure what to think. The more this 2 discussions regarding the respec are going on I think it is ok as it is.

Thanks for the response. I think respecs serve a purpose larger than just “I made a mistake with my character”.

At low levels, where people feel more “free” to experiment without a character feeling non-functional or viable, they currently cant experiment very well. You don’t have access to 5 specialized skills until level 50, well after the campaign, and then you are still missing a whopping 50 passive points on top of it which could be needed to still complete the “core” function of a build.

Several builds in ARPG’s are a VERY narrow margin of near-perfect gear and stats required to even start functioning in the first place. The build idea requires high resource generation, cooldown reduction, Idol chances etc. Experimenting with a build is really only doable at endgame because of this.

Nerfs, or new items/mechanics, or new endgame options, or even just plain boredom might lead to someone wanting to fairly drastically change their character. I don’t think the lose-lose choice of “Play a non-functional build and struggle to get 20 levels on each of the skills because you can’t push high monolith or arena with it until you do to speed things up” vs. “level an entirely new character, likely well past level 50, just to play a build that would function perfectly fine on the character you already have” is a very fun choice for the player to have to be making.

When I’ve made the decision to change, i’m normally excited about this change, have that excitement dampered by a slog of re leveling before I get to actually feel the benefits of the change takes away from that a bit.

I dont forsee quick-swapping being an issue with my suggestion. The idea was that you could swap once or twice and that would eat up your entire “overlevels” People would not be gaining them at any rate close to fast enough to swap back and forth to abuse like this. Even if they could, swapping skill specializations can easily be disabled during arena and monolith to prevent any abuse case. I think lowering QoL of most of the playerbase for a niche edgecase is kinda silly.

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