11+ Million Gold To Respec Paragon? Are you kidding?

PC General Discussion
787

Yep. People just copy the meta builds for Path of Exile and it does NOT have free respecs.

So arguing it has much of anything to do with free or non-free respecs seems to just be ignoring the other factors of the games/genre/Internet/people that actually contribute to this.

And, unless you’re trying to top the leaderboards, why do you care if someone is doing better/worse on some content than you?

How will you even know?

This is just a different way or restating that people will just pick the meta builds. But now you’re attributing that to happening because of free respecs.

So far the World Bosses appear to be strictly single-target.

As I mentioned in responding to the other forum-goer, I have yet to see a dungeon that was not a mix of weak enemies, elite enemies, and a boss at the end. So I’m curious where this AOE Challenge vs Single Target Challenge is coming from.

In addition, I don’t consider those “challenges”. A challenge would be, to me, things like dodging various high damage attacks, having to leverage windows of opportunity to attack an enemy, or other actual mechanics that can be simple but combined to provide depth (the sweet spot in game design).

We saw this isn’t the case when you and Jim opened the door to looking at D3 characters. We saw that Jim wasn’t playing optimally … nor was my Barb and especially not my Wizard … only my Necromancer due to running out of stash space so I picked one of the builds I had the gear for and trashed the rest to make space.

Plenty of people don’t do the swap because it isn’t a magic, automatic thing. To swap between builds, you have to have acquired the gear for each of those builds. That involves farming, upgrading, rerolling, and dealing with stash/inventory space.

And, as we’ve covered so many times, people can simply swap between characters of different specs to accomplish the very thing you have an issue with with free respecs.

788

Indeed.

Cookie cutter happens regardless of what else is done. I dont see why it should be avoided either. If people want to copy builds, then let them.

Because efficiency matters. And as said many times previously, other players are irrelevant for this. It could be the exact same in a singleplayer only game.
One player could respec or not respec, and see the difference for themselves. Regardless of other players.

Then you are misunderstanding.
Meta builds are not a problem in any way.
What changes is the kind of builds that are picked. Super specialized vs. more generalized (albeit likely still with specializations).

Super specialized builds is boring gameplay imo, due to always having the perfect solution to each problem.

Bosses can also be about AoE.

But yes, it can be a dungeon vs. a world boss, or a bounty, helltide etc.
It can also be different types of Nightmare Sigil modifiers. Like, the one that spawns minions through a portal. More enemies = more AoE, presumably. While other modifiers might benefit more from single target.
And of course single target vs. AoE is just one of the many examples here. Could also be resource generation (generator vs spender), mobility, dmg types, and so on.

Challenges in the context was just another word for game activities. (dictionary: a call to someone to participate in a competitive situation or fight to decide who is superior in terms of ability or strength)
They might not be challenging in the sense of being difficult to do (albeit, that kinda should be the purpose of them…)

Technically we didnt see that. We saw he was using something in between pure speed and pure push. That could very well be optimal for what he was doing. Like lets say you can comfortably speed run GR120. But 140 requires your push build.
However, maybe he was doing GR130 to lvl up gems, resulting in the optimal build being something in between.
I certainly used such builds on my Wizard in this season, for this exact purpose.

In some cases they can. With limitations, such as not in the middle of a dungeon. And also not necessaries between bounties/Tree of Whisper, since if you do 3 bounties on character A and 2 on character B, none of them gets the reward for doing 5 bounties.

As mentioned before, I would expand on that. But even now, character jumping comes with limitations. One of which is of course also the time it takes to lvl up that other character.

789

Can you provide your definition of “all the time”?

I know players who have primarily kept to a single build for an entire season when tbey get the requisite gear where they may run 1 or 2 variants per class.

790

Whenever they switch between activities (such as pushing, speed, solo, group etc.).

Knowing an outlier who never changed their build doesnt say much tbh. Not how D3 is generally played.

791

Let’s assume that there are 2 main activities where both are “obligatory” each with a unique meta build.

With free respecs, a player can alternate freely between the two builds and activities.

In a costly respec system, a player needs to make a decision

  1. Play the same build for both activities, knowing that they are wasting game time for one activity
  2. Play a hybrid build, knowing that they are wasting game time for both activities
  3. Play exclusively one activuty and then the other while wasting time to farm gold to make the respec.

Irrespective of their decision, the players in a limited respec system knows that they are wasting gane time.

Limited respecs will promote even more players to adopt cookie cutters builds and discourage build experimentation.

Altogether, limited/costky respecs are bad game design.

792

It was rift key farming. It was a fart and leave the room speed build. In geom would trigger on my way while teleporting along.

There’s no way I was using that for Pushing GRift. Not a chance.

If anything. Playing less than meta is probably why I quit and you see the build as it is. People don’t quit at the host of their game, it’s usually at the lowest

I very likely spent at least 90% of my time in the meta state though.

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793

Peeople have access to all skills , with +skills from gear

And generally , exceept if u really want a main nuke, you dont even have to put all points in a skill, so unless you change completely your playstyle , you can test out plenty of things, and see if it works, and if you’d like it better

794

There is a significant difference in performance at end game between optimized builds and goofing around with buulds with a few skill points from gear.

795

Playing the game as it was designed to be played is not a waste of time unless you want to make some meaningless argument that all games are a waste of time.

You are not wasting time by playing a build that is not perfectly optimized for an activity. Quite the opposite even.

That could happen. The game design should ensure that this way to play is not optimal. By rewarding doing diverse content. Stuff like world bosses appearing for a limited time already should do this. Bounties should do this. Nightmare sigils should do this. Blizzard have hinted at some kind of targeted item farming in endgame that could also help here.
But I would add more to it, such as outright giving buffs if you switch between activities.

These are exactly what should happen, with a good respec design.

Yeah, wasnt trying to argue what you used the build for. Just that a build that is half push and half speed can ALSO be a specialized meta build, in a game with free respecs.

Yep.

I guess I quit at the top in S28 though. The moment I had done a GR150 I was out. D3 gets boring so incredibly fast imo.

796

If the time it saved trumped the gold cost to respec it would have been a barrier either.

797

Rod said in a interview available on youtube that at certain high level (he said level 50 simply for illustration purposes) where it might make sense to level an alt since the costs of respecing would be too high.

This was widely criticized as bad game design and Blizzard had to enter damage control mode due to widespread negative feedback from players. Now, they insist that respecs will not be prohibitively expensive.

You have your vision of the game.

The simple fact is that many (I would even predict that the vast majority) are against high cost respecs. The diablo franchise as a whole features repetitive gameplay. Being able to switch builds defrays the monotony.

With only 10 character slots, the idea that we should just create alts for each activity is illogical.

In D3 at least you can freely respec to challenge yourself with a new build for the same class. For D4, you are advocating removing that option.

798

I assume you mean “wouldn’t”. But yeah.
Although it can make the two closer to each other at least. Like if you gain 50% efficiency through the respec, but the cost makes you lose 45% efficiency, then it is still worth respeccing. Just way less so.

That definitely should not be that people create alts for each activity. That is not the goal with having respec costs. The goal was the two you already mentioned (quoted below).
Blizzard should make sure that using multiple characters to circumvent the respec cost is inefficient.

That is simply false.
You very much should be able to respec once in a while.

799

How often in terms of gameplay hours? Once every hour? 10 hours? 100 hours? 1,000 hours?

P.S. I am talking fiull respec.

It is true. You do not want free respecs as in D3. You advocate for non-free respecs. See what I wrote:

800

I dooubt Ill respec even once, leveling until 100

Just because, i like planning as it goes

Only reason to respec would be if i cant kill anything, but then, Ill still be groouping with folks

and pretty sure i’ll be pulling my weight

801

I’d say

It should be impossible to respec more than once every 5 hour on average. That should cost more goal than you can possibly farm in those 5 hours.

It should be doable to respec every 10 hours on average. With a cost that eats significantly into your gold resources, meaning you might lack gold for other stuff if you respec this often.

Respeccing every 20+ hours should start to feel like the cost is not important. You lose some gold, but not to the point where it drastically limits what else you can do.

The above should be for any kind of respecs. Best accomplished by simply making all respecs, partial or full, cost the same. Or maybe half/half in the sense that there was one cost for respeccing the skill tree, and another for the paragon board. That would be fine.

Now, I would not use the current gold cost system in the fist place. Gold is a bad currency for stuff like this. A respec token, or something like the Last Epoch system, would be much better.
Also, if something like gold is used, a rapidly increasing cost per respec, that then reduces over time, would be much better, allowing rare respecs to be free, while ensuring that frequent respecs would be impossible.

802

yeah, I meant wouldn’t.

At no point was I ever anti-experimentation or anti-respec and I don’t feel that my stance on respec costs says that. As long as the costs are reasonable, I don’t think it’s a problem.

According to Rhykker, it sounds like once, not twice per day. (full respec - cost-wise)

803

That just means that respec costs aren’t the only factor. PoE is known to have an excessively complex skill tree system. Not the case in Diablo 4.

The examples I laid out do not require any or at least significant gear swapping.

If someone has gone to the lengths to roll another character, then that’s fine.

804

But why care?

I didn’t care back in the days of Nintendo, Sega Genesis, etc. that players were using cheats. They played how they wanted and I did too.

Same with Starcraft … I didn’t care that some people resorted to cheats there.

If someone’s play doesn’t affect you, it shouldn’t matter to you.

Which again goes to playing how you want and letting others play how they want.

You think that is boring. I think it’s tedious to swap for that. So you and I won’t be doing that. But some other people will. And your “solution” to stop them is to infringe on my gameplay as well as others who have their reasons for respec-ing a decent amount that may or may not be related to specializing for what they are doing.

Yes, I understand that they can.

However, I have yet to see it except for the world boss where it’s obviously only a single target from what we’ve seen of the world bosses so far in beta and from video.

Dungeons and such as mixes of weak and elites with bosses at the end.

Yeah, however you want to define it. I want a challenge that lets me do more than what you see in most of D3 and PoE builds where you spam the same 1-2 buttons and the rest is just upkeep for those. Aside from “don’t stand in the crud”, there isn’t much challenge.

So now we’re getting into a large amount of variety from what is/isn’t optimal at different points in time. More variety.

And we also can’t seem to tell whether or not it was/wasn’t hyper-optimized and it didn’t affect either of us. So apply that to D4 … why would we care?

Yes, the first limitation needs additional limitations in order for it to “work” as a “solution”.

That’s generally indicative, to me, of needing to go back to the drawing board.

For sure at work we would have flagged a solution like that in a code review and sat down with the dev.

805

It absolutely improves the player experience for people who want to play ARPG. It’s only a downside for people who just want the A and nothing else.

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806

Path’s in Paragon are fairly flexible to be honest

As most people will probably want a MAIN board, and then look if they can reach a few extra legendary nodes, for specific extra features, and then, mostly work around some specific glyphs / rare nodes that you prefer over others

Only way to screw up, would be to be picking only white nodes, and it would be funny