Lol, yeah, hence why you don’t see me with ancients / primals this season and instead a stash full of gear for all sorts of specs … as the only entertainment with that content draught is really just playing around with different builds to suit your mood.
Regardless of costly/free/whatever respecs … content draught and out-of-control power creep are issues and D3 is a great example of them.
You will likely phase out from the shard that has the event going when you teleport out to change your build. So it isn’t risking anything, because you already lose if you teleport out.
So instead of being a risk, it’s a guarantee that you’ll miss the event?
They can by all means do it if they wish, I don’t really care as long as they pay for the respec in both directions, or make a character that is dedicated to party play.
People want a fair leaderboard system, which comes from ensuring that characters are balanced, which requires looking at balance than just looking at individual classes or even individual sub builds.
Take a multiplayer example four party members respecing to: 1 tank barbarian and 3 ranged, pure DPS specs of say a mix of sorcerers and rogues.
You take any one of these specs on their own and not only may they perform significantly worse, they may potentially not be able to clear that same content at all unless they respec back to a more viable solo spec.
For solo hot specing, the problem isn’t as glaring, but you can still make a number of choices that narrow down your skills that you’d want to spec into depending on the content that you face.
For example, I may spec for my Rogue build and I don’t have free respecs available:
If free respecs were available:
I can choose to respec away before a specific dungeon I’m familiar with that has lots of weak monsters:
Or instead respec away in a dungeon with fewer but strong, hard hitting monsters:
Or instead respec away against a world boss:
And repurpose the remaining points into skills or passives that I would find more valuable.
This is a clear advantage to any player that has free respecs at their disposal, and therefore presents a clear issue with balance if free respecs were to be in Diablo 4.
Compared to what will be only a moderate amount of gold to respec in Diablo 4 in the end, and with proper gold management and other techniques that can be employed to make this a non-issue, free respecs don’t really have a valid reason to exist in Diablo 4 when weighed against the issues that introducing free respecs will introduce.
If gold costs for respecs were to be discovered after launch to be unreasonable, then that’s a conversation to be had at that point.
So I can’t play around with different specs because of a leaderboard that I have no interest in competing in. Just get rid of the skill tree then and give me the same 6 stills to play for each class so everyone is balanced. I don’t believe that is how they want us to play the game considering at any time I could get a lucky drop of a build changing legendary and want to respec to try it out.
It makes sense not to go to a world boss fight with skills you know are not helpful in any way. Oh but too bad you already chose skills for AOE so just go suck on the World Boss now. No need to ever learn how mechanics on bosses work since everyone will just already be balanced for the fight.
It also affects PvP too.
Not if you built your build correctly.
You will be getting the game similar to what was shown in the beta. Considering everything else I have said and not said, it’s going to be fine.
PVP is another issue where a decent spec for that would be very different from a good PVE spec. There is no balance issue from being able to respec. You can only choose from the skills they have made available on the skill tree and you can only use gear they have put in the game. That is where the balance is. Just look at the recent patch notes, they made some balance changes to skills. They also tweaked some dungeon bosses to be less effective against melee. I believe they will lower or remove the respec cost in the future.
Which is why I don’t like this, because as is, this restriction will only affect casuals. Blasters will respec because they will have the gold. Or level another character.
my main concern is to bypass the skill costs folks are just going to copy online people’s builds rather than experimenting.
I feel like they are doing the talent respec costs to try and have something in between d3s free talent respecs and d2’s limited respecs. There’s two main issues with this.
1st WOW had this model for a long time and they ended up with so many complaints they finally ended up creating dual talent specs and than dropping the cost of respecing all together. Now you can have multiple frost and fire specs and switch between them without any costs.
2nd when d2 came out, Internet bandwidth was not the same as it is now. Most people had dsl modems. Gaming websites like wowhead, alkhazam and thotbot from what I remember hadn’t come out yet. Streaming also was not a thing either. To build your toon you literally sat and combed the d2 website to figure out the skill build you wanted. Than you wrote the build down. Also the legendaries at the time were not build specific, so if x dropped it did not require any deviation from the written down plan. When I bought the d2 remake I literally copied someones build online because I didn’t want to deal with d2’s talent respec insanity.
If the respec cost is too high, people are just going to mass copy the best build online. People will not pay 200000000… whatever the actual cost is going to be even if they get some amazing fire mage item. Why they don’t have the 200000000… and some website told them too.
This is literally going to be d3 all over again where everybody is going to be playing the meta build whether they have the gear or not. At least in d3, playing the meta build required the gear for that spec.
I don’t actually understand this argument at all. If everybody had free respecs, Than everybody can change into the right build for that dungeon or for that group. How is that unbalanced?
It’s such a long ago that I don’t remember it properly, but I think there was Youtube vids on D3 builds and diablofans had the first build collection, but may have not been there at the start. I do recall me creating the most broken Wizard build by myself with how Force Armor + Diamond Skin interaction worked. But then there were vids on it and it got nerfed pretty fast.
The original d2 came out in 2000. Youtube didn’t start until 2005.
It doesn’t create an uneven playing field between players in that sense, but it changes the makeup of the builds (they no longer will be builds, but instead specs) that players will create by forcing players to play hyper optimised specs, rather than actual builds.
It also adds a bad quality of life aspect to the play experience in a number of ways starting with the task of respecing the character periodically.
My bad that’s supposed to be d2 in that sentence not d3. I just edited it. Thanks for catching the typo.
If I’m having difficulty with content I would rather be able to respec to see if I can overcome it than have to start a new character.
Then do so. The game lets you have respecs, they’re just not free.
Right, was wondering if my brain had melted that badly 
Pretty sure, Respec cost wouldnt go up exponentially, but were rather based on amoount of points being changed
But not 100% suree about that one ;o
That doesn’t bypass the respec cost though.
Making your own build, or copying another persons build, are equally fine in this regard.
The people who copy builds (which are probably the vast majority) will do so with both free respecs and with limited respecs.
Yes, and that happened with free respecs. The respec cost has no impact on that.
It is unbalanced for those who dont respec. Which is relevant considering that the “free respec” proponents keep pretending that people can just choose to not respec, and not be any worse off. Which of course is nonsense.
But you are right that respeccing for everything does not have to mean that the content becomes imbalanced. Blizzard can just balance content with the expectation that people are respeccing, ensuring that it remains challenging.
However, imo, that also leads to really boring gameplay, where players are just picking the optimal solution for each challenge, making the gameplay very repetitive and shallow.
AoE Challenge => pick the AoE build
Single target challenge => pick the single target build
and so on. Brainless gameplay.
Starting another character might not really work. Your new build might just struggle with some other content instead.
That would be the purpose of builds having strengths and weaknesses.
Instead, players might just have to improve and beat the content with their current build.
But of course, you very much can respec if you want to. The game should just not be designed around you doing so. And if respeccing, you might run into the same issue as if creating a new character, that you will just struggle against some other content instead.
Why do they need to pay for that respec? What does them paying gain?
But if everyone competing on the leaderboard has the same tools available to them, what makes it “not fair” ?
And for those that don’t care about the leaderboard (I’d argue the majority), we’re going to restrict them because of something they don’t care about?
I’m failing to see the issue here.
There is nothing preventing that group from creating these characters using these specs and only playing them when playing together in that group of 4.
In addition, this seems to be promoting more build diversity which I thought everyone agreed was a good thing for games.
Maybe it’s different past level 25, but all the dungeons I ran during the beta weekend had a mix of weak monsters and elites and then ended with the boss.
Given this, I didn’t see a single dungeon where I thought “man, AOE was useless” for did I see a single dungeon where I thought “man, single target was useless”.
If everyone has it available to them, there isn’t an imbalance. They all have the same options available to them.
Yep. We’ll ultimately have to wait and see.