So you effectively want to front-load the time spent by being able to gather the currency before respecing so you then don’t have to feel like you’re spending time respecing (despite the opportunity cost of not being able to spend that currency on gear, be it gambling for bases to craft or buying stuff on the AH when that’s implemented/etc).
I think it has to be unique currency for this sole reason of respecing. I can see two types of currencies.
Single node respec orb - it will allow you to remove point from node without lowering level of skill itself.
Respeciallize orb - which will allow you change skill in slot without losing levels in that slot.
This is sort of solving issue I have with respecialization and hopefully what Ghostlight has. You can’t be just switching from one build to another in matter of seconds - at least not many times, you need to spend “time” and resources and if you are respecing a lot, you will run out of these and you still need to use old fashioned respec or just grind for hours to get more these orbs, but if you are playing let say for like 70-80 levels, you should have enough these orbs to completely respec your character at least once - or respec few skills several times.
I can get behind this, but these orbs have to have some rarity and not be dropping like crazy.
I think I agree, but would you want the xp to be bound to the slot or the skill? I’d probably want it to be bound to the skill, but that would allow the player to level a skill up to 20, respeciallise (freeing up that slot but keeping the skill at lvl 20) to allow them to level up a different skill up to 20 thereby having more than 5 skills specialised. Which would be “bad” (given the devs view on how many specialised skills they want us to have) so the xp/levels would have to be bound to the slot as un-intuitive as that feels to me.
Also, would they be tradeable or not?
If you bound XP to skill, you will get to the point, where you leveled up all your skills and you are in fact in same position, what is currently proposed in Diablo 4 and I don’t like it.
I would say bound XP to slot and if you want keep xp on that slot, you have to use currency to respec the skill.
And I think these should be tradeable. If someone want spend other currencies or items to respec more often, I am fine with that.
Not sure why you doubled his time, but he actually said;
I think that was the experiment time and then reverting back to the way it was which doubled the time. I also died and I didn’t mention that I crashed because I was trying to work at the same time. I probably could have done it sub 10 mins pretty easily.
I think that one of the main problems is the disconnect in our vision for when level 20 skills are supposed to be easily accessible. Level 63 is early to be regularly playing with fully leveled skills. We considered locking the max level of skills behind character levels. Have a sliding scale of max skill levels. So at say level 63 max skill level would be say 15 so the respec time for a “max’d out skill” would be much faster just because you can’t get it up to 20. We figured that it would be better to let people get up to 20 earlier if they really pushed for it though.
I know people aren’t really calling for this but I just want to be clear that we have no intention of making skill respecs completely free. It will probably always hold some sort of gold/item and/or time cost. We are still experimenting with the system as a whole.
3 Likes
After a discussion already this long + various other similar threads it’s nice to hear some devs thoughts.
And i really like that you don’t intend to make it completely free.
But from what i gathered you are very much open to different solutions and that might be still worth discussing here or in another thread.
Thanks for the insight.
So after creating a new topic and not commenting here i will do it properly.
I think respeccing a char for a new build is ok but maybe even a bit too easy currently. The issue i raised was implementing a “D3 armory” type system not implementing a D3 respeccing system.
The reason i say this is that it should take time to get a build together but once i have gone through the grind it should be “saved” for to come back to at a later stage.
Once you have ground out a particular build, then move on to grind out a new build, it should be very simple and easy to go back to the build you first ground out.
I dont want creating a new build to be easy but i want going back to a build i have previously ground out to be easy. Hope that is clear as mud 
1 Like
Like this one?
1 Like
I hope it will steer towards gold/item cost. It feels to me that the inconvenience of time cost had made you folks experimenting with making skills easier (or faster) to respec at higher character level and I’m not sure if I think that’s just a very awkward way of taking away the cost but also trying to stick to the original philosophy.
I would like build identity to be strong and for respec to always have cost. But I do agree with many that releveling the skill is clunky as a cost and would be better priced with material resources.
1 Like
When I read through my earlier posts on some similar topics I have to admit that I had a similar opinion on respecs at early levels being to punishing. Seems that my opinion had changed with time playing.
That’s propably because of the more higher level characters I have now where respec isn’t that hard and when I level something new I have a rough plan and already know the different skills and nodes so “real” experimenting isn’t a thing.
From a perspective of a new player I can understand that the time investment early levels is really punishing, when you have no clue about the skills and synergies.
2 Likes
I play for the stories and quests, Arenas have really zero point to them bar leveling for me.
Same here to be honest, the whole respeccing skills is a mess imo, the game in general is great but those skills nope…
My opinion i feel skills should save the points you’ve earned in case you want to level said skill again, starting a new skill is fine as long as the journey there isn’t wasted like it is now.
Absolutely. When I am tweaking builds it is a process of experimentation. An idea comes to me and I want to try it NOW to see if it works, not in 3 hours when I’ve forgotten what the idea was in the first place. Strike while the iron is hot as they say. With that in mind, it is vital the cost for the respec can be payed BEFORE the respec is going to happen (e.g earn gold or orbs or whatever and be sitting on a stockpile). I can’t stress this enough.
I was experimenting with a build and changed 4 points. Experiment failed, so I had to put them back again. So I had to level 16->20 twice. He listed his time for doing it once.
Heh. My opinion has gone the opposite way. I see no problem with the respec cost early on for a new char. Now that I have levelled 5 chars to post 60 (finished campaign) I know that an early respec is fine as all your skills will end up hitting ~17 more or less together, so it’s not a problem. Also the campaign is laughably easy so I don’t need levelled skills to roflstomp it.
However, now having 5 chars at end game, which is when I want to tweak my builds more and more and test them in Arenas, is where I feel the painful cost of respecing much much more. It hurts more lategame, not early game. Well level 60 to 70 at least.
In short where I am now, respec time from 16 → 20 is much important than cost from 1 → 16.
I’d love it. I can experiment all day without cost. That is my ideal. In fact the completely free respec was the one thing I think D3 got absolutely right, in terms of the evolution of ARPGs. Unfortunately there were just not enough skills or skill variations in the game to merit it being free, which is what caused the issue I think. This is not so here.
LE is not like D3 because there are far more combinations of skills available here and in each skill you are picking 20 skill points from about 100 possibilities. That is FAR MORE diversity than D3 offers by many many orders of magnitude. Not even comparible. This is an absolutely key point and is why fully free respec would be OK in my book, as there are just so many possibilities. Even if it was 100% free I could still not try as many experiments as I’d want to.
The game is being marketed by the sheer number of build possibilties and hence the depth offered to the player. That’s its strong suit. Therefore, it seems counter-intuitive to punish the player so hard for wanting to explore those depths. And yes I feel punished for wanting to tweak late game builds, as per my Fireball example.
As I said, we both are expecting different things from this game. Where you see strong points, I see flawed design, le’ts agree to disagree here.
But as they said, respec system is still in flux, while it never will be free, they are playing with ideas so let’s see.
I hate it. I absolutely hate this. How the hell your choice matters when you don’t even know what you’re getting? It’s completely opposite. Your choice doesn’t matter at all. Because the only way you can acquire the information about a skill is to GUESS(by poorly described tool tips), but there’s no refund. You’re forced to be committed without any testing chance. Yes, you can respec your passive easily, but skill specialization on the other hand… There could be so many different outputs with 20 points, and dozens of node. It’s so tedious to test every possible result with the current system.
I’m fine with sticking to one mastery though. You also have to guess what you’ll get from each mastery but they all have a clear concept that really differs from other two.
To me, ARPG is all about building. Building a character that I would like to play by making hundreds of small change. It’s just not happening here. So I actually gave up. This game already offers different base classes. You need to re-start from 1 if you want to play something else. And I’m fine with that, but why is it so punishing to test a skill?
I don’t see any change coming with this amount of people actually want this to be harder, or are okay with the current system so it’s whatever. I personally like how PoE executed a respec system. [On a full respec it costs you about 2-3ex, which isn’t too hard but not brainless-easy to do without planning or thinking. Actually, it’s better to create a complete new character for a skill that uses different mechanic. I’d say it’s much harder doing that than how you respec your passive points in Last Epoch. Although, in exchange, it’s far more fair to test(respec) skills that can work with your passive tree. You can level multiple skills that you don’t currently use all at once, and they’re permanent once they are leveled up. And you can change how your skills work by just linking different support gems. And putting them in and out on your gear is easy(this whole part was out of point, and unnecessary, I was writing gibberish)]
By reading the tooltip? For the most part they’re accurate & where they’re not you flag them to the devs & get them improved.
1 Like