I’ve been routinely posting this, and I will keep posting this topic. As a reminder: You took this stance in D3, DI Beta, and WoW:SL. You caved on each one, because it’s a bad stance.
I just saw the interview where they talked about respec fees not being a huge blocker, but want you to have weight to your choices, etc. Cool, I’m fine with paying. I am. But give me the armoire system that has existed for the last 2 iterations. Even in beta when I would go from WW Barb, to Thorns barb, to shock barb, I got soooo tired of spending/re-spending those points.
You’re building a system where you want me to have ‘2 barbarians’ and switch between then for the spec I want like D3 was originally. This is completely detrimental to long-term gameplay. Casual players won’t do it, serious players do it at the cost of QoL, long-term players do it and burn out, ‘alt-fiends’ refuse to do it because it’s n*2 for them to have alts.
We absolutely need a way to save specs; I already have 3 ideas for barb that I actively want to play, and would swap based on type of content. To be ‘stuck’ into one, or to be annoyed with manually respeccing (As a reminder, all point spends are final! Not even a template mode) it is absolutely going to tarnish the length of which I play this game.
No, we dont need to. Besides, your gear with skillbonuses have a lot stronger contribution, skills alone doesnt a full build make. You are overstating how much you are going to need a full respec.
You should know this from WoW , i dont care if i pay , but to have to swap from PvP build to mob killing build , and this game will need a solo or potential group build. We dont wanna have to re allocate feat and or paragon points, and there’s alot more points to allocate .
You’d think you would have learned recently with D2R how convenience of life things, really makes me h, h, h, HAPPY!!
This should be the absolute minimum they should provide: A template mode. It’s nothing more than a quality of life change.
Respecs still cost exactly the same as they do now, but the cost isn’t charged to you until you click “Commit”. This way you can at least be sure that the build you want is at least possible before you spend gold on it.
During the beta there were several times that I was trying to get a certain build but it wouldn’t let me refund a certain skill, presumably because of prerequisites. Eventually, out of frustration, I just hit “refund all” even though I was only changing a few skills.
Additionally once you reach 100 and full renown, there’s no more progress to be made.
So you create a 2nd character, level it to 100 (much faster) without having to get altars, or renown, or farm all the aspects etc… may even be able to use some gear from your chests. Hit 100 in no time at all and have 2 specs to switch between, with no real downside after the initial levelling investment.
Most people in D3 do this anyway. Key farmer, en farmer, vault farmer, bounty farmer, zdps, solo push, group rat setup etc…
So people will likely naturally do this in d4 too.
I don’t necessarily think we need “loadouts”. The skill tree is not “that” complicated. Maybe for paragons?
For skills though - the only downside is if you want to change something at the base of the tree, you need to free up points from the bottom and then, yeah it can get a little annoying.
I do think respecs need to be free though. Full stop.
The barrier to “respecs” already exists in the form of gear. We don’t need additional barriers.
It works fine for D3 and there is no cost there. Far less options too. Why? Because your 2.5 minute rifts aren’t going to happen if you keep porting back to town (or even just out of combat) respeccing between pulls.
Yeah, I mean I don’t mind casual players, there’s nothing wrong with that. But when they start demanding that everyone becomes limited to what their available playtime is and everything after that is just diminishing returns or completely time-gated, we have a problem.
And, that’s what they tend to do.
It’s the casuals that demand to be at the spearhead of power even though they only have a half hour every few days to play.
Hey Blizzard, I know you have already said multiple times that you don’t want to encourage players to switch between builds often, and don’t want players to feel like they need to switch builds to complete different content, but you should totally add features to the game to facilitate making it easier to switch builds constantly.
This hard and fast stance is going to last about 3 months and then they will do their usual “balance pass” which will nerf the builds that 90% of people are using since everyone will just go cookie cutter and they will see a massive drop in playrate. See Covenants it will probably take about a year for them to finally go fine just respec as you want and have fun but you need to be in a town to do so which is what it should have been to start.
You do realize that like 90% of players are casual right? Like you flat out don’t get AAA games without a casual player base stuff like Last Epoch exists the uber hardcore and is budgeted as such.
OP, what about having just 2 preset tabs for skill builds. You unlock it after level 50, after you have paid for your first full refund.
Then you can grind the items for that Build #2 and store it in town Stash.
This will allow players to swop between at least Build #1 & Build #2 at a lower cost and feel like you have more options on the table, avoiding boredom of 1 build rigidity.
Sure, and there’s nothing wrong with being casual. I’m casual in a lot of games. But I don’t expect those games to cater to me by limiting everyone’s effective play time down to my level. That would be selfish.
Yeah that annoyed me too, that there was no way to remove a point and place it elsewhere because of the point requirements to unlock that node. I ended up just respeccing fully most of the time as well.
The devs also said you wouldn’t be able to buy power in Diablo Immortal and we all know that was a bold faced lie.
We have brains, we know the costs to respec are going to be prohibitively expensive.
And since we have brains we also know that respecs should be free forever because limiting player choice does not increase player entertainment or fun. Part of having fun in a game is novelty, ie being able to change your build at whim whenever it starts getting boring. But increasing respec costs gets in the way of that ability to have fun for NO REASON WHATSOEVER.
There is ZERO reason to have respec costs. Respecs are in violation of the purpose of a game and serve no purpose other than limiting player fun because of developer malice towards the players.
Adding a huge cost to change a build does not make the choices important. They are still meaningless. A choice can only be important if it is inherently important and you know the result of taking that choice. If you are only choosing whether to do laundry today or tomorrow that isn’t an important choice. If you are choosing whether to romance Liara or Kaiden in Mass Effect then that choice is important. Blowing up the Collector base or purging it of Collectors to give to Cerberus APPEARED to be an important choice (although Mass Effect 3 would remove the importance of that choice). Choosing what armor to wear in Mass Effect 2 was not an important choice. Adding a huge cost to change armor would not have made that choice important because it was not inherently important. The armor model didn’t affect how the story unfolded. It didn’t affect what happened to the characters you liked.
Choosing where to put your skill points in Diablo 4 is just like choosing armor in Mass Effect 2. They don’t affect how the story plays out, they don’t affect what happens to the characters you like, they don’t change the game world.
It is also important to point out that not ONE SINGLE PERSON who wants respecs to be prohibitive has ever presented A SINGLE argument that would convince anyone that limiting respecs is going to make the game more enjoyable for most people. NOT ONE SINGLE ARGUMENT.
No, the only argument they have is that they want to control what OTHER people do in their game. Wow, just wow.