Or D4 but it doesn’t matter, it’s the idea of a price “just not so little that it feels rewarding to swap just for a run” that’s important.
Also, D3 is now centred around GR the player can do on a loop and requires specific builds. Because they are random, D4’s dungeon keys shouldn’t have the same problem.
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No. I would have it be from normal quests/play activities not challenges. It’s about respecting players time, not gatekeeping an out of date restrictive system.
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Imo having a respec cost that is like “do X in game”, no matter if X is farm bosses for a rare drop, or do a bunch of bounties etc. is not a good solution.
For a lot of players, that cost will be nothing. Respecs will essentially be free, and people will run around with a ton of respec tokens.
While for another group, they might have made so bad characters, that they cant complete the task needed for a respec, essentially breaking their characters.
To adress those issues;
Have a free respec that resets every 14 day. Giving those who destroyed their characters, through an amazingly bad build, a way to get it back. Mechanically, the game could essentially just give you a respec token for free.
Then have a farmable respec token that can allow you to buy respecs within those 14 days reset timers. I dont particularly care how you get that respec token, could be a rare drop, or maybe given for completing a full replay of the campaign (which imo should be one of the possible end-game activites), or clearing 20 camps on the map or whatever (I dont mention bounties, because I dont think bounties D3 style should exist). How you acquire the token is not that important imo.
BUT, you can only ever carry one respec token - and they are bound to the character who found them (so you cant make 10 alts to carry respecs for your main character). That way, you can’t ever store up a bunch of respec tokens, addressing the first issue mentioned, of respecs becoming essentially free.
To further make sure that respecs never becomes completely free, even the token respec should have a 24 hour cooldown or similar.
As for the topic, I really hope Blizzards claim that you can fill 30-40% of the skill tree, was just a random, non-true number. Because that is, way, way too much.
We should be able to fill maybe 10-15% of the tree with the amount of skill points available.
If the game has 30 skills per class, and you could fill 40% of the skill tree, that is 12 skills + their support nodes. Considering we only have 6 skill slots, 12 skills would represent lots and lots of different builds. That would be complete nonsense to allow.
15% would be 4.5 maxed skills, forcing you to (of course) make decisions not only on which 6 skills you pick, but also which upgrade nodes you take within those skills. As it should be.
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Too restrictive. Also you do not have to go earn them or use them. If someone wants to have speed run for mats build, a PvP, build, and a pushing keyed dungeon build, you idea would make it impossible.
Now, proponents of such a system will say things like your character should have meaning. And you guys are free not to swap builds and keep to one and roll additional tons for those activities. But that doesn’t respect a players time.
You also need to take the D3 gold situation of it. I doubt gold inflation will be the same in D4. But you make the gold cost a % of total gold or scale up the more you change in a day.
As to your skill thing. If we have 12 by the guesstimate, that would solve many respec options as one could go for the 12 skills they like and swap out accordingly.
True about GD and easy respecs (stat points can’t be respeced til quite a ways into game), works great for that game and I still feel like it’s my unique character.
Just wanted to say, in D2 respecs are pretty easy too. You get 3 free ones from doing the Den of Evil and you can always use tokens for more respecs, people usually have these for trade for not too much if farming them is a problem.
Yeah, but they came 10 years too late and nearly 7-8 years after I beat the game and moved on.
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Ahh. The call of D2 is still strong with me, the ladder is resetting in two weeks!
That is not a problem imo. Rather, making that impossible is the very goal.
Your character should not have a speed build and a push build. It should have exactly one build. Pick your strengths and weaknesses, so you can handle (or not) the different activities the game offer, including speed and push (insofar as those things exists at all in D4).
Well, except for PvP. I would actually be fine with allowing all characters to essentially be dual-spec, with one build that automatically actives in PvE areas and another that automatically activates in PvP zones. So not something you could abuse for having two PvE specs.
The reason of course, would be to allow more people to participate in PvP, without having to limit their own PvE capability.
No A-RPG (nor any RPG really) has ever managed to make a meaningful general currency that keeps its value over time. D4 will not manage that either. That is pretty much guaranteed.
The whole “I made a mistake and now have to respec again” thing would also be largely solved by making it so that you have to click an “accept build” button after you’re done setting everything up rather than immediately locking the choice in the moment you click.
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Yeah, surely there should be an accept button.
Heck, if you can only respec in towns, you could be allowed to fix mistakes until the moment you leave the town again. Leaving would be the accept button.
Throw in a “target dummy” for people who want to test their skill choices!
Think the % alone isn’t the real reason, it’s more about the competitiveness and/or synergy between skills
Personally think that the class-talent system could play a key role in this, BUT what could be also cool is have like 3 possible “themes” of each skill… For example, a Meteor falling dealing AoE and scorching the ground, a Meteor falling and dealing massive single-target damage and knock-back everything else, or a Meteor falling and creating an unpassable crater temporarily. Think that wouldn’t be THAT hard to make, basically 3 versions of each skill (not necessarily all about damage), or even whirlwind, one could be the regular WW with “transparency stepping” able to move across opponents, other could be a 3 in a row “combo” kicks, all knocking back targets from the side but dealing greater damage to the target/s in front, and 3rd version could be a shoot bunch of spears in an arc, start swinging and chain targets in between
You get the idea :), don’t need to go “bonkers” with runes or anything, but making each skill have 3 versions to pick from might achieve just enough in terms of providing competitiveness/synergy
If you can manage bots and cheating and there aren’t other factors acting on the game I think you can keep a pretty good economy.
Not sure how it affects anything I wrote. If you can get 40% of the skill tree you would also be able to get 40% of the different versions of each skill. 40% is just too much no matter how the skill upgrade nodes are designed.
There wont be a whole lot of different ways to build characters, if each character can pick 40% of everything.
I completely agree that there should be skill modification/upgrades though. It is pretty sad that current D4 offers LESS skill customization than D3 does.
I hope the tree in D4 is like a Grim Dawn or D2 tree.
D3 had more skill customization than necessary imo. I don’t need 5 different hydras that all do about the same thing. Also, it’s good that some skills are locked in as certain damage types imo (like Grim Dawn or D2) so you have to gear for those skills instead of changing the skill to compliment your gear.
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I agree with that. Especially about skills not having changeable dmg types. Kinda removes the importance of dmg types, if you can so easily change them (and of course, the lack of monster resistances helped with that too). A fireball should be fire-based. But give me ways to change how the fireball works.
Still sad they cant even have more skill choices than D3 in D4.
Doesnt mean D3s skill choices were always good. Definitely not.
However, the classes kinda had 70-125 genuinely different skills through the rune system.
I think Wolcen and Last Epoch is showing a better way for skill customization though.
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Guess this part at first sight sounds correct, but then you can end up with the same thing… Slightly more versatile at the end I guess
I also think that the 30-40% is a relatively intuitive number considering the fact that one can have 6 equipped skills at a time from a “pool” of somewhere between 25 and 30 (and add a few extra for the sake of emergency/adaptibility), so you end up with something like 9/25 or say 10/30
If you were to “limit” the character build to 15% of total points/talents then a class would need to have at least 50, maybe even 60… 
, but here’s the catch/difference: NOT ALWAYS more is more, IN FACT one skill can completely overshadow another at times (and the higher the number the more likely it becomes a thing). Would MUCH RATHER have a pool of 25-30 skills (with up to 3 modifications for a certain playstyle each) than 50 skills out of which 15 probably won’t get picked
Now, for the “modifications”, think that can be a very “lategame-specific” thing, say each “orb” has it’s own requirements (and sacrifices, say 5-10% of total stats of your character, or maybe 15%~ish of stats of a certain type), and you can place only one orb on a specific skill… Kinda like that kind of thing 
This really needs to get the axe. I’m hoping it’s not true for D4, it would make me think they’re just repeating D3 gameplay in a new world. Give us a 2nd action bar that is hidden (or not) like PoE, Grim Dawn, or D2. I want auras, curses and war crys!
Especially if itemization ends up being D3 like too with scaling drops and legendaries that roll mostly affixes found on a rare.
Since we can only “equip” 6 skills, allowing us to fully pick and upgrade 9 or 10 skills seems pretty bad. No choices in our 6 skills then.
Regardless of how many skills we can physically put on our action bar, it can be 6, 10 or 50 skills… we should always have less points to spend, than needed to max them all. Otherwise you remove the meaningful choices in those skills.
Not sure why that would be the case.
15% of all skill nodes, with each class having ~30 skills, would allow you to get your 6 skills (which I personally think should be 7-8, but that is a different topic), and some of the upgrades for each of those 6 skills.
Yeah. I have not argued otherwise.
Although, I dont think 50 skills is that many either. We have already seen about 25 skills for each class in D4. And all of these classes were missing really obvious “class fantasy” skills. Coming up with more relevant skills would be easy (if ignoring the development time that is), but my argument about maxing <15% of skill tree is based on 30 skills. Not 50. If we had 50 skills to choose from, then we should only be able to max <10% of the tree. And so on.
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Honestly ?, think people overreact to this cause we had a greater/bigger thread in which the answer was = 7 instead of 6 
Either way I get your point but highly doubt people ever use more than 4 skills in a particular fight (effectively), in fact too often people even max-out only one skill and rely on that one specifically
Point taken, but this wouldn’t be a problem if the “rest of slots” could be filled with consumables of certain types I think… For example
[1,2,3,4,5,6] [c1, c2, c3]
The left bar is the skill palette (the usual), but the right bar contains things like HP/Mana potions, but could also contain summons, traps, temporary buffs, scrolls of curses, throwables of any kind, or even at some cases self-repair kits (those kinds of things), basically droppables that require you use them strategically at certain places should you choose to do it… 
Grim Dawn allows you to find recipes for consumables (then you can craft em with reagents from monster drops) that you can put on your action bar (which is about 8-10 buttons) and then you can press ‘y’ to look at action bar two which is where I like to put my auras to turn them on then I never look at the bar again.
7 skills would not make me happy either. I want more of a Grim Dawn, PoE, or D2 bar.