Passive Respec cost decay

[imcoldheartd]

I have a problem with the current increasing cost to respec passives.

As I understand it, the increasing costs is to discourage flippant respecs and make those decisions matter.

Skills can be respecced essentially free by de and respecializing. My issue is that in trying out builds, passives can make or break the new skills.

For instance, I am working on a mana strike build. I’ve been going between buffing the phys damage, buffing the spell damage but staying melee, buffing the spell damage at range, buffing the melee but at range, all while trying ward stacking vs mana conversion to ward vs leech on melee.

I’ve had no issue with de and respecializing my skills several times to optimize. Currently however, my passive respeccing cost has resulted in about just over 1 full redo in the passive tree per character. I have about three or four mages now specifically messing around with mana strike. I don’t think this is the intended option for trying out builds.

My solution to keep in line with what the devs are looking to avoid while avoiding the annoyance of not playing and retiring a mage at 67 because I have outpriced my respec is to have a passive respec cost decay over time.

Potentially every 24 hours, the cost per point decays 1 level back to base. This does not allow for several respecs a day but allows me to play another character for a day or two and then I can come back to my mage, respec, and continue on.

As it sits now, I am leveling a new mage and will essentially throw away my first 3 mages which feels like a waste because it’s basically a duplicate just to avoid respec costs.

I understand the need to not have casual complete reworks but as there is a learning curve understanding how “on hit”, “on use”, spell/elemental/global damage, % crit vs crit vs crit chance all mesh together, I think this is a happier medium.

Thanks,
Imcoldheartd

TL;DR: make cost multiplier for passive respec decay over a few days so character don’t become throwaways.

[Elgareth]

Either through days, or determined by XP gained or something. But yeah, respecs being costly is fine, but respec costs scaling into infinity is a problem.

[Jerle]

I generally don’t like to see cheap implementation of respec cost. But this suggestion is something I could live with. And could be a happy middle ground for those who are up in arms about current respec costs.

[digne]

Game is still beta, you should remove those costs so that people actually can test different skills and setups while it actually is more beneficial to you than the players themselves

[Zerondar]

True that.
Personally i’d like decaying respec costs to be in retail aswell.
But yeah especially in beta where you expect alot of ballance changes and people wanting to test out builds it would be helpfull to not punish people for respeccing every few days.