This is exactly the mindset this game is trying to change. Gaining power for your character and making decisions along the way is the point of these games, which is why they added paragon points in D3, and why seasons are popular. Unlocking 98% of the power then fooling around with the options trying to find ways to amuse yourself is awful game design.
They are specifically doing the following:
Adding in a skill tree and complex paragon boards that give players many more choices at levels far below max
Making it easy to experiment while you are low level but difficult to change once you are high level
Making the same item found at level 50 more desirable than finding it at level 70 (and likewise for 70 vs 100)
Allowing you to bypass the story with every character after the first and scaling the content so you can do it in different orders
Giving you account-wide boosts that start your new characters off with bonus skill points to allocate
Giving battle pass boosts to your new characters that season (not sure if this is confirmed)
Pacing the leveling so that you will complete the season pass before hitting max level, rather than basically starting it after you hit max.
And most importantly: creating a system that puts tension between having a wide variety of skills available and maximizing the power of the skills you have
All of these things indicate that the devs expect leveling different characters to be a core part of gameplay, not power leveling to max so you can “experiment” by having 5 builds you swap around like cheap suits. Making it so that you only need to level each class once would fly in the face of that goal.
Making the character you are creating unique (through the many choices you make as you level, each of which are a bit sticky) means that there is a sense of ownership and satisfaction over the character. Sure, there are players who love to invent their own skill combos and figure out ways to make them work in the endgame. This game will make that a bit harder to do. But “making a build” will go back to meaning that you passed various difficult achievements all along the way to end up with something cool that you made, instead of meaning that you finally decided what you wanted to select from a menu (for now).
Your build doesn’t have to be completely your own invention to be cool. You still had to make the right choices, beat the dungeons, complete the quests, etc. Just like someone painting a model or drawing a drawing based on a YouTube video can feel satisfied in the end product (and then want to make another).
It’s like the difference between making your own drawing in ProCreate vs asking midjourney to do it for you. Sure it’s easier to get drawings by asking midjourney, but maybe if you had to spend a couple hours finding reference images before it let you make each drawing. you’d have more incentive to draw your own and end up enjoying creating drawings more.
Which doesn’t change the uniqueness of the leveling process. Even if someone did end up with a perfect copy of a build someone else came up with, they would still have to make it work all along the way and would get the experience of making that character: working with the incomplete skill packages along the way, working around legos they don’t have yet, earning the glyph levels, choosing item bases that will work at different levels and when to save or use aspects, and so on. That character would be a unique experience.
If a player gets a character to the point where it can tackle high-tier sigils, their build is likely to be very similar to top builds others are using, even if they never looked at those builds, unless the player is intentionally trying to be different from the crowd. If they are, they don’t need free respecs to differentiate themselves, if they aren’t they will choose the things that seem to easily work together.
Since it’s easy to respec a few points here and there, no one will feel the need to follow a point-by-point guide just to avoid the cost (though some will still want those guides because they don’t want to come up with ideas, they just want the experience). It also means that people who want to tinker with a build to optimize it beyond the obvious choices will be able to do that. It will cost a little gold, but so will any tinkering that changes what you are doing with an item slot.
Since it’s hard to respec many skills/paragon points at a time, people will have to think carefully about making big changes to their paragon boards or skill loadouts. The main difference compared to D3 is that since you won’t be able to easily swap back to your old build, it will actually be about changing your character, rather than about adding a second way to play that class. And that is a good thing because it means that leveling once and then just grinding out drops to cover all the other builds of a class is not the focus of this game.
So yes, the problem is the mindset that assumes the starting point for creating a build is to transform an already maxed out character with a different build.
So much this. That journey is, or at least should be, the intended game experience. A significant respect cost helps with that.
Also the reason item drop rate should not be too high, so a build doesnt always have exactly the gear it would prefer.
Tbh I would say that is how many JRPGs work. With endgame content specifically designed around using specific builds that counter whatever the bosses are doing. Multiple FF titles, BD2, among others, And no, it isnt stupid. If you offer free respecs it is the sensible way to challenge players.
NEITHER of those games do that. Nearly every coherent build can complete all content in D3. Some faster than others, but the game is designed so that every class has multiple builds that can complete every piece of content in D3 AND you can’t even change specs mid-GR in D3, so you literally CANNOT change specs between bosses in the hardest content.
And in World of Warcraft, it is also balanced so that every class can complete virtually all content with a coherent spec, without the expectation that people change specs between bosses. Yes people CAN do it and get an edge that way, but no the developers have not designed content to REQUIRE it. The only thing they ‘expect you to change specs’ between is pve and pvp, and that’s perfectly reasonable because they’re practically different games.
I’ve played hundreds of JRPGs and never been forced to change specs between bosses. I sometimes change specs because I’m bored of what I’m doing, but I have never felt forced to. (I suppose with the exception of games where they take party members away from you between bosses, because obviously if your party changes you have to change… but that’s not really the point of this discussion)
The uniqueness of the leveling process exists regardless of respec cost. BEcause everyone will choose to respec at different points, even if they have free respecs. No two playthroughs will ever be identical in a game with random loot. Respec costs are neither increasing nor decreasing that, although they ARE Decreasing build diversity endgame and decreasing the number of potential players who will play the game long-term by removing ‘people who just love to experiment on a day by day basis’ from the pool of potential long-term players.
Your argument is like 'we shouldn’t have seatbelts because people should be able to have cereal for breakfast. They’re two completely 100% unrelated things that have absolutely no correlation or connection to each other, so adding or removing them has literally zero impact on the other thing.
It takes like an hour of grinding at max to farm the materials for a respec token and I have never seen a guide advising you to respec more than 2 times while leveling up
Leveling is only a meaningful part of any RPG the first run through. Scaling enemies is probably the single best idea so that all of that content is not obsolete. Additionally, it allows for a fairly non-linear replay experience (except for the main story campaign which is still linear).
Based entirely on what devs have said, they expect leveling a character to cap to probably take less time than it does to farm enough for a near total respec. This means 2 things:
It is going to take a long time to grind gold so you really cannot change builds and try new builds end-game
Leveling is going to be so fast it is almost meaningless to have levels.
Neither of those things are good. You have to realize the way the game is designed, experimenting at low levels is not super reliable. Most builds will play and peform completely differently at different benchmarks. You might not even unlock the potential until you get a certain Aspect or Paragon point. Additionally, you might not even realize the effectiveness until you dump a ton of points in incremental power creep stats and skills.
My biggest pet peeve is that Blizzard has provided absolutely zero way for the Community to effectively Plan, Build, and Test their characters either in-game or through out of game Tools like Apps or Web Tools. Instead, they rely entirely on the backs of the community itself to develop those assets for them. Individual players cannot really gauge what is/isn’t effective or more importantly, fun, for them easily and they have to rely on YouTube videos, Maxroll, and Streamers to help them figure this out.
So, either Blizzard implements this (not likely) or gives players free-respecs with obvious rules to stop exploiting of swapping specs constantly so that players can experiment and have fun.
Nope you are wrong. D3 until recently could not be completed on the hardest difficulty. You were either blocked because you were too slow at trash or you weren’t strong enough to kill bosses. I hasn’t been until somewhere in the last year or two that power creep got to a point where multiple builds and classes could do GR 150.
Mythic raids are 100% balanced to where you are swapping specs between bosses when you are doing them at the intended gear level. The only time where you might not need to swap specs between bosses is when you overgear them through doing Mythic+.
Prove it. Find me one statement where they say this is the intended, tested design.
Every time I’ve seen them talk on the subject, they’ve said they’re okay with people doing that but don’t want people to feel forced to. So find me one statement where they say this is what they want people to do as the intended method of completion.
You’re making the absolutely absurd statement, so prove it with something concrete.
If you can’t, admit you’re just projecting without any proof and that you’re talking out your backside.
You must be unfamiliar with watching the RWF back when they would be in Heroic ilvl through splits prior to attempting the Mythic push. They 100% catered their spec to every boss. Heroic ilvl would be the intended gear level to complete the Mythic content btw. Anyone pushing the content past those first few weeks has inflated ilvl from Mythic+.
Again: There is a difference between ‘what the world first players are willing to do’ and ‘what the encounter is designed around’.
Find me one statement from the developers where they say that they INTEND for players to do that as the standard intended method of completing the content.
ie. where it is specifically designed with the idea that people will be swapping specs every fight. One statement from a dev where they say ‘We design the encounter assuming players will have swapped their specs before it’.
I am NOT saying players won’t do it. I am saying developers don’t design the encounter to force players to do it. And I want you to prove that I am wrong with a statement from a developer where they explicitly say that that is how they design the game. Find me one example. Doesn’t even have to be from WoW. One case, anywhere, where a dev states that they are designing that way.
Missed the part where you had played Nightmare Dungeon lvl 100 in order to add even a semblance of validity to your claim here …
That is your interpretation.
Mine is that they are wanting the leveling process per season and per class to be more enjoyable since we will already be experiencing the leveling process once per season per class we want to play.
You seem to be also be stuck in the “finding meaning” in being stuck in a spec.
There is nothing keeping you from having that. You can never respec if you’d like. Other’s choosing otherwise doesn’t prevent that.
This is an odd. Wouldn’t respec be similar to having the undo functionality?
Asking it to draw something for you seems like that’d be more akin to using a bot to play your character for you.
@ other folks …
Please keep in mind that unless the devs explicitly said something, that you’re offering your interpretations from what they’ve said and their intentions.
Exactly. Every time I see a developer interview with almost any developer, the message is the opposite. I’ve seen a lot of dev interviews say things along the lines of “We don’t want anyone to ever feel pressured to change spec just because something is better, but we want to make it easy if you choose to do so” or “We’ve tested our content to ensure that a variety of comps and specs can complete it, so you should be able to bring your friends regardless of what they choose to play for most content”.
So I’m eagerly awaiting them to provide me the comment where they state the opposite.
D3 is balanced this way. From the leveling speed to the armory to the season rewards to the way they alternately push some skills and reign others in to the fact that all loot found below max level is trash, it is built around the idea that characters can swap their skills around easily. Players who chose not to do that would miss out on the things being added to the game, and would gain nothing by leveling a new character each time because that experience is basically intended to be skipped.
Now, I will grant that if they choose to balance this game the same way (greatly accelerate leveling, no loot found below level 100 is endgame viable, season reward items geared for very specific builds, seasonal challenges targeted at max level players), then it will cut against the respec cost as a part of the design. Current indications are that this is not their plan, though.
Not engaging with you until you find me a developer saying this.
You’re just talking out your behind assuming how they develop the game, and that’s just uneducated guesses at best. Find me a dev comment, an interview, a twitter statement from an actual developer, etc. that backs it up or else you’re just bsing us all.
Give me proof or else you’re just making your own assumptions based on your own biases.
RWF is not doing stuff at intended ilvl lol they are doing it between 3 to 7 or more ilvls under the tuning. There is a reason that those initial states get nerfed within weeks because the tuning is so insanely off that when a hotfix goes in can determine who gets world first.
Not sure if you are intentionally misunderstanding, but I’ll give the benefit of the doubt. When I say, “D3 is balanced around people swapping specs all the time,” I don’t mean, “the devs want people to swap specs so they force them to do that,” I mean, “the incentives and challenges in the game assume that people can swap specs all the time.”
ya, I remember back in the older days they always said that they balanced the encounters assuming your average Ilvl went up a tiny bit after each boss because you were assumed to clear boss 1 at least a few times before boss 2 went down. And so on. Which means it wasn’t, at least in the olden days, balanced around ‘week 1 clears’.
Nowadays with all the other alternate gearing paths, I can only imagine that they probably expect even higher ilvl per subsequent boss due to things like the vault and mythic+, etc. But I haven’t heard them discuss it recently, so I can’t say that with 100% confidence.
But that’s not ‘balanced around it’, that’s ‘you feeling pressured because the option exists and you don’t want to use it’. Balanced around it would be the Devs EXPLICITLY want you to do it and tune the game around the idea that the majority of players do it or even explicitly forcing players to do it by having the numbers be so tightly balanced that you can’t do it without doing so.
You feeling pressured because the option exists and other people are using it does not mean ‘the game was balanced around it’. You picking your spec and then boss #2 of a dungeon is too hard for you in your current spec so you have to swap but then boss #3 doesn’t work for that spec for a different reason so you have to respec again… that’d be ‘designed around it’.
The devs can’t control whether a few specific people feel bad because other people are having fun in a different way from them…
And again: Every interview I’ve ever heard from a WoW, FFXIV, D3, or any other MMO or ARPG dev has always said ‘we balance such that most well thought out specs/classes/builds can complete most content’ - which is the exact opposite of what you’re saying. Which is why I find it so mind-boggling that you are assuming without evidence that they’re doing something they’re explicitly saying they’re not and why I was hoping you had some proof.
