Entertainment isn’t the same as MEANING. Entertainment isn’t unimportant, but it isn’t a substitute for meaning.
You do understand that gold isn’t money right? It’s something you earn by playing the game, just like the drops, enchants, upgrades, glyphs, XP. You play the game, you get more power, you allocate that power to make the character you want. Free respecs make one of those allocations (skill points) meaningless. None of the other allocations work the way you suggest: you can’t swap any item for an item of the same item power with the affixes you choose, you can’t swap a glyph for another glyph of the same level, you can’t even make 3 smaller gems into one larger gem without spending some gold.
Actually, everyone who has ever leveled a D3 character has done it without spending any skill points. Also, that isn’t evidence, it’s a wild claim about some anecdote you heard somewhere.
This would probably work. Ideally I’d rather see it be a wholly separate mode with its own separate balance, but letting people respec for free on eternal might be a reasonable compromise. Could let them ramp up the respec costs faster on seasons too.
Without the cost, you have people who only ever want to play the same character forever and they want that character to eventually be able to do everything, have infinite stash space, and have constant changes in balance and endgame content to keep that character fresh. In short, you have a massive time sink for devs, who have to take those resources away from making a good game about leveling up characters and trying to beat the game’s milestone content with interesting approaches.
Yes, sure, you could get to swap around from level 100 ice Sorc to level 100 lightning Sorc and then say you beat the game with both builds. But getting a lightning Sorc there is going to be a different experience than getting an ice Sorc there… unless you can easily respec so you just level with the best leveling build, then respec into whatever when you’re done.
I honestly don’t really care how others choose to play, I just want the game to present me with a different challenge reaching the upper level content with a different build. If there are no respecs at all, that is a bit harsh and means I get annoying little mistakes that creep in. If respecs are easy, it means I feel gimped sticking with a build when it gets hard and it means I have to create and track my own system of costs for respecs. The arguments that say that this style of play (which is wildly popular and is the standard style for the genre) should be the one that is gimped so that another style of play can be powerful just seem misguided.
So, if you don’t want to make two or three different characters to play two or three different builds, then spread your points across the skills you need for the two or three builds. There will probably be some overlap and you will still have room for some extra points in the skills that accept them. Problem solved.
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Really? So you don’t have that one magical song (entertainment) as a young person that triggers some special memory, wedding songs, funeral dirges, christmas music have no meaning because they’re entertaining? Entertainment has value therefore it has meaning. You telling someone to find meaning in life not in a video game is meaningless and rude to boot.
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Another moot thread. You will be paying for respecs. It’s what the Devs want and a lot of people agree with it. No instant gratification for the crybabies this round. Better luck next time.
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Nah, D2 was better. D3 was just a bunch of flashy colors and insane numbers.
D2s main downside was that the gear drops were abysmally low, so the grind was insane. But the overall feel of D2 was way better which i feel like they did well to keep things fresh with d4 but take inspiration from the things that made D2 so good.
No, because it still takes thought to come up with the idea, creativity to put it into practice, and effort to test it out. That’s what makes it enjoyable(I won’t claim meaning, because nothing in a videogame like this TRULY has meaning - meaning is best sought outside of games or in games with actual messages). Not that my gold count went down. My gold count going down is a punishment for it, since it means that in order for me to experiment I cannot also work on improving my power which is the ultimate goal in the game.
Which is where gold sinks should lie. Gold sinks should be tied to increasing your power in direct ways, and to general maintenance. Upgrading your gear is a good gold sink. Rerolling bad stats is a good sink. Combining gems, good sink. These are all changes that are virtually always power positive, and thus it feels positive to spend gold on them.
Spending gold on respeccing is just tying gold directly to experimentation, which is awful. Not all spec changes will be power positive, especially if you’re truly experimenting. Some will be negative, at least at first. Additionally, since specs are your choice, tying a gold cost to it is basically monetizing your mistakes. Since sometimes skill points are spent in error, especially with the garbage UI we have.
I played D2 for ten years. I powerleveled at least 100 characters for people who refused to spend a point until they hit Hell difficulty and level 60-70 for exactly that reason. And I got several characters powerleveled without spending a point myself for exactly the same reason. It was a very common practice.
As to the D3 point, you know what I mean. Nobody ever leveled in D3 without getting a skill. Ever. Everyone in D3 always picked skills and played the game using abilities while leveling. While, in D2, many many people didn’t. They just refused to spend points, or spent the absolute bare minimum they could to functionally level, if they weren’;t getting powerleveled. That’s a reality, and denying that is simply being willfully ignorant.
So you don’t want people to ask you to weaken your style of play(really shouldn’t be using the g word, its pretty disrespectful, but I don’t expect better from you) so that theirs can work… yet then immediately after:
You ask the other person to literally weaken their spec in order to have what they want. Since if you ‘split your points’ you’re not getting maxed skills or synergistic passives. So quite literally you’re asking them to do exactly what you don’t want others to ask of you. You’re actually doing WORSE because you’re asking them to FACTUALLY make themselves weaker whereas they’re only making you FEEL weaker without being any weaker in reality.
Hypocrisy at its absolute finest.
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Rerolling bad skills too eh? 
Really? I guess im the outlier. I would level up and add skills to leveling abilities then when i got to aroujd 50 or 60 id use my first respec to switch to my end game build.
In d4 i feel like they really nailed it for making intentional decisions along the way. You start out basic and as you get an idea for the fantasy you want to play you build out that way. Within the nodes its fairly cheap to reset one or two skills.
If gold is anything like d3, i had so much of it by the end game i didnt know what to do with it. So it may not be that bad to respec.
From the latest livestream seemed like itd he 5mil to respec the whole paragon board and their characters had 2-6mil on them which makes it seem like a reasonable amount. The level 100 items selling for 150k which means high level rares could probbaly be around 50 to 75k meaning youd need like 70 items for full respec (which would take like an hour maybe?)
No because bad stats are rng, bad skills are player mistakes. GOld sinks to improve rng are good, gold sinks tied to player mistakes are bad.
Certainly not everyone. But the chat channels were literally full of powerlevel requests day in and day out when I played for people because they wanted to get to max level without spending points so they could pick their build because the specs were so restrictive and punitive.
I’ll never understand why people feel like the worst part of real life is important in videogames… do your real lives not have enough consequences in them that you crave them in your games? lol
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You must of joined the D2 community late because there wasn’t a “rush me for forge drop” crowd till well into the 2010’s, not on USEast sc or hc anyway matter a fact I think that crowd didn’t come around till after D3 release.
Can you respec your toon in this game?
I played for the first ten years after launch on USEast. I haven’t played in about 14-ish years. I stopped playing gradually as other games that were more well designed came out lol
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Yes you can for a price in gold.
Oh that’s cool, how? What button do I press?
I think it is ok, but we will have to see how long the gold takes to farm endgame. If anything I think gold is going to come too fast and that they should raise the cost.
The you’re aware there wasn’t the ability to repec till 1.13 and it wasn’t even a topic of discussion aside from the “oh crap” moment.
Yes,w hich is why everyone kept having to create new characters despite hating to do so. It was the only way to respec. And everyone hated it, so everyone asked for powerlevels to ‘respec’ by remaking the character. And literally everyone was relieved when they added the ability to respec and wished it was easier and less limiting.
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You must be into participation trophies IRL then too. I hope more states vote to ban those things. Destroyers of society they are just like free respecs would destroy this game.
Wow. Something that does nothing except help people experiment would ‘destroy the game’ - yeesh. Hypocrisy and hyperbole is basically all the proponents of respec costs have to offer. lol
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Yes destroy the game. They would then balance every boss assuming you swapped to your boss spec and balance all the trash to take a trash spec. You would need to swap back and forth over and over. That would make the game trash.
And now in D4 it is less limiting and you’re more than likely not going to need to make a new character for a misplaced point.
I about died laughing. But this and your handle = Gold. Has anyone said Kaboomer before? Not trying to sound rude. Just the first thought that came to mind.
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