Agreed. For the vast majority of players, this game is essentially single-player. Respec costs are a punitive legacy from a 20-year-old game that honestly has no place any more.
If they want people to feel connected to their character, to try things out, to play, to experiment, then remove the costs, and improve the interface.
If they want people to get bored, to be afraid to try new skills, to just get all their builds from third-parties, then they should leave it as it is.
I cannot fathom why the designers thought #2 was the better choice here…
What double-blows my mind is that they have these features in all of their other games.
WoW has beautiful skill trees with meaningful choice. It has a “edit” mode, where you make changes before you commit them. It lets you save builds. It lets you drag skills directly from the tree into your action bar (notably D4 doesn’t let you do this, it has a separate interface for that).
D3 saves builds, lets you swap between them, and takes a fraction of the number of clicks to build a new one.
As a game developer not using previous functionality, especially when it is QoL functionally, in your new game is essentially unacceptable.
How many people have grown up hearing over and over
“learn from your accomplishments and mistakes”…
How is it that a man who gets a 6 figure income to head up Diablo 4… doesn’t think it is a good idea to implement previous features that clearly were good ideas…
Like what level of pretentious do you need to be in order to ignore all previous paths laid before you that have a literal GOOD IDEA sign on them…
If this was a small indie dev team I could accept that they may now have the time to add all the systems we would want… But this is Blizz… and we don’t have a LFG Finder in a 2023 “MMO”
Or D3, a the previous game in the exact same series made by the exact same company.
Just rest assured: respec costs, farming for gold for respecs, these are not popular features. D2 was popular in spite of these, because it was great in other ways, and it was boundary setting, not because you couldn’t respec. I played D2 when I was in high school and had no life. Now, it’s been 20 years, and farming for hours just to respec hasn’t been fun in over a decade.
Exactly. It comes to the point it is frustrating to find legendaries for different builds because the cost of trying them out is ridiculous at a high lvl, and then you have to switch back again if you end up not liking the new build. It’s a hard pass for me, thank you very much.
It saddens me though that we can’t try out stuff because one needs to spend X amount of time farming Y amount of gold to respec and try a new unique aspect that hopefully will be good enough or work at all. By far one of the worst things in d4 imo.
i spam lvl 36-45 NM dungeons on my lvl 93 and usually walk out with 11 items which is around 140, 000 gold a run at most. even regular dungeons don’t give that much: it’s super rare to get a full inventory in my experience…
so all these people saying they get 5 or more mill an hour are just making crap up.
No it doesn’t, it takes a few hours to get to the top of the skill tree, maybe 20 to reach paragon. But you are playing the build you want to play the whole time, so it’s fun the whole time, instead of farming for gold and items on a different build and not being able to play the one you want to try out.
Have you used them all? Or do you still only have 1 slot used?
The just start a new character defense is such nonsense. Maybe if paragon was still shared like D3, but even than it would be a tone def stance. Defenders of it being people with no time commitments or Devs that keep making knee jerk decisions.