Diablo IV - An Argument for Limited Respecs and Choices with Gravity - Feedback

General Discussion
367

Yeah, not exactly difficult.

368

I would really include something like a timer. Every time in a row, it gets exponentially expensive but when you wait like a day, the timer resets

369

You could do something like WoW used to do with its talents where it gets more and more expensive and once a week(or whatever time you set) the cost reduces by half until it goes back down to the minimum.

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370

It’s more valid than “I don’t like it and I’m a real fan of real Diablo so it should be taken out, hurrrr durrrrr.”

Taking it out stifles experimentation and replayability.

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371

Sure.

If anything respec costs increases replayability imo. And a respec cost still allows for experimentation, and gives you more reason to experiment, due to a larger amount of builds being viable if you cant respec for perfection all the time.

It would make sense to have an “arena” where you could freely test different skills though.

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372

And next time we get a button to instantly kill the whole dungeon?
“yOU dOnT hAvE to uSe IT” ~•v•~

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373

Yeah, that could be a reasonable method.

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374

The extreme in the de-evolution of video games is very eye opening. That is essentially what difficulty levels are in D3 for me. I like challenging games, but when there is a nob for difficulty it makes it feel less immersive for me. Lower difficulties are the epitome of game design de-evolution and are basically an “i win” button.

Adding the ability to respec is just one example of turning a immersive virtual experience into a modular contrived fantasy simulator.

375

I can’t fathom why people blame D3 failure for its unlimited swapping skills, when in fact item raining from the sky is the real culprit. Give player 1 or 2 legendary per GR run and I would like to see how freely swapping skills kill the game? Admit it please, D3 is boring nowadays because it takes so fast to complete every build you want with full items, not because it has all skills available. Skills without items mean little in ARPG.

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D3 failed in many different ways. Free respecs is just one of them. That part would have been the same failure even if items didn’t rain from the sky.

377

exactly, its all together. disney looks, no point allocations, free gear, goofy characters, 80% of skills dont even use the characters weapon…its like a diablo for 9 year olds

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First off kiddo, youre wrong.you sit here and pander so much to diablo 3 that anyone with a different outlook or opinion is condemned. Get over yourself, like I said they wouldnt be gping more towards diablo 4 after 20 years if tgere wasnt the fan base amd the right things done with diablo 2 to begin with. I can tell you the only 2 factual things diablo 3 does better. 1) it’s got better graphics amd fluid combat - but uhh no s*** because it came out over a decade later than diablo 2. Secondly and finally, the only other thing diablo 3 factually has over diablo 2 is quality of life and this is also controbured to time a decade later. Every thing I haven’t mentioned after that, Diablo 2 did so much better. The environments the lore, the music, the skill system, tge difficulty especially within ubers and hell mode with reistances and immunities. Fact - if diablo 3 was as big as you like to pony back ride, then diablo 4 would look like something from Disney, would hold everyones hands in combat and freely allow you to destroy the meaning of character development and choices and consequences with them. I’ll say it again kiddo, stick to diablo 3 if you want. You spend am awful amount of time yourself bashing diablo 2. You clearly dont see why thousands still play diablo 2 after 2 decades. Guarantee your game diablo 3 will be close to if not completely gone by the time diablo 4 launches also poe 4.0. Defend diablo 3 all you want, what is ever brought to diablo 3 that findamentally makes people want to play even entire seasons anymore? Nice try though. Diablo 2 fans will get the game they’ve been waiting for for a long time.

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379

I think it could come with an extremely high cost. While I understand that it takes away the need to have more than one of each class if you allow respects, it could be done where you are only allowed a partial respec every so often (like 1 point per set time of gameplay or 1 point for alot of gold). (Note: my main flaw with all the Diablo games is the amount of gold you can pile up quickly and I think gold should be hard to come by in drops and returns on sells). If the gold issue is fixed it would be very costly to respec and might even force you to sell stuff you like to respec points.

They have to find a line between where it would be too easy to respec and where people would rather start over than work at fixing their characters. Most people looked at builds online and went off that guide anyways after awhile. Blizzard only cares about post-game in D3 and even said they didn’t want players starting over to build character.

The respec is the main reason I don’t like as much. I build a character and stash items for each build then swap when I get bored of it. I do think they need to give you a reason to play through the game more than once per class.

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Hi Starship688. You didn’t number the paragraphs in your treatise, but I’m going to refer to your paragraphs as P1, P2, etc. If a specific sentence is in question, I’ll use P#, S#.

Let’s get into your treatise.

  1. Your primary argument in P1 is that realism is “(what got us all hooked on D2)” P1, S2. I think this is erroneous. Realism has nothing to do with it considering that we’re talking about a video game where people raise the dead, cast magic spells, carry around millions of pieces of gold (a rather heavy metal), and live in a pocket dimension created by rebels from Heaven and Hell. Instead, I think the primary reason D2 was more popular than D3 was theme and theme enforcing mechanics.

  2. Convenience isn’t a bad thing, per say, but it does have a place. Let’s compare D2 to Dark Souls 1 (DkS1) and Dark Souls 3 (DkS3). These games all sport similar themes, but I want to focus on convenience.

    1. In D2, PCs are entitled to one (1) free respec per completion of the Den of Evil for a total of 3 cross the difficulties. This is intended to prevent a player from wasting his/her time leveling an otherwise identical player character (PC). This also allows the player to “jump in” and play the game in whatever manner seems to work at the time. Because you can figuratively hang yourself in D2 with the wrong build, especially in Single Player, there needed to be some mechanic that would allow people to escape from bad builds. While the early 2000’s answer is to just make a new PC, this is no longer acceptable in the modern gaming market.
    1. In DkS1, PCs are not entitled to respecs. Respeccing does not exist in the game in any capacity; however, it is also impossible for the player to mess up his/her build so badly that the game is impossible to complete. Lobos Jr. on youtube and twitch has completed challenge runs where he only used fists and stayed at level 1. I’ve completed level 10 challenge runs. You’re supposed to be close to level 100 when you beat normal game. This illustrates how, with enough skill, any build can complete DkS1. However, this brings us back to respeccing. In response to not wanting to have to spend hours upon hours making PvP PCs in DkS1 for constant duels, some wonderful person made the DkS1 Mega Mule, which included both unupgraded, and max level version of every piece of gear in the game in addition to multiple copies of every spell. In essence, because respecs were impossible, the community created something better than a respec: a free PC generator.
    1. In DkS3, PCs are entitled to five (5) respecs per playthrough, but a glitch was found that makes this infinite respecs. The game allows a player to respec his/her PC, but this is, by in large, not required since, like DkS1, the game can be completed with any build. At worst, a bad stat allocation can only ever delay progress. Because of this, the respec was mostly used in PvP.

  1. What is gained by allowing PCs to respec is the ability for someone to fix mistakes in their build. I recently played a Fishymancer and leveled up Skeletal Mastery instead of Raise Skeleton. Then I looked at a builder and realized the reverse was far, far better, so I used my Normal difficulty respec. Without that, I don’t think I would have been able to defeat the Ancients since they reset if a town portal is opened during the fight. My build would be stuck on a soft fail state since I’m not willing to grind ten (10) more levels to get Raise Skeleton to where it needs to be—that could have taken quite a long time, and I’m quite the busy person as evidenced by my responding to your treatise with one of my own.

  2. This all said, I do think that Blizzard erred with D3, but it has more to do with theme, color scheme, and mechanics than convenience. Let’s compare D2, D3, and DkS1.

    1. In DkS1, the world is dying. “Even now, there are only embers, and man sees not light, but only endless nights.” — Dark Souls 1 intro ( DARK SOULS: REMASTERED Opening Cinematic - YouTube ) Everyone portrayed in the intro cinematic is fought in-game. Most of Gwyn’s Four (4) Knights are fought in-game, and one of them is built up to be so much of an invincible killing machine that no one aside from the gods or other knights would dare cross him. With the fires fading, the gods and knights have disappeared, and mankind is left to die. The PC is told by pretty much everyone central to the plot that he/she is the Chosen Undead who will save the world. News Flash: the Chosen Undead is being used to prolong the Age of Fire. Color wise, the game hugs the medieval aesthetic and embraces the idea the magic is blue and white, light miracles are mostly white and yellow, dark miracles are black and white, pyromancy is orange and yellow, and demon pyromancy is black and red. The game’s mechanics reinforce the themes of the game in that the dying world is an unforgiving place filled with demons, monsters, and undead. The PC will die repeatedly, but through his/her determination and skill, the day may be won—unless he/she gets cursed, which probably means rerolling the character unless you look up how to remove the curse.
    1. In D2, the world is dying as the Prime Evils become unbound in Sanctuary, and wherever they go, they leave total devastation behind. The narrator speaks about his nightmares and how he tries to avoid sleeping to avoid his nightmares, but then his nightmare appears in the waking world. This path of destruction is typified by every town the PC enters. The Rogues are overrun, and it is only a matter of time before Andariel’s minions finish them off. In Lut Gholein, the army is trapped behind the walls keeping the town safe instead of pacifying threats to itself, and town would have likely been overrun by Duriel’s forces after the Desert Vipers put out the Sun. In Kurast, the once mighty civilization has fallen to Mephisto’s influence and the tiny dock town is just barely being kept alive by a failing warding spell and the Iron Wolves mercenaries. In Harrogath, the Barbarians have been pushed out to their last fortress by Baal’s armies, and they’ve all but given up hope on ever retaking Mount Arreat. Everything is on the brink of death, and it is because the PC shows up and defeats the antagonist of each act that the towns featured in these acts are not destroyed. Color wise, the game is very dark and gritty. The mechanics of the game don’t do a great job of reinforcing the theme. The PC growth in power over the course of the game and defeats the Prime Evils, but this isn’t reflected in the game world. For example, the Rogues do not retake the Rogue Monastery.
    1. In D3, the story revolves not around the PCs or the Villains, but this girl named Leah who is important for some reason. What weakens this even more is that Deckard Cain, super wizard of the Horadrim, is now seen by people as a crazy old man who obsesses about the ending of the world. What hurt it even worse than the above is the fact that the world doesn’t feel like it is dying. The guards handle the Zombies quite easily, and the PC helps. The town seems lively. This isn’t a world plagued by darkness and death, but instead one where people can afford to not be trained to defend themselves against the horrors of the night. Even people living in the middle of nowhere are portrayed as not being capable of defending themselves, but this poses the question of why they live out there. The bosses are no longer demons of great power, but a fey witch, an evil sorcerer, a manipulative secondary evil, and a tactics based secondary evil. The boundary between Sanctuary, the High Heavens, and Hell is supposedly gone with the destruction of the Worldstone, so there is no reason why there haven’t been constant invasions by the High Heavens and hell. People should be living in constant terror, but they instead live comfortably. This is one of the greatest issues with D3. When the PC goes to a town, it seems to be doing quite well for itself, and the Guard has things under control. This is counterproductive to the theme: the world should look like it is dying, but it looks like it is doing quite fine. Color wise, the game has suffered from World of Warcraft’s success. It is easier to make an art style that looks like World of Warcraft since different groups of people and magic all can have different bright colors. However, this is Dark Fantasy where things should be the color of blood, depression, fire, nightmares, and spirits. Instead, things look bright and lively. The mechanics really don’t support the intended theme since Dark Fantasy typically features a struggle for victory instead of a cake walk, and D3 is a cake walk. If you’re dying a lot in D3, you’re doing it wrong because it was not designed to be challenging.

  1. What we see is that DkS1 and D2 are closer to each other than D3. The opposite should be true: D2 and D3 should be extremely close to one another in terms of theme, and DkS1 should be relatively close.

  2. The above examined theme more than mechanics, so the next paragraph delves into mechanics.

  3. The skill trees between D2 and D3 are likely the largest departures between the games. So let’s examine them.

    1. In D2, when you put a skill point into a skill, it is locked in that skill. I think this is what you mean when you say “realism.” You must deal with the consequences of your actions for better of worse. While I like this, it often turns into meticulously planning out each and every level ahead of time to create an optimal character. The problem is that by doing this, I haven’t allowed myself to explore the game’s mechanics in a freeform fashion. What is worse about this is the fact that online Wikis didn’t exist in their current form when the game was released. This means that D2’s play time was artificially extended by the virtue that the player would essentially have to build a character to explore the skills, and thereafter, make a character that was optimal. This means that each class would need at least 2 or more playthroughs with trickier builds, such as the Fishymancer, likely requiring more than 2 playthroughs. The limited respec feature that was added to the game allows players to experiment without investing 10, 20, or 30+ hours into a single character. I personally think it should be more than 1 respec per playthrough, but I don’t think that the PC should be able to do it on the fly. This doesn’t harm the “realism” of an unrealistic game, but it does allow the player to experiment with the class.
    1. In D3, when you unlock a skill, you can swap it out on the fly for another skill of that skill’s category. I personally hate this mechanic. If I unlock a tool, and want to be able to use that tool all of the time. This is why I’ll play D2 over D3 any time. D4 includes that crappy Six (6) skill system, so I may just give D4 a pass altogether. On the bright side, the PC is no longer hyper specialized into whatever the PC does. Instead as stated above, PCs are able to adjust on the fly. Worse still, variants of skills unlocked at higher levels are objectively better than versions unlocked earlier. This is padding, and it is a design choice that gives the player the illusion of progress while not actually granting substantial progress. There are also builds in the game that are objectively bad. The Melee wizard who uses the melee spell may be able to survive Normal, but the character is doomed in Nightmare. By Hell, each character must be played in accordance with the character’s specialization, or the player will suffer. Dedicated Summoner builds are pretty much dead on arrival due to horrible damage. No Fishymancer in D3. I suspect that there won’t be one in D4 nor Immortal. Imagine if Witch Doctors could have different varians of the same skill out at a given time. Dogs that poison. Dogs that bleed. Dogs that explode. Dogs that life drain. Dogs that stun. It could be cool. NOTE: as far as I’m aware, this is currently disallowed.

  1. The primary difference in the above is that In D2 I map Q – T, A – G, Z – B, and Space Bar to Quick Skills, and I use most of them. That is over 10 skills I use on a regular basis all of the time. I can’t do this in D3, and I dislike that. It feels arbitrarily limiting on player skill. If Blizzard’s excuse is that there are too few buttons on the controller, then they need to take a good, long look at Final Fantasy 14. There are plenty of work arounds that allow the use of secondary skill bars.

  2. In P2, S3, you bring up “ROLE PLAYING elements.” The player doesn’t actually make all that many roleplaying decisions in D2 outside of deciding whether to rescue Deckard Cain, which most people will do because they were told to by the in-game quest. I disagree that D2 features roleplaying opportunities. The PC is, and the characters react to the PC’s character class on occasion in addition to having quest acquisition and completion dialogue. The leveling up system is present as the core RPG element, but let’s not confuse RPG elements such as leveling up, stats, and skills with being a role playing game. D1, 2, 3, and 4 will all revolve around being told to do something, doing it, and being congratulated for doing it. Pursuant to doing the thing, the players will slaughter everything that is targetable because quest completion does not grant experience. Beyond this, there is more dialogue in D3 than there was in D2. You can chat with many NPCs, and they have a decent amount to say. The Diablo series is nowhere near what I would consider a Role Playing Game, which is often reserved for Infinity Engine games like Baldur’s Gate.

  3. In P3, you say that the most valuable and fulfilling moment in life are hard won, the road is paved with mistakes. The issue I have here with your argument against disallowing people to respec is that the nature of someone wanting to respec their character away from a bad decisions is that the person has already learned through experience that the initial decision was bad. Now knowing this, the person wants to take a different approach or restructure part of the character. I’m not certain how this hurts the “realism” of the game or is a “role playing element.” Continuing to punish someone for making a bad or ill informed decision is a surefire way to turn them off of your game. You then state that if people got everything first try, they’d be bored stiff. You’re missing the forest for the trees.

  4. Continuing the above paragraph, the primary reason that D3 is boring is that the classes are supposed to be played a specific way. If you deviate from that play style, you could find yourself severely underwhelming compared to people who did not. This means that when you make a character, you have just pigeon holed yourself into a role whether you know it, or not. Witch Doctors are fantastic crowd controllers and debufers. Wizards are a fantastic long ranged damage dealers. D3 suffered not from being able to fix previous mistakes, but instead, it suffered from Blizzard’s laziness in designing classes. The worst part of all is that they didn’t give the classes multiple different optimal builds that emphasize anticipated play styles. In D2, I can make around 10 different end-game viable builds with each class, but in D3, I can make 1 or 2 for each class. They may say that this “focused” the classes or “protected each class’s niche,” but this is a screen for the fact that they didn’t want to put in the design work. This is a massive reason why I didn’t like D3, and I suspect that it is a reason why you dislike it. I suspect that you’re wanting to push the system closer to D2 to avoid the funneling that happened in D3.

  5. P7 – P11, your argument appears to be that the option to respec should not be included because mistakes should be permanent and that by having permanent mistakes on your character, your experience is more personalized. You then blame Blizzard’s incompetence in designing the classes on the players for gravitating towards optimal builds. Blizzard should have ensured that each class had 3 – 5 different end-game builds that were all roughly equally optimal, but they treated each class like it was from World of Warcraft and hard specialized it into a specific job. You are taking issue with a symptom but attributing it to the metagame instead of the poor design choices that lead to the current metagame.

  6. P12, I don’t see how disableable UI features inhibit roleplaying. I don’t see how having to return to town all of the time to identify and dump treasure improves the game. D2 had its inventory because that was how it was done at that time in RPGs. I Demon’s Souls, predecessor to Dark Souls 1, players have infinite inventory, but they had an “item burden” which limited how much weight they could carry. This was burdensome, clunky, and didn’t really contribute to the gameplay, so in Dark Souls, item burden was removed. This was an improvement for play. What you seem to be advocating for is the mechanics of the game working against the player playing the game. Your argument also stops making sense when we consider that four (4) scrolls take up the same amount of space as a claymore, and eight (8) scrolls take up the same amount of space as gothic full plate. Let’s not even get started on carrying around thousands of pounds of gold coins.

  7. P13 – P14, D1, D2, D3, and D4 will all be games where your gear, formerly loot, will determine your success. In D2, the Fishymancer and some other classes can get away with beating the game naked. Good luck with that as a barbarian. Farming for loot to improve yourself shouldn’t be as tedious as possible.

  8. P15, if you were actually teleported into the hellscape, you’d crap and pee all over yourself before being killed. Let’s not delude ourselves with teenage beliefs of being invincible here. Your dislike of people focusing on DPS when DPS is actually important is nonsense. If you want to roleplay as someone who can’t kill bosses because you didn’t care about DPS, then be my guest. Condemning people for optimizing is nonsense when their actions do not negatively impact yourself. As far as I know, PvP is opt in, so I am unclear on what the issue is.

  9. P16, I honestly would have just downloaded a character editor and fixed the issue. If it was on battle.net, I would have probably stopped playing the character, planned it out to the fullest, and then meticulously followed the build plan. I would have preplanned every aspect of the character to stop my lack of foreknowledge from harming me again. Of course, see my paragraph 14 supra. By doing that planning and learning from the experience of those whom have come before me, I have missed out on the novelty of playing the game unaided and learning from my mistakes.

  10. P17, I think you are seeing a building that was set on fire with a lighter and blaming the lighter manufacturer instead of the arsonist. Misattribution of blame can be a nasty business. You are literally blaming people for playing to get the most out of their classes instead of the designers are Blizzard for making the classes have one (1) or two (2) builds that are leagues ahead of the other builds. Blizzard did a bad job. Blame Blizzard.

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381

i agree, it’s some kind of disrespecting your own work when you dont want people to play your story again, lol.
you can also let players farm for respec tokens and stuff. gold doesnt have to be the problem here.

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Why do you think that is the case? The game “Darkest dungeon” is all about leveling several heros. I wonder what mainstream games you are referring to here that has abandoned leveling alts. Perhaps WOW set this precedent due to the overwhelmingly long time it took to level a character? Can we fix it?

I would attempt to summarize your paragraph #10, as D3 was missing “suspension of disbelief” primarily due to elements that seemed inconsistent with each other. I agree, in particular the marvel’s avengers style introduction of comedy into the dark fantasy, and the “cakewalk” gameplay being at odds with darkness and hopelessness.

In Paragraph #1, I do think that “suspension of disbelief” is what the OP means by “realism”. We know magic and raising the dead aren’t real, but if the game is self-consistent enough for long enough, we can believe, if only for an instant, that the universe is real and that we are in the world of sanctuary.

I agree with the OP, that that being able to respec at random, disallows for the suspension of disbelief, and turns an immersive gaming experience into a modular fantasy simulator. This is because in reality learning skills takes time, and being able to reset and relearn a bunch of new skills in an instant makes our experience in sanctuary more unbelievable. As a result, the less often respeccing occurs along our journey the more immersive our D4 experience will become.

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Hey, this thread is trending on Google, so prepare to have the contented 10% coming out of the woodwork to weigh in on this Dark Souls mentality manifesto. Blizzard, if you are listening, please note that the torch of this thread is being carried by three very vocal actors. Threads are great for getting hot takes. Market research is great for getting accurate user data.

To speak to the premise of the thread–the days of games like Diablo being the prime vector for “role play” is long gone, if indeed it ever existed. I’d argue that any role playing anyone did in any Diablo game was purely in their head. There were cute ludonarrative elements (e.g. the backpack system), but you never really had any opportunity to author a character in a role-playing capacity. You could never turn down a quest in Diablo. You could never make a moral decision. You were never the author of any part of the character’s story. You just allocated skills. You decided which of several equally canon abilities the sprite used to defeat Diablo this time 'round. That is not role playing. Diablo is a role playing game only insofar as it is an inheritor to AD&D’s number-crunch mechanics and shares its thematic elements.

Which brings me to the question of “immersion” and “realism”. Another poster pointed out that a master martial artist will use two weapons in very different ways. A kung fu master, for example, may apply similar principles to combat with his fists, a bo, or a hook sword. Nevertheless, the particulars of combat using each of these three weapons will be very different.

Now let’s examine Diablo 3. The protagonists are polymath demigods and paragons of their respective combat disciplines. They can be understood to canonically possess their entire skill set, all at once. However, they adopt a fighting style which most closely adheres to their current optimum equipment (because only a fool would forgo an advantage against the forces of Hell). You aren’t respeccing in D3–you’re shifting focus. And yes, that did remove the players’ last illusory drops of authorship of the character. But, again, you were never the author.

As to the merits of respeccing itself. Another poster shrewdly observed that every game features respeccing–you can just start over. What we are discussing here is the matter of what the time investment should be. I believe it should be short. Many have noted that nobody wants to be ineffectual in the late game. Why make them? The burden really is on you to explain this, OP. The fact is, there are plenty of MMO communities that will simply kick characters of a certain role who are not optimally built. That is bad; we should avoid it. And quite poigniantly, another author noted that playing D4 isn’t an achievement. It’s a game. An entertainment device. Why gatekeep it behind an artificial time wall? Because, I’ll tell you, PoE did that, and I have one hundred better ways to spend my time.

I will agree that experimentation is good, and it is all the more rewarding when you get a build right first-try. But one need look no further than Diablo 2 itself to see the flaw in not allowing some post-experimentation access to a functioning build. Diablo 2 offered many, many builds which were simply not post-game viable, which could not clear all of the content the game had to offer. That was true of the vast majority of builds, in fact. Why bother experimenting at all if the game holds something out as viable (e.g. single element sorceress), then pulls the rug out from under you when it shakes up the game without warning? There is none. That’s why everyone uses the same five runewords and teleports around slinging Blessed Hammers–it actually works. So yeah, if the builds that should be viable are all viable, we won’t need a respec. But that’s just never the case. So what’s the harm in the safety valve that is a respec?

And let me just say–this all comes from a place of great love for D2. But I was a kid when I played those games. I spent more time on any given build than I did on my college applications. I don’t have that kind of bandwidth anymore.

At the end of the day, the puzzle of working a powerful new drop into my kit makes the level-up process each season of D3 feel unique to me. Making “Optimal Summoner Necromancer” did not. You’d be kidding yourself by feeling any accomplishment while solving the “big number good” puzzle presented by D2’s skill tree. Honestly. Maybe you has some wacky off-the-wall builds, OP, but I really, really doubt it. The universe of functioning post-game builds was laughably small in D2.

And yeah, maybe I’m just using whatever build anyone would use given my exact drops. So what? Better than every caster scouring for yet another Shako. Besides, switching up to use the most powerful plunder is what Zhota the Monk would do. I’m just buying in to the canon role. One might say I am role playing. So, OP, I contend that it’s not that the role playing is missing, it’s just that you misunderstood the ludonarrative expression of that playing of the role in Diablo 3. And as I said above, you probably misunderstood it in Diablo 2, as well, seeing as the “RPG” term of art attached to the game only because the game borrowed the mathy crunch of AD&D et al. Maria the Amazon was always just “canonical Amazon protagonist”. She used poison arrows. Or was it lightning javelins?

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I won’t say free respec with zero cost and limit is good. But too limited respec will kill this D4 game. Why? Everyone will search in forum, google, youtube for the best endgame builds. Planning is good but the reality is that most of the time in ARPG theoretical planning requires tens if not hundreds of experimental hours to make it functioning. It’s weird somebody here actually thinks that the rest copying a few working builds on the Internet is more acceptable than easy respec. Most people are lazy, that’s our nature. Elitists think limited respec will force people to plan ahead when in reality all they do is go online and copy another working build. So this is what you really want?

The majority of audience will be secondary kids to university students. I’m not sure if they are mature or free enough to think about planning. This generation is a generation of Google, of Internet. Yet some guys fail to realize this, thinking society and human behave the same way as in the early 2000s. No it’s not, and it’s vastly different. Your core values back then are nothing more than confetti on the ground in 2020.

Instead, I propose one solution. Whenever you acquire a skill tome, you have 2 options: add a skill point to use, or use the tome to reset the whole skill tree. Or maybe make it 2-3 skill tomes required to unlock skill tree reset. It’s not too limited, you need to farm for it, may not drop for quite some time too. But it’s much better than being able to reset skill tree once per difficulty level, ways better. And it won’t be such a free easy respec to the point where you go to town, pay 100 gold per skill point reset.

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385

Yes I said taking out respeccing stifles experimentation and replayability. I’m fine with a cost.

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You mean you can’t just ignore Hardcore mode, Challenge Rift or Set Dungeons so you have to use those features no matter what? Oh wait…

That’s exactly how game design works, you can’t make everyone happy therefore it’s better to have the options than not. Just because you don’t like certain features doesn’t mean they have to be removed.

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