I think you’re falling into the argument trap of because it’s free, I can’t use it. Respec costs don’t stop me from experimenting though as long as the skills are interesting enough. It didn’t in Grim Dawn.
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Ya’ll dont even know how much gold you’ll find in the later stages of the game. Not to mention vendoring items instead of blackmithing them.
Chill out.
WOrst case scenario you just reroll! LOL
I think you’re not discussing the points brought up and trying to now go a different direction.
Shadout (and I believe you as well … others certainly have) … have said many times that people won’t play the non-optimal. They’ll respec every time. Yet here you are playing “sub-optimally” despite those free respecs.
Mind discussing the current points before we go off on another direction?
You probably haven’t read the thread, and I don’t blame you since it’s awfully long … but we’ve already covered that.
If the costs end up being negligible [enough], then there’s no issue from those wanting that … maybe one from those wanting a higher cost.
But we won’t know till it comes out.
That doesn’t keep us from being able to discuss the ramifications of it being one or the other.
Yes.
Most people put at least some value on their time.
Sometimes even deriving fun out of being efficient.
Doing something in 1 minute instead of 5 adds up over a season, and will have Blizzard balance the game around it (as they should). For better or worse.
There’s simply no way around the impact to game design that free respecs have. I can see adjusting the costs so that people don’t have to reroll. I honestly agree that is too much. A respec should be farmable in a day. That is, you respec and by the end of that session you’ve made back what it cost you.
Having zero cost means players will respec based on the content they are doing. For Nightmare Dungeons, they’ll look at the affixes and then match up their build. For world bosses they’ll focus on dots and passive damage so they can concentrate on mechanics.
When players start doing this, devs will either have to balance the content against it to make sure its challenging (forcing everyone to now tailor their builds) or they leave it and people who tailor their builds find zero challenge in the content.
Having a reasonable but meaningful cost to respec means that you can do it when you need to, but not abuse it.
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Interesting, because HOW people want to spend their time has been one of the reasons people have cited for not wanting cost attached to respecs.
People do value their time enough to not want to have to worry about it being diverted to pay whatever cost for being able to respec. That’s a cost, if implemented, they don’t get to actually choose.
As opposed to choosing whether or not you want to bother with the work needed to respec in order to gain the time possibly saved by the increased efficiency.
Some won’t “waste their time” with “fiddling with items and respeccing” … others won’t “waste their time” with “being less optimal”. But result in different builds being leveraged and different decisions for whether or not respecs are leveraged. And neither require additional cost added to the equation for that split decision to be occurring.
What is going to prevent players from just having multiple characters of X class that they just swap between for those things?
Won’t that just result in the same scenario you just described?
You mean showing up to a boss fight sub-optimally? if they choose to with free respecs then they’re not giving it their all at everyone else’s expense to be honest. They had a 30 minute warning to prepare.
We’ve had these discussions, you know I’m not against respeccing. And I’m not against respeccing with a cost either. You seem to be mistaking that since I want a cost to respeccing that means I’m against using it in a game that doesn’t have that cost.
You shouldn’t have to go that far. If you want to be inefficient and spend all the time it takes to have multiple of the same class specialized in each type of content that’s fine. Under the current system it’s actually faster to respec than relevel.
It’s about controlling the meta, and meta is always about efficiencies.
Indeed. To counter that time saving/efficiency that respecs offer.
Since one is way more efficient than the other, yes you do need to add something else to, at minimum, balance them.
No, I was just pointing out that your own actions don’t match with the claims made by you and others that are arguing for a cost to respecs.
Y’all have claimed that it results in people only playing the optimal builds.
Yet we can see that in a game with free respecs (D3), you are not playing an optimal build.
And to make it more interesting, you did actually change … just not the build/spec … instead you changed the gear.
Nothing, that’s exactly what this is designed to nudge you into doing.
When I’m pushing? You bet your a$$ I am. Respec costs or not.
You’re just looking at a bounty build tuned for travel speed by cutting through elite packs.
Using D3 as an example doesn’t help your case. People go to ladder and look at the #1 spot and copy the build. It’s the absolute worst example of what we’re talking about here. It 100% results in people just freely swapping to the meta.
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Who have claimed that?
You can always find outliers.
Lets say Barbs were only 1% as powerful as Sorcs in D4 endgame. Just because you could find a single person out there who played Barb, it would not make the imbalance acceptable.
Except this has been shown to not be the case.
TatsumakiJim linked to my builds and one is the Tragoul for Necromancer but the other is Frenzy Barb … that’s not top of the meta. There are a few sets above it. And my wizard is me just playing around having fun as I get gear for it.
And then linking TatsumakiJim’s Wizard, we see he is not currently the exact cookie cutter Wizard either … he is currently running a bit of a hybrid between GR Push and Farming.
Those respecs enable him to do that. Those respecs enable me to play around on my Barb and swap from Frenzy when I want to play my Barb but am not braindead-tired so want to do something a bit more “involved” than Charge and hold LMB for Frenzy and especially to just play around on my Wizard.
If we didn’t have the free respecs, I wouldn’t even bother with playing around with stuff like I currently am on the Wizard.
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Go look at all sorts of people that aren’t the top of the ladder. Lots of people are just having fun.
The ladder only captures the meta builds because those are the builds topping the ladder.
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Again, respec costs don’t stop that. Even at half a billion gold a respec I’d still have money left over.
The point is the highest echelon of difficulty is scaled to the meta. The meta is dictated by all the character and monster design choices. And free respecs change the meta through those choices.
Also I haven’t played since the beginning of March, so free respecs and experimenting clearly wasn’t keeping me around anyways and it wasn’t respec costs scaring me off.
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Game designers cannot balance their game against the subset of people who just play to have fun. They deal at the level of what’s possible within their game design, and as such must balance against the people pushing the envelope of what’s possible to maintain control on that design.
I get that isn’t ideal but its the nature of the beast. I don’t go around shooting people, but that doesn’t mean we can get rid of gun laws in my country.
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That’s what I’ve discussed before.
- There is a range that they try to keep the possible specs within.
- Builds within that spec are what they design for
- Specs above that range are targeted for nerfs
- Specs below that range either get buffs or are simply bad specs.
Whether or not a spec is within that range is independent of whether or not someone playing that spec always did or respec’d to use it.
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