I 100% guarantee you Blizzard is not tuning the encounter to only be completed by people who respec and change classes for every encounter. I absolutely 100% guarantee it.
They’re balancing it for a variety of different comps, intending that it be completable with compositions including at least every class. And most specs. Because they understand that you don’t balance around unhealthy activity. And switching classes or specs between encounters is unhealthy activity. Because if you FORCE anyone other than the absolute best to do it… you kill your game.
The best will do it anyways. You can’t stop them. So you just let them get benefits from it, because they’re WILLING to do things that aren’t healthy for the game as a whole to get an advantage. Whereas you don’t push the average player to do it.
Terrible decision when you are building your character blindly and then being penalized when only after heavy investment. What is real fun is when inevitable balance changes come into play and your build gets nerfed. This is not meaningful design or impactful. Your options are to:
Spend a bunch of time leveling the exact same class to redistribute points
Grind a bunch with a busted build or one you don’t like playing hopefully not having to repeat it.
What this does is mean players will shy away from experimenting with the game and ultimately just stop playing. This is sort of why people stay in some toxic relationships because they feel they have a lot of time invested and have to do all that courting, and dating, etc. Bad idea all around. You want an Option for No Respecs, Permadeath, Survival mode or something? Sure go ahead. Forcing restrictive design needlessly on others is selfish.
They wouldn’t be balancing that way either way. That’s the point. Nobody is stupid enough to balance around that. So the balance is EXACTLY THE SAME as if they had free respecs. The only difference is the game is less fun.
Hardly anyone is advocating for completely unrestricted respeccing. There are some very easy changes that could be implemented with respecs to stop exploits, namely, respeccing must be done in Town at a Vendor. Upon respeccing, any dungeon progress is reset. This stops players from using an AoE build and respeccing for Single Target Damage for a Boss.
Will they have different specs for different dungeons? Some people might, but who cares? Want to discourage that? Just put in 2 max Gear/Skill Profiles. Free to respec manually, but if someone is going to put in the work to place every single skill point and Paragon Point, more power to them.
Oh so you have played Nightmare Dungeon lvl 100? I didn’t think so. Just like GR 150 the stretch goal is unlikely to be reached. Unless you can swap betwwen single ad multi target damage. Well since there are respec costs they are probably balancing more loosely so we might be able to complete the content. If there were no respec costs then for sure it would be balanced around swapping specs because the players would be sure to do it.
Too much work to call out all the outliers. Keep it as it is to enable the balance to be at a point that encourages more build diversity. Free respecs would just kill that build diversity because everything would have to be balanced around the meta.
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+.
