Yeah, shouldn’t have said no progress. And the rate of decay of the debuff hasn’t been defined, yet. That’s another point to hammer out. Instead of having a linear rate of decay, maybe have one that reaches 75% after an hour, and then falls off to take 4 hours to reach 100%?
That is… If it was purely time based. The 5hr figure came from your estimate of how long it should take on an XP based penalty system… Hmmm. Also, I just looked up how XP works (or worked, it’s based on an old press release version) and it seems like there’s ways to passively gain XP and increased XP gains when grouped. You’d have to account for that, too.
I think # of monster kills is the only way to equalize it between solo and partied players.
So, how about something like: ME = MM ( PL ÷ ML ) ^ 2 ,with a minimum of 1 at level 1
ME = # of monsters need to reach 100% efficiency
MM = max number of monsters needed at max level
PL = Player Level
ML = Max Level (may not always be 100)
The main variable being MM which is how many monsters you think it should take at max level to regain full efficiency.
This doesn’t account for the degree of a respec, though. Changing 1 skill/paragon point would incur a full penalty… Could be adjusted to be relative to the number of points refunded, but then you’d have to either replace the previous penalty if you did another respec before the debuff wore off, or add to it.
I’ve played both d2 and d3 and I never optimized builds around certain content.
The only game I’ve ever done that is wow where you are either a dps, heal or a tank. Than some content is more single target or more aoe. Others you need special utility skills.
D4 is not an mmorpg. From what I can tell in the open beta the skill tree is not really designed around micro optimizations. Its either these skills work together or you have the items to support the build.
Even the defensives which you can argue could be optimized for certain content probably will not be. For example on the sorceress, I took frost nova and teleport because they fit the style of the melee lightning build i was building. Nova was a freeze that worked perfectly in melee and teleport could be used as either an offensive cd to get in close and do damage or a defensive cd to escape. From playing all of the classes during open beta the observation on defensives seemed to be true for the other 4 classes.
I feel like the devs are doing this more for historical reasons because d2 was impossible to repsec and than eventually had limited respecing. I think what they are saying is more of an argument to make them feel like what they are doing is the right thing but doesn’t match up with previous diablos. Yes I know there were a few d3 builds that were buff bots and were not designed for individual play, but I think that was more the exception rather than the rule.
Also based on history, every time blizzard has argued with their customer base, 1 of 2 things have happened. 1. Blizzard reversed their decision quite quickly because people were furious about it. 2. Blizzard lost massive amounts of customers and than finally a light bulb went off after a year+ that we (blizzard) need to make a change.
New META builds are released pretty much weekly in PoE. Though that is more of a side effect of the game having so much depth and people accumulating the insane amount of currency required to create a new META build. Many of those builds are not very attainable by the majority of players though.
It will take years upon years to get anywhere near the complexity of PoE. And frankly D4 will have a lot more players to find builds if they succeed on making this game good. Don’t think there is a lot people won’t find in the first few days of the season even if they could hide the information right into the start of the season.
This is most likely true. The issue is how many players do we lose along the way? How much QOL do people that stick around lose along the way? It’s pure stubbornness on the part of the devs - “I’m right, you’re wrong, it’s our game” mentality.
Business wise, you’d think they are better off doing free/negligible cost respecs because it simply adds free replaybility over long term without them having to spend full development cost to develop a content to achieve the same. Not only that, it will scale better and better with introduction of new contents as new items, classes are introduced. Because new contents mean more possibility for builds therefore more play time which means better retention of player base, therefore more possibility of their new paid contents selling to wider base. All the while, it is a win for consumers because they get their freedom to play however they want. But no, devs decided to ‘stick to the principles’. It’s almost like they have not learned it the hard way before.
It is my “business” to give feedback for Blizzard to make a good game, which should be their business.
Yeah, definitely wouldnt need to be linear. Frontloading it somewhat makes sense.
Wouldnt that have the opposite effect? Likely making it much easier in groups.
But yeah, if XP based, stuff like the 10% XP bonus in groups would need to not count.
That basically should be how it is imo. Since changing even a fairly low amount of points can have the same effect as changing all points. Also see Diablo 3, where the difference between a push and a speed build can be one different skill, or passive (of course, no concept of points there, so not very comparable).
If there is a cost difference in respecs, you risk creating a huge efficiency difference between builds, based on how many points it takes to spec between different roles. Like, lets say build A has two sub-variants; A1 and A2, for single target and AoE. Respeccing between the two requires changing 20 points.
Then you have build B, equal in power with build An, and likewise with two variants, but here it takes 100 points changed to go from one to another.
If the respec cost is per point, we just created a weird meta where Build A is a better build than B, solely due to weird meta reasons in how the skill trees and paragon board layouts are.
Imo that should be avoided at all cost. As it might even risk lowering the build diversity.
I could maybe see a system where the cost starts lower, but increases rapidly. Like you can change up to 3 points with a “cost” of 10 minutes each for getting your buffs back. After that, each additional point adds 30 minutes, up to a max of those 5 hours. That way, you can make very small fixes to your build, at a low cost. At 12 points, you are at the full cost. This likely wouldnt do much harm, assuming no builds can fundamentally change with just a few points.
Yeah, the formula seems fine, albeit again I think XP is much better than monster kills, due to how some monsters will be much easier to kill, and come in higher numbers than others, likely creating too much of a gap between different strategies for farming the buffs back. Also any future game activities with super high monster density could cause problems.
As mentioned I would mostly like to see some build-in cap on how fast the buffs can be regained, to protect against future power creep.
Like; lets just for simplicity’s sake say that you need to kill 3000 monsters at lvl 100 to regain the full buff. Then make a cap where in the first hour you only get credit for 1000 kills, and same for each hour afterward. Allowing you to potentially get the full buff back in 3 hours, even if the current balance is expecting you to spend 5 hours on it. Then future power creep cant break that 3 hour minimum.
This can still work with a frontloaded buff regain of course, where the first 1000 kills might give back 50% of the missing buff, 2000 kills would be 75% back, and 3000 get it to 100%
Maybe; if the new cost is higher than your current cost, it replaces it. Otherwise it adds to it (but the addition cant surpass what the replaced new cost would be, to prevent any cases where you are worse off by having the cost added).
So, you do a full respec, incur a full debuff that might take ~~5 hours to get back. You play for 2.5 hours then. but realize you wanted to change 3 points in the paragon tree to get closer to one of the glyph nodes or whatever. In the example earlier, respeccing only 3 points might incur a 30 min expected cost, which is lower than your 2.5 hours, so it is added, resulting in 3 hours.
Or with kills, 3000 kills needed after the first respec, you kill 1500 monsters. Then change 3 points incurring a 100 monster kill increase each, so 1800 in total now.
While, if you changed 15 points, that cost would incur a full new reset to 3000 monsters needed.
That desire can emerge just fine within a singe day, as it can between days, though?
Someone playing 5 hours one day, and halfway through, they want to group up. Vs. someone playing 2.5 hours today, and 2.5 hours tomorrow, where they want to group up.
The days you split the playtime over still seems to not really matter.
The character is sticking to a build, if you want to be pedantic about it
Not that you should need to change character. You can simply pay the “cost” and respec after a while if you want to try something new.
It can easily be both at thw same time. As in, the cost can be unnoticeable an issue if you respec infrequently. While preventing respecs for someone who wanted to respec every 10 minutes.
It’s not good business nor does it make good games when devs listen to one subset or group of players that want to dictate to other players how they should play and what they should do based on variables that is none of their business and does not affect them.
If someone switches up their build to experiment or try something and switches back 19 mins later for w/e reason that has zero impact on anyone else…too many busybodies here with their noses where it doesn’t belong.
Frankly this smells of lame mmo mechanics where they want to force people to have more characters and/or waste more time in game so the company can spout/boast metrics and is not at all to do with gameplay or making the game “fun”.
Agreed. Any cost on respec, in a season game like this where no one is going to level multiple of a specific class, is extremely punishing when basically builds are 100% driven by gear, not spec.
More nonsense copium on your part here, this is not a true mmo and someone changing their build has zero impact on others.
Unless they count whiners crying about what builds other people are using and trying to equate them switching to a say a dungeon or overworld build impacting them somehow or those same said whiners wanting people to hopefully party up with them to run something when they are stuck in a poor suboptimal build for said content etc etc ad nauseam.
Nor does “fairness” come into play, its not a moba etc where people are competing against each other.
There is a positive in a way if respecing is being able to do at anytime and anywhere, you could do it by having a slight downside to it(but gold or resource cost isn’t it). But that’s pretty the only one I could ever think of. This could ofc be that you can only respec in town and that’s it everything solved.
Who cares whether it is or isn’t?
Some people will always pay as optimal as possible. Others won’t. There is no good reason to limit other people as collateral for trying to impose your will on the hyper-optimizers …
… especially since the suggestion can be circumvented by the hyper-optimizers via character change leaving you with just the collateral damage to other playstyles.
Your business as far as I can see it has been:
voice that you have zero faith in Blizzard
despite that, post 1178 times (as of this post)
be dishonest at times
advocate for a long chain of restrictions, each depending on the next for it to “work”, with the goal being to strongly impose your view of “how it should be played”
This is more of that overly abstract bull from you. There is a large difference in moving around 1 point versus 50 points.
It’s like watching a liberal arts major discuss engineering; tiresome.
Unsurprisingly, what you have highlighted here is another issue caused by your desired “fix” to a “problem”. Now an aspect of how good/bad a build is can potentially be how cheap/easy it is to swap to another build as opposed to how effective/fun it is.
./golfclap
You seem to think people’s days are the same. As if they and the people they play with don’t have other responsibilities that might result in them jumping on/off in a single day or not at all on some days versus others.
The character is stuck in a build, thus forcing the player to be stuck in that build when playing that character. “Cute”, but the character isn’t an actual actor.
Yes, they can change characters, but they could also have just respec’d to use all the other equipment they saved up instead of having to waste currency and/or a character slot to play another spec.
His point, which was obviously lost on you, was to focus on the players that are focused on their own fun … not focus on the players trying to control how others have fun.
No kidding … we’ve been over this. It doesn’t affect you. It only affects the person who chose to respec or not. So let them have that choice and stop trying to thumb the scale in the direction you’d have personally preferred it went. Let the decision be purely based on what would have them enjoying the game and thus sticking around and even possibly tossing some money if they are happy enough to want to keep the game going.
The hyper-optimizers? Yep. If it’s more efficient to do that, they will.
Meanwhile, people who weren’t ever going to do the “offensive” things you don’t like people doing with free respecs will be the ones actually impeded by it.
Since you might be grouped up with someone who respecs, obviously, their respec might affect you. That is simply a fact.
It is however a game. The player is competing against the the game.
Fairness, balance, intended difficulty and experience etc. are always super important.
Eh, I am the one arguing that they are NOT the same, pointing out that what matters is hours played and not which days you happen to play. And yes, specifically mentioning how people might jump in and out of groups within a day as an example of this.
Do you even read what you respond to before going out on a tangent.
Yes. Which again, is the entire design goal of the respec restriction.
You then showed up with “players can just play different characters!”. Which is certainly true. Just not colliding with the idea of the respec cost restriction the respecs on that character.
And, since it is a gold cost, a shared currency, also restriction the respeccing of other characters.
Yeah, it is totally fine that he wants Blizzard to make the game for him. While I am saying they should focus on the other “group”. I was just pointing out that Blizzard likely should try to please a subset of players, as in, the opposite of what he said (even if I agree it likely was not what he meant). Some people here just likes to pretend that they speaking on behalf of what some imaginary average player wants, instead of what they themselves want. Which is always a bit silly.
At least it especially affects the person who respecs, yes. We can definitely agree on that.
But no, that does not mean the game should just let you do whatever you think you prefer. The game should restrict and limit you, to create the game experience that was intended.
