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

General Discussion
42

And I also played D2 enough where, if you’re not getting rushed, it was just sitting on skill points until you got to the desired level to start investing. When synergies happened then maybe you were lucky enough to use a pre-req skill until then, but oftentimes you would also just be sitting on points to dump in different trees to expedite growth after that critical point.

I’m just going to circle back to how we grow our characters being the problem here. I’m not the sort who appeals to tradition solely because another game did whatever back in the day. The entire core of this debate is still that it’s running from a flawed premise.

3 Likes
43

And what happens when the build that you chose is the best, and ends up getting nerfed? You put all the time and effort into researching to have the perfect build and then the next patch comes out and you’re bottom of the barrel. Developers aren’t perfect, and balance changes will happen. Those shouldn’t screw players over.

8 Likes
44

According to each area, mobs should have relevant resistance. E.g. mobs in ice area have more ice resistance and mobs underground/hell area should have more fire resistance. Therefore, people should be able to freely swap skill or at least easily respec to pass thru these areas in campaign.

I would love to see this Starship guy make another character with another elemental build just to pass in important area, or wait for a week to respec to pass it.

What a stupid idea.

1 Like
45

Personally I can have fun without being the absolute best at everything. Assuming the core game itself is fun. Happy to use that now slightly less than optimal build to build up a new flavour of the month character.

It takes 2-4 weeks in D2 to build up a level 1 into a character with GG gear. Hardly a long time, its not like it take you a year to level to max or something. You could level up to 75 and be pretty kitted out within a week or two on any build.

Anyways the more I argue about this the less I care, just remove the flashing white when I hit mobs, remove the floating health bars above the mob heads, remove the floating numbers and make an immersive sound track, and sound effects. Go hack up a cow carcass with a halberd and use those sounds as the in game effects.

Create a sick, dark and real game and Ill play it. FFS

46

The game is not supposed to only be beatable with different builds
Resistances are also no immunities
And if ur still scared, build a hybrid character

1 Like
47

Plenty of MOBs in d2 were completely immune to certain spell types and if you played a certain char would be impossible to kill. You skipped those or usually you played with a group of 8 so if they were fire immune it was the barbs job to smash them up.

Oh no you didnt kill a pack of MOBs… You had a weakness and you had to overcome it with team work… End of ze world.

2 Likes
48

I believe Blizz can introduce concepts such as resistance reduction, or you simply increase your damage to overcome the loss of resistance. Then, even if a boss is 100% immune to ice damage for example, I can reduce it to 50%, hard to kill yes but still viable with my current build.

1 Like
49

I’d say this is where you diversify encounters enough so you don’t automatically have an unquestionably superior build in every situation. Should that actually be the case, it’s likely more a matter of imbalance somewhere in the player/monster chain.

However, there’s also this persistent boogeyman argument that if people can freely respec, that they’d somehow be doing it from just outside aggro range over and over to optimize their combat experience in some mind-numbingly impractical method that can be curbed in other ways not involving the all-or-nothing approach.

2 Likes
50

What I propose is once you step in an area, you should have the information of the main resistances of mobs and boss (ice resistance in icy area). Other resistances and immunities are for you to figure out.

It fits the lore and any logic too.

51

Exactly. You shouldnt be able to just respec your way into being the optimal build for everything. You should have weaknesses and strengths. You should play to them, when you’re weak for a dungeon you should get friends to come along or pass it to a different character.

What’s wrong with using your brain and thinking once in a while? Its like you all want to be able to slobber all over your keyboard and still be the absolute best. Competition is dead, dumb down the skills, dumb down the choices so we’re all the same. Don’t let people come and kill us because we’re weak and we want to cry.

Some of us want a challenge and some of us want to kill weak punks like you be the best and take the spoils. Thats why we play games. Good games have rewards for being good and punishment for being bad. Thats what makes them worth playing, because if you’re good you do better, if you use your brain and think you do better, if you out smart people, play better and make better decisions you win and you do better.

Same thing in life my friend. The successful people may have had an element of luck but most of them are intelligent and work HARD AS HELL. A good game mimics the laws of the universe and the laws of life. You could say the game of being a human in society has been worked on and perfected for thousands of years. And any good games requires cunning, hard work and intelligence to be the best.

If theres nothing to think about, all decisions are made for you, and the game holds your hand WTF is the point. Go sit in a bath full of chocolate milk and never challenge yourself or work in any respect. Just consume the sweet sweet milk and get fatter until you hate yourself.

It shouldnt be GOOD TIMES ALL THE TIME. SOMETIMES THINGS SUCK IN GAMES SOMETIMES YOU GET SMASHED AND ACTUAL CONSEQUENCES OCCUR. JUST LIKE IN REAL LIFE. If I eat pizza for 5 years Im not going to be a world class athlete tomorrow. If I train my *** off for 5 years I get to enjoy the fruits of my labour.

Games need to reward hard work, intelligent decision making, and allow for differentiation again. With differentiation comes the ability to be SUPERB, and the ability to SUCK. This is freedom. Freedom is not a set path down a certain road. Freedom is the ability to COMPLETELY SCREW UP and the ability to DO THINGS TO A HIGH DEGREE OF PERFECTION which creates diversity, creates accomplishment, and creates meaning.

This is as much a philosophical and neurological debate as it is one about games.

4 Likes
52

Depending on how it’s designed, there’s also the option that people might just duck back into town to respec or respec if you know a specific boss is coming up.

For what we’ve seen of Diablo 4 you also run the problem that they’re doing dungeon keys like WoW’s mythic+ system, where you’re going to know the effects you have to put up with before you enter the dungeon.

So people will just always respec to the optimal choice rather than the added strategy of needing to play around it.

I’m not against respecs to fix your mistakes, but I don’t really like the idea of simply switching your builds entirely between encounters.

2 Likes
53

I always try to build multi element characters. F.e. revenge paladin in D2. I’m more comfortable with the idea to adapt to every single enemy in the game. Also if I’m not the strongest against a certain enemy, noone can counter me.

1 Like
54

Also, freely respec or swap skill doesn’t mean that’s it. Do you even have gears for the build you want to swap to? I don’t think items will rain from the sky like D3, therefore you are still pretty much limited by goddess of RNG.

Some people argue like freely swap or respec skills means the end of the world or something. Without decent gears to back up a builds, skills you use are somewhat useless already.

3 Likes
55

Oh yeah, gotta love when people pull the “but mah realism” card when it suits them.

4 Likes
56

I suspect you’re grossly overestimating the difficulty they plan to reach a keyed dungeon, let alone how commonly one could get a key tailored specifically to their build. Obviously, if you’re using fire skills, you’re going to want to avoid those with fire resistant/immune flags, but this also doesn’t mean your build is completely non-functional in areas where the same is anything not-fire. Those who want to turn around and gripe that their build finishes a dungeon 2-3 minutes slower than one more optimal have problems beyond the mere notion of a respec.

1 Like
57

I expect that high rank keyed dungeons will be among the game’s endgame. They might not be the pinnacle of content, I expect them to be very relevant.

Also you don’t need to tailor the key to your build if you can freely respec on a whim. That means you can now tailor your build to the key, which is what I have the problem with.

If respecs aren’t a thing that can be done on a whim, I don’t have a problem with a build that finishes a rift/dungeon/whatever a few minutes slower. That is simply what comes with the territory of having a build not so easily changed: You’re strong in some areas, you’re weak in others.

In a free respec system though yeah, every build should be equally powerful because I can just switch to the most powerful build on a whim. That becomes the “accepted” way to play the game by most players because respec is simply part of the core gameplay.

1 Like
58

And eventually you gathered all gear for the builds (doesn’t take too much time in d3 hm?) and run to your armory flip flop generic character xy build 5 activated

2 Likes
59

Honestly I think the absolute dumbed down level of hand holding and babying we see nowdays in games is just a reflection of our current generation and society. Everything needs to be fair. Everyone needs to be equal.

Forget about the fact that some people are better and some people are worse at everything. And the people that are better usually devote significant time energy and resources to getting to the top…

No there should be no reward for being great any more, everyone should be treated equal no matter how lazy, stupid, silly or hard working, industrious and commendable their actions are.

So you wipe out any variability. Those who are hard working and industrious are less so because you eliminate the rewards for working hard, being smart and doing the right thing for society, at the same time you remove the punishments for being lazy, making the wrong decision and being an overall drag on society. And what you end up doing is killing the human desire to innovate, strive for success and you destroy the whole structure of the game.

Theres nothing to aspire to because everyone gets to the “top” easily and the mountain is easy to climb. And theres nothing to fear because the consequences are never severe. Boring as hell.

Any well designed game should have a well established group of 1-10 people at the top who everyone knows, See runescape, diablo 2, etc.

Human success works on a poisson distribution. Look at planet earth, we know the winners, bill gates, steve jobs, asap rocky etc. and we know the losers eg hitler.

The winners are able to achieve to multiples of multiples above average and the losers are able to completely screw up. This is freedom.

Good game design peoples. Learn it.

3 Likes
60

Assuming we’re talking high difficulty, this also means that person is going to have high quality gear to supplement this change. This is where I ask how it’s ultimately different than them just hopping to a different character? Especially after players have meta-gamed the most optimal leveling paths or powerleveling methods. There’s still effort involved in getting the varied gear, but it just goes back to my earlier comment about respecting the player’s time when the early game becomes inconsequential or even loathed. Classes are still going to exist as an eventual forced leveling between styles, but I’d say we’re past the days where people need to level a dozen different amazons just to try something different or fix an early mistake.

2 Likes
61

As for the topic in question: the only acceptable limitation in respeccing should be that they can only be performed in non-combat zones and you lose all your buffs when you respec. Any other limitation is just pure BS.

Arguing that it destroys the RPG experience is pure nonsense. First of all, not being able to respec is not a defining characteristic of RPGs, in fact there are a crapload of RPGs that allow respeccing.

Arguing that restricting respeccing leads to more builds is also pure nonsense. If anything, it leads to the complete opposite where people look up builds online so they don’t screw up their character.

No respeccing also severely restricts experimentation with items and skills. Get a cool item drop that buffs a skill you don’t use and want to see how it does? Tough luck. Putting severe limitations on respeccing that essentially makes it so it takes a long time to respec again is no solution to this. If I change my build to try out that weapon and skill and don’t like it, now I have to wait a crap load of time, of farm mobs with a broken build in order to go back to my original build.

No respeccing also forces players into perfectly idiotic situations in which they have to save skill points from leveling up just so they don’t waste them on skills that won’t be in their final build.

It’s also stupid that when you level up, you have to make blind guesses as to which skill works best, since you have no information about distance or animations which will affect how the skill works. And if the solution to this is to look up how the skill works online, people will just look up a build.

9 Likes