Diablo 3 Doesn't Have "Free" Respec. Not Really

General Discussion
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The cost is time.

True you can swap abilities on the fly, but builds are defined by more than just chosen abilities. Gear, legendary gems, actives/passive skills, cube powers, and if you want to stay competitive, augments.

Not everyone has ancient or better of all class sets lying around in their stash. That’s time spent farming new set pieces.

If you don’t have the right legendary gems leveled up that’s time spent leveling them up.

If you are changing gear, chances are you don’t have them all augmented, and that’s a lot of missing main stat. That’s time spent leveling up more legendary gems to augment all your gear.

If you don’t have a stack of Ramildinis Gift, that’s time spent farming it for the extra weapon affix.

If your old build had all this, and you switch builds without doing all this work, you will be severely under powered.

Technically you can switch builds with no cost, true. But I’d argue that’s it’s not really free, if you are wanting to solo GR push, there is a cost at getting the new build up to the speed of your old build, and that cost is time.

In fact I ran into this exact problem. I have Tal/Deathwish build on my wizard. I tried switching to Vyr/Archon, but I could not do anywhere close to the same GR, because of all the missing augments on my new gear.

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Respecs were never meant to be a method to bypass making characters in the first place. They were meant to remedy mistakes, optimize your build and allow some experimentation.

Making characters, enjoying the character progression of your character getting stronger is what ARPGs are about. Yeah you may enjoy being able to change your build at the drop of a hat, but that means you don’t like arpgs.

However, in D3 the character progression happens in the span of a couple hours so repseccing isn’t even a big deal as you are literally only saving a few minutes of power leveling at that point. If D4 ends up having such crappy progression and character customization as there is in D3 then sure have your infinite respecs. Because that just means a D3 sequel is what they made.

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I like arpgs but I like to play one class, what ever the strongest or most efficient build is. I don’t like constantly starting over, I like playing one class/build for a long period of time, or at least until I decide I want to change builds. But that should be my decision. When they make a different build become stronger, I now have to spend time getting the new build up to speed to keep with the strongest and most efficient. I guess I don’t have to, it just feels like I do, because I’m no longer using the strongest or most efficient build. The cost to change builds in this game is not nothing, there’s definitely a high cost in the form of time and grinding.

That cost is still there, whether it’s intended to be used that way or not.

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Those aren’t costs of respeccing. Those are costs of making a new build. They don’t equate to each other.
Other games are able to fully Respec their characteers too, but no one utilizes it like they do in D3. Why? Because there are real costs attached to respecing. It’s fine if you want to do a one time swap to the best build. But what happens when you want to go back and play your old build? When there is a real cost to a respec people tend to not use them to completely change their build unless they don’t plan to go back anytime soon. Having a cost to Respec wouldn’t affect you who plays fotm builds. It will affect the people who want to Respec constantly for whatever task they are trying to complete.

Arpgs are meant to provide people with different end game objectives for different characters. Take Diablo 2 for instance. If you wanted to make an Uber farmer you may make a smiter paladin. But if you wanted more general pve you may make a hammerdin. But you wouldn’t carry around 2 sets of gear and constantly Respec back and forth based on what you want to do. You would simply make a new character spend the few days it takes to get him leveled and gear him. Now you have 2 characters with 2 different objectives in the game.

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So what’s the difference between a spec and a build? I’d argue it’s the same thing, at least in D3. Your build is your chosen focus on specific abilities. Respec means to change your build to a different focus. The terms are interchangable.

I get what you’re saying. I liked playing one build in D2 as well. But they didn’t constantly update the game making your old build subpar to the new build they just buffed. You could play that build forever in D2 as long as you were happy doing so.

Not the case in D3, they are always buffing and nerfing builds, and if you want to stay on top, you have to Respec. Or change builds, whatever term you want to use.

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But we are hoping they don’t make D4 like D3.
And respec is the act of resetting your character. It is not necessarily changing builds. You can use it to optimize your character as well. It’s just that in D3 the character customization is so shallow that this is just swapping out some skills and maybe changing order of paragon points if not high enough to max them out which is why in D3 it is almost always used for the sole purpose of swapping builds.

D4 won’t have such shallow customization as shown by having a talent system.

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It’s also time spent grinding GRs for augments. Like my OP, you can change builds, sure but builds are defined by more than just your skills. They also include your gear, because gear also is a part of your build. And augments are a huge part of making your build good.

Point I’m trying to make here is that everyone is claiming how you can just freely change your build in D3, when I’d argue it’s not necessarily that easy. You can change it, but there’s a level of time commitment involved in doing so.

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Changing gear isn’t a Respec. Respec is only resetting your character(swapping skills/resetting paragon). I get what you are saying. All your power in D3 comes from your gear. So you want to say that swapping your gear is part of the respec. That’s just not what a Respec is, that is just how it came to be in D3 because all of its other systems have 0 depth to them where your only major choice is: what set do I want to use?

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Right, like I said, that’s what it means in D3 because that’s how they’ve designed it.

Respec or build, it’s the same thing in D3. And changing builds costs a lot of time grinding.

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oooh man… where to start… i hate what i just read.

you know what is decision making ?? thinking before doing something?? Learning a game ? Consequences ?? satisfaction of hard work ?? and MANY MORE. welll this features Craps on all of them.

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This is the dopiest thing I’ve ever read. You’re talking about table top RPG’s, not ARPG video games. Two completely different things. What you want exists in pencil and paper form. If you’re expecting that in a video game, you’ll find your options are fewer and fewer, as that type of gameplay does not lend itself well to the format.

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Actually it does. All the most popular arpgs have costs behind respecs. I have only seen the Diablo 3 player base want something like unlimited and unrestricted respecs for no cost at all.

Makes sense. D3 hasn’t been an arpg for a while. It’s an ag.

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Then why aren’t you playing those instead?

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I do. I’m not talking about D3 here. I know it’s confusing but general forums have been marked as a D4 area for now. So we are talking about the future of Diablo. This thread is a little confusing but its purpose is to advocate free respecs in D4 by trying to suggest respecs in D3 aren’t free.

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Nothing confusing at all. You’re trying to shoehorn a feature into D4 which no longer belongs. D3/ROS sold 30 million copies, POE has maxed out at 123k concurrent players on Steam. I would have to put forth that D3 is the more popular of the two games. If you want the old school pen and paper ARPGs, those exist. And you can get close to that experience with the less popular video game RPGs. Blizzard found more success updating their game. Doing so does not make it less of an ARPG. If you want to go that route, no game outside of D&D and other tabletop games can be considered a true RPG.

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Alright, I tried being civil but you want to fanboy so hard that you don’t even want people voicing their opinion on the forums?

The one trying to shoehorn things in is you. I have argued my points on why unlimited respecs isn’t ideal and even provided compromises. The only single thing you have done is express your belligerence for anyone that doesn’t agree with you.
Onto some facts instead useless numbers (comparing sales of a game that rode the coat-tails of Diablo 2 and concurrent players of a game that had to build it’s reputation from scratch. Not only are they not the same metric there are 2 different expectations of them).
No one said anything about RPG. I said arpg. They aren’t the same. Yeah. D3 and Ros had 30 million sales. 2.7million of which was RoS. Showing what a failure D3 was. Commercial success that was built on the reputation of the company and the Diablo series. But a failure of maintaining a player base. Blizzard cancelled the 2nd D3 expansion. Not a good sign for a succeeding game as you claim it to be. The D4 devs own statement of wanting to “GET BACK to what made Diablo great”. Guess what made Diablo great? Guess what really pulled in those 30 millions sales? It was Diablo 2.

PS. PoE beats D3 in twitch viewers. An actual metric that matters. Can’t believe you compared all time Diablo sales over concurrent users.

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Infinite free respec = good for experimentation. Why should noobs be punished for trying out a new skill theyve never tried before? Its utterly nonsensical to make a new player grind to respec after they tried a new skill that unbeknowst to them was underpowered and not in sync with their playstyle. Make them grind for another respec? Give a huge incentive for new players to follow a brainless guide? Screw that, let them switch between skills theyve never even tried for free. All this bs about making barriers to change skills is makes no sense.

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This is copy and pasted as I’m tired of repeating it. You seem to think I’m against all this you are saying. No. I’m just saying it’s not a choice of 2 extremes. So many games have full respecs with costs and there are no issues with “noobs” making mistakes and it completely ruining their experience. Here is an example of such a compromise. It isn’t the only one. Just an example:

There needs to be a true middle ground for respecs. Respecs shouldn’t be what they are in Diablo 3 - a method to bypass creating new characters. Part of the ARPG experience is creating characters and progressing those characters step by step. Choices you make should matter, but there also needs to be some lenience to experiment and make mistakes.
Possible compromise:
Skills - Infinite respec.
Talents - Very limited (like up to 3 respecs per character)
The idea is that your talent tree is where you make your decision on what type of character you want to play. Your talents will buff certain aspects of your character. Then you have your skills. Your skills are just that, skills. Skills are things you can learn at any time. You can experiment and swap them out as much as you want. However, your talent choices dictate what skills your character is good at using. You will be stronger if you synergize your skill and talent trees.

Example:
Say you want to play a Fire Sorceress. you may not know the skills you want to choose yet and you want to find what feels best for you, but you know you want to blow things up in a fiery blaze of fire. So this gives you an idea of what talents you want to specialize in. While you are leveling you will spec into fire talents and experiment with whatever skills you want. You may even experiment with skills outside of the fire category, just they will be slightly weaker than your fire spells. Since you get talent points as you level the impact from talents won’t be as great while you are leveling as compared to max level. This means you can experiment with legendary affixes as you level without worrying much about your talents synergizing with the skill.

I feel this makes sense on a conceptual level as well. Skills are perceived as things you can learn anytime while talents are things considered part of who you are and can’t really be changed.

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That’s one of the things I disliked the most about d2 and poe. The massive incentive to follow a ‘meta’ guide. Otherwise you end up in the mid game realizing you just wasted your damn time, no fault of your own, because you couldnt literally predict the future of optimal node placement. Now the game is sugggesting you make a brand new character when all youd really need to do is simply replace your nodes? Its not game breaking, all this ‘permance’ is punishing noobs for not following the meta guides. I do like the free respec at the end of each difficulty, but i always wanted easy and free ones so i could test a new unique i found without literally making a brand new character just to find out the unique was a peice of crap all along.

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Putting back old mechanics isn’t something I’m trying to do. Like you said, there are other, less popular games with that mechanic that you can play.

Then why did you say:

If you weren’t using popularity as a metric to justify not having respecs? Don’t get mad cause I used your argument against you. Another way you could have put it is ‘games less popular than D3 don’t have free respecs’, but you didn’t. That argument was fair game.

In it’s first week. Bad play trying to fake an argument like that, when you know it to be dishonest. D3/ROS is still the most popular ARPG, even after people knew respecs were free.

This is nothing but you lashing out for no reason. 30 million of anything isn’t a failure, as badly as you want it to be.

Did they though? They sure put plenty of money into developing it and updating enough content for free to justify another expansion. Only thing that had to be paid for was the Necro pack, which again, I’d have to say was an objective success. Seasons are still being played. This PTR had a queue for gods sake.

If that was the case, again, RoS would not have sold anything, let alone the 10 million+ that it sold. You keep wanting it to have been a failure so badly to justify your arguments, but it will always be objectively a huge success.

How much money does Blizzard make off of Twitch viewers again? I can’t recall. Nothing, if I remember right. Now compare the 30 million sales vs. PoE, a free game. Blizzard chose to not monetize like PoE is, and still had massive sales numbers, and was more popular.

This is again, wrong. This is a part of pen and paper RPGs. Video games get to be whatever they want. Blizzard found huge success with D3, whether you like it or not. Hell, even D2 finally caved and added respecs. You keep wanting to make another video game that is a tabletop RPG, and the numbers just don’t add up for them. If they wanted to make games for limited audiences, they’d go hardcore. That went out the window 15 years ago with WoW. They’ll make far more money making more accessible games, and I honestly do not see that changing with D4. They just would not make the same money with a slow, old school ARPG.

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