Except that this is exactly how most groups do it and is actually a cool experience that you are missing if you swap some skills around every time you drop into a pickup group.
Or, if you do play with PUGs, you can just as easily deal with the fact that your builds are not perfectly complementary. That’s not harming your fun at all.
It is fun to go out and kill monsters to get loot. It is painful to have to kill many monsters with no idea of when / if you will get the item you want.
That pain is not there to deter me from wanting rare items, it is there to make those items more rewarding to find.
You are also giving completely abstract examples of how this harms you. “What if i need to swap skills to play multiplayer?” “What if I find an item I want to swap skills for?” “What if I get bored and want a new experience?”
Most of these examples could very easily involve swapping maybe 20-30 skill points at the really high end. That’s a far cry from swapping the 280 skill/paragon points you have at max level. So even if swapping 200 points takes so much gold you could just make a new level 70 in the time it takes (while having fun doing so), 1/10 that much time could easily be 5 hours or less. 5 hours of the gold you are already collecting during regular gameplay.
Level 100 rares seemed to be roughly 40k and supposedly the cap for a full respec is 666M. Hence you’d have to loot quite a few rares to respec once it caps out.
I mean the use of the word “pain” was literally quoted directly from the dev - it shows their intention – that being, to cause pain if people want to respec.
I can see how this game is gonna go for me - play a season, be frustrated with the pain the devs want to inflict on me for wanting to try new things…and then hang it up. It’s a shame because I’m literally looking forward to this game…more than any other game in history.
Was this detailed somewhere? I thought we were seeing respec costs of about 40k/point at level 100 (which would cap out around 12M for a full respec). 666M would mean it costs more than 1M per point, which seems unlikely, though it would mean you have to do a little more than just sell 20 or so inventories-full of trash to fully respec.
You forgot to include ‘supposedly’. A.k.a, it’s not yet confirmed
Yep, the only reason why I kept playing TESO was people. Without that community with me these days because they all moved on, I am feeling less and less inclined to play the game because PvP is a repetitive affair there with PvE just same mechanic, different visual effects with story getting worse and worse. It wasn’t any game mechanics that held me in TESO, it was the community. Content also is very limited in terms of playerbase retaining because eventually, you are basically reskinning same bosses mechanics/visual effects and stories sprinkled with totally-not-similar-item-but-more-OP items. No game mechanics will keep me playing a game unless it’s really something that cannot be had outside of that specific game. And D4 isn’t that game.
There are, at least according to Rhykker, who had been playing end game stuffs, golds were somewhat easy to come by but clearly not enough for full respec. However, keep in mind that this was done with preset builds that came with inventory full of nightmare dungeon sigils and presumably with plentiful gold + potentially upped drop rates for stuffs.
Unless it increased since beta, which they said everything was final, it was only costing around 2M for a full respec. Now if you kept doing that I could see it reaching 666M, but again, there is no need for constant build swapping for things like in D3. The game is just not designed that way. I know there are people that feel they need to do it for that extra 1% for PvP, but it is totally unnecessary.
“Most groups” where? What data are you looking at? Are you still talking aRPGs or now MMOs and/or some other genres?
Again, you’re incorrectly applying “pain”.
You’re also bastardizing a scenario that’s actually “carrot” instead of “stick” to try to make it a scenario to discuss “pain”.
That rare item is the carrot. You want the carrot. So it is promoting your behavior to chase after it.
Well here are some concrete ones I’ve mentioned multiple times
A speedy Rogue build playing with a slow as molasses Necromancer build …
A thorn Barbarian playing with a Minion build (Necromancer or Druid)
Shout Barbarians playing together.
Necromancers playing together with duplication of curses.
As for as what if I swap skills because of an item drop … do we need to go into each actual skill-specific affix to discuss this one? It seems concrete enough as is.
As far as getting bored and wanting some play variety … how exactly would you make that “less abstract” ? It’s something that happens in games to players. They get bored. Variety in the content helps prevent that. One way to have that variety is different ways to play the content. One of those ways to have different ways is different builds if not different classes entirely.
I’m amused you tried to start talking about those things being “too abstract”. I assume due to me saying the claims of “free respecs allowing builds to have no weaknesses because you just pick the build that doesn’t for that scenario” were too abstract and I wanted someone to actually list concrete builds and scenarios where this takes place …
… I’m still waiting for someone to provide concrete builds and scenarios where this occurs.
That new build is the carrot. You want the carrot. So it is promoting your behavior to chase after it.
And again, rather than trivializing group play by having someone swap to optimize every group, you can play the game in a way that that balances this. Coordinate with your friends so that your builds work well together. If you play with multiple groups regularly, then either have characters for each or choose builds that don’t have these weaknesses. If you aren’t constantly playing at max level, then you will also want to be about the same level / gear as your friends to keep it fun. Multiple characters is how this is done in D2, rather than just powerleveling everyone to
max then swapping your character concept around constantly.
You do know that you can swap skills around in D4, right? So if that legendary makes frozen orb better than chain lightning, you can just respec a few points and try it out? So yeah, if you want to claim that it will require respeccing 100s of points, it is worth having a concrete scenario to show that.
Getting bored isn’t a reason to swap skills and just keep doing what you’ve been doing, it’s a reason to make a new build. I know to you think that just means swapping some skills around, but I mean actually make a build. As in create a character that can play that build up through the difficulty levels.
The devs have made it very clear - that you are in fact wrong. It’s not a “carrot” that we are chasing. The high cost on respecs is their intended form of punishment for us wanting to respec. This is literally out of their own mouths that the high respec costs are their intended way of making us feel pain by wanting to play their game our way.
Anyone who’s saying that respecing will be easy or cheap - clearly has reading comprehension issues. And any person at Blizzard that is going along with this - doesn’t get the modern gaming community. They will bleed players until they reverse this draconian and arbitrarily punishing way of thinking.
I wonder if a good way to keep the positive features of respecs but give a bit more freedom to eternal players would be to put characters of the same class into the same character slot in eternal and give you an armory-like in-game interface that let you swap to any character with access to your current world tier. So each character still has a unique identity and skill set and has to be leveled up, but doing that leveling gives you a new option you can easily swap to in-game.
If they really need to sell character slots, they could always limit you to 5 armory slots per class and 5 seasonal slots (that don’t stack), then sell additional armory or seasonal slots. Or they could just give enough slots that it doesn’t interfere with normal play (like open up a new tab with equally-many slots every 2 or 4 seasons) and rely on the extra desire for different cosmetics across your different characters to fund things.
That is not at all what they said. They said they wanted the choice to change your character to have a tradeoff. “Painful” is a term used to describe a choice where getting a thing you want means giving up another thing that you also want. The intended gameplay is that if you want to play a very different build, you should make a new character. The game is designed around making it fun to level up new characters. They have also included a respec feature that allows people to relax about how they spend points, because there is a mechanism to correct mistakes without making it so that there’s never a reason to level a class more than once.
The reason that the choice is painful is not because it is punishing you for wanting a different build, it’s because it is asking you to commit to a build. If you want to switch rather than making a new character, you can, but you are giving up your old build to do so.
Except they put a stick in the way in the form of a “painful” cost to deter me from swapping to that new build.
So, in a game where they are stating 100+ hours to get max level, seasons are only 3 months, and my friends and I are all around 40 will full-time jobs, spouses, kids, and other responsibilities so we aren’t just no-life-ing games any more …
… we should just create multiple characters
… and/or restrict the builds that we do use
… because there needs to be “pain” for respec-ing to gain what exactly?
Oh, you mean like when I said the quote below?
… I guess I do know that you can swap skills around
Item acquisition scenario where it will cost a good bit more would be swapping from Shadow Damage Minion Necromancer to Bone Damage Necromancer w/o Minions as you swap from using legendaries with +Minion buffs to those that buff Bone Spear, Bone Prison, etc.
swap out the minion bonus passives
maybe swap out the corpse gen passives … depending on taste w.r.t. corpse explosion usage
maybe swap in corpse explosion if didn’t already have
or change from shadow damage DoT variant to physical
swap out basic from decompose/reap to bone splinters
swap out blight for bone spear
swap in bone prison
And so on. There’s quite a bit to change if you’re going from Shadow Damage to Physical Damage. Even more if going from Shadow Damage Minion to Bone Damage w/o Minions.
Multiplayer scenario where it will cost a good bit more would be a Thorn build for Barbarian.
If you want a specific build … check out the d4builds .gg (remove the space before .gg) which has an example Thorns Bleed Barbarian build.
Swap out the Thorns passives
Swap out the Challenging Shout Thorns from Strategic pick … or the skill completely
If swapping out the Shout, swap out the Shout passives
Personally, I didn’t think Death Blow as good in multiplayer as in singleplayer due to enemies having more health preventing you from as easily constantly refreshing the ability to keep up Berserk … so I’d swap it out as well.
No, to me, a build isn’t just swapping skills …
figure out a build you want to play
acquire the gear for that build
upgrade it
reroll as needed
apply aspects as needed
respec your skills and paragon board for that build
None of that needs me to have to go use one of my limited character slots and back to being level 1.
This concept had been suggested before in a slightly different way … it was simply spec slots … so you didn’t have to re-level the same class multiple times.
You would have something like 5 “builds”.
You obviously start with 1 but could buy additional “build slots”.
You would have to pay the respec cost to respec any given build
but you could swap between builds at no cost.
I think that would be a nice compromise.
It hits up most of the scenarios that I think the friction of “painful” costs cause.
swapping for multiplayer? buy 1+ build slots for your multiplayer build(s)
swapping for variety of play? buy 1+ build slots to swap between the different build(s)
Respec still has a cost to prevent “constant respec-ing”
How can we commit to a build when we don’t know the efficacy of the talents or the interactions, or the Unique - or the Legendaries we will be getting, or in what order?
The cost is just time spent killing monsters and getting loot. Same as for finding legendaries and uniques.
Making new characters with your friends is fun. If you aren’t no lifing then you don’t really have a crunch on active character slots and you probably don’t have time to play regularly with multiple groups. Make two characters. Play them solo when you want, choose the best one to complement the group you’re in. This solves 99% of the issues you’re talking about. Sure, if you want a thorns barb and your friend wants a minion necro you’ll have to swap to alts when you play together. Literally the only thing you are “restricted” from in this scenario is if you only ever wanted to play a Barb, free respecs could make it a little easier to have the two builds you want. Since you still have to farm gear for them, and since farming good gear takes way longer than leveling, even here the difference is very small.
And the gain is that it encourages people to experience the fun thing of making a new character and getting that new character through the challenges of beating veteran and nightmare. So, just as with making legendaries or uniques rarer makes them fun carrots to strive for, making character builds rarer makes them fun carrots to strive for. Even for us 40-something dads who can’t realistically hope to catch them all.
This is not an item acquisition scenario, it is a complete build change scenario. If you were already super-deep on shadow damage minions, what item might you find that would cause you to want to swap to bone damage and also drop the minions?
You listed about 7 skill points of swapping, increasing to maybe 20 if you really wanted to optimize. 20 will likely cost enough gold that you don’t want to do it every day, but I suspect you would earn that gold in a relatively small time. Concrete scenarios really require situations where the paragon board skills also have to shift. So if you are level 80+ and shifting away from a main damage skill that you have invested in on your paragon board, that will be harder. But of course, you’d also need to level new glyphs and find new items to make it work, yet for some reason that cost is ok with you but the fun of leveling a new character alongside the people you want to play with is a punishment.
“But I just want to be able to play with my friends without having to invest a bunch of time first.”
First of all, you can play with your friends without changing your build. You don’t need optimally complementary builds.
Second, swapping skills means swapping a bunch of other character power that will also take investment. So spending extra time to create the build that you will play with friends can’t be the issue. The issue seems to be that you think it will be more fun to grind up items with your highest level character than it will be to create a new character. In D3 that might have been true. I really hope it is not true in D4. The developers seem to want that too.
Good news! You don’t have to commit to a build until you have had tons of time to play around with the skills and even the first paragon board, and even once you get deep into paragon the cost of re-gearing is likely to be higher than the cost of respeccing. But, you won’t be able to constantly swap back and forth without farming a lot of gold to afford it. If you end up in a build you don’t like, though, the choice to rework it is available. You just have to commit to the change.
Also, here is the quote:
Pain = difficult choice with a real tradeoff, not punishment.
I mean - not sure what dictionary you use, but your definition does not supersede any actual definition just because it fits your narrative.
Pain: to make suffer or cause distress to
Their choice (their words, not mine) that the respeccing should have pain associated with it - is their choice, and it is a form of their punishment on us for wanting to respec.
Punishment: the penalty inflicted
We’ll restate the following sentence using the official definitions.
Respec costs will cause the user pain as a form of punishment.
Respec costs will cause the user to suffer or undergo distress as a penalty inflicted.
I don’t mean to argue semantics - and it shouldn’t come to this. I will not explain the English language to anyone else. We can all google our own words. But please stop re-writing the definition of words to fit your agenda.
