Game is designed around them.
Challenge Rifts are part of the lvling experience these days, for easy mats and gold. Set dungeons are part of the season journey, and the rewards connected to it.
Exactly because you cant make everyone happy it is not always better to have options. Not if those options are fruitless attempts at making everyone happy.
Design for your your core game idea - and go all in on it - whatever that idea is. If you want to design for everyone, you end up designing for nobody.
Dont get me wrong, that core design could certainly be to have free respecs.
But dont try to sell it as a choice. Whatever respec design D4 ends up having, that is what the game is designed around. Ignoring it is not a fix for anything.
If the game has free respecs and you choose not to respec, you are playing the game wrong - yeah, you technically have a choice, but not any meaningful choice.
A good developer wont give you a choice to hurt your own game experience imo. By making sure respecs are not free, they take away a bad option for players.
Different people have different opinions (unsurprisingly).
I thought (and still think) that the art design for D3 is great. And yes that includes the PonyVille area (whatever the name is) which was fun and a brilliant joke. Heck, I might like D3s look more than D4s so far.
But damn, there was a lot of other issues with D3 at release. Kilometer mentions a good amount of them.
Youâre so right, Lolli. Hopefully there will be more than just Hammerdins doing endgame runs in D4.
In any event, we should expect D4 to have an update cycle, being a modern game and all. There will be top builds. There will be jank builds. They will change each update cycle. Everyone using the same thing is not surprisingâas weâve established, folks want to be able to play the entire game with their character.
If the content that is easier with a meteorb sorc and a firewall sorc is in the same key dungeon for example, then with free respecs, you can respec between different enemies. But you (presumably) cant do half a key dungeon on one character, and then log in and do the rest on another character.
A better example here would probably be a build that was great at clearing trash mobs vs. a boss killer build. Imagine if you could respec inside GRifts. It would be extremely valuable to do so.
Outside of dungeons, the same still holds true. If you switch between characters, you lose out on XP (whether for normal lvls, or something like non-accountwide paragon systems) + you save the time it would have taken to lvl multiple characters (which is a cost, like a respec cost would be).
If you clear content A at 80% speed with your build instead of 100% speed with an optimal build, it might not be worth it to lvl a new character, depending on lvling speed. Thus your 80% speed build is viable. With free respecs it wont be.
People copying builds will always happen, no matter what Blizzard do. No point in trying to change it.
But with a meaningful respec cost, more builds will become viable, as it is not worth it to switch to perfection all the time. If we have equally needed end-game activity A, B and C, a build that is 50%/70%/40% efficient at those, are just as viable as another that are 40%/20%/100% (and thus optimized for activity C).
So even if you copy builds, there will be more viable builds to copy from => better game experience with more replayability.
With free respecs, you will have build A 100%/X%/X%, build B X%/100%/X% and build C (X%/X%/100%) which you will switch between as needed. (yes, there can be more than one build at 100%, doesnât change anything)
If you made me choose between free respecs and trading, I would have a tough time deciding what is worst
(well, the trading issue can be solved with two game modes, as trading only really influences gear acquisition rate. Respeccing influences pretty much all aspects of an A-RPG. Probably one of the first topics you should decide on, before locking down other parts of the game)
Shhh. That destroys some of their arguments. You can technically get and use at once every skill on your class, but somehow having all and being limited to 6 in D3 is bad.
Its not free
You cant max all skills, so you have to decide where you put the power in
Its character building
D3 simply unlocks all skills for your character automatically
Never said max. Inwas told if one wanted you get the minimum needed in all skills to have them all. But obviously you were not maxing any out and would be gimping yourself.
Still doesnât matter. You guys claim having all skills available means choice is meaningless when it is possible to have them all and use them all in D2. The fact you donât have to make meaningful choices invalidates your argument.
No
The argument is not âhaving all availableâ but âhaving all available at full powerâ
Thats just no difference in D3 because the skills only have 1 skill point
Maxing vs 1 point in each IS a meaningful choice in D2 (well, not that meaningful, since it would be a really bad choice).
As Loli42 ssays, it is not even remotely the same as having all builds available all the time.
1 point in each skills is not all builds in D2, it is just 1 build.
In D3 though, having all skills = having all builds
