Maybe it’s because I’m not yet 100. But I find some of the arguments contradicting each other.
Supposedly, the cost (and lack of build sets to swap around) is to make choices matter and to put weight to the identity and existence of your character.
But then the game is designed around seasons, meaning your characters are not supposed to matter in 3 months. Eventually, if you keep playing the seasons, you are going to keep deleting all these character that supposedly have weight and supposedly made choices that matter.
IMO cost of respeccing and swapping around builds doesn’t make your choices matter. This is a common logical fallacy.
The cost of your choices can be expensive or cheap, but it doesn’t make your choices meaningful. If removing the costs makes those choices not matter, then they never mattered in the first place, because you are actually worried about the money you have to pay, not the actual changes those choices make.
For now I’m still exploring the skill trees on my own mostly, but as the game progresses, the moment I find myself needing to farm for money, will be the moment I stop experimenting and just blindly following guides.
Costs are not going to make me think over my choices. They make me stop making choices and jump directly to the “right” choices other people have made.
I can understand people who invest a lot of time into the game wanting their every step to have weight. But ultimately the devs will have to balance it around how big they want their playerbase to be. I just hope they don’t go all-out hardcore, because that will make the game tedious and unfun for me.
No, this is a twisting of the actual intent that is used by people who want to dismiss it. People can get invested in a character they play for a while no matter whether that character’s skills can change.
The purpose of respecs isn’t to get you attached to a character, it is to make you commit to a build and experience the game from the point of view of that build. That way when you lay another character of that class later, there are other bulls you didn’t already play and there’s therefore more left to discover. It keeps the game fresh by differentiating characters, not just classes.
Respec costs do absolutely nothing other than punish the player. It provides no benefit to the long term play experience. The only valid use of a goldsink in this game is with tweaking your gear at the blacksmith/occultist. There’s ZERO reason whatsoever to have them elsewhere in this game, as there is no player-to-player economy. There’s no inflation to control. There were no consequences in d3 from letting your gold pile get enormous.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it seems like minor inconveniences like this were slapped into the game last minute as a means of trying to stretch out what little content there is for as long as possible. The result is a stale, diluted experience that can’t really compare to any other games in the genre. They knew they were rushing an incomplete mess out the door. I imagine this is why gear sets were never implemented. As shortsighted and off the mark it was, it was probably a strategic (and rather anti-consumer) choice so players would have to make multiple characters of the class to reasonably try out other builds. Thankfully people are pissed off, and rightfully so. The current state of D4 is substantially worse than the rest of the games in the series.
Remember when “Blizzard quality” actually meant something?
Okay, that makes a lot more sense than the “your choices matter” and “your characters matter” argument.
In other words, it is there purely as an obstacle to make it more difficult for players from experiencing all the various builds on the same character, to extend the life of the game.
That makes much more sense.
And to that design, I can only say I’m very much disappointed.
I did a full paragon respec yesterday evening on my 100 barb, it took me around 8M only for this part (around 37k per node if I’m not wrong), plus around 75k per skill point.
This is an insane amount ! Besides we know that the rerolls on the equipment can also quickly go up to 8/9M par attempt… I won’t try to improve my gloves anymore as it costs me 14M per try now.
These costs are even more insane when Blizz is constantly nerfing (or buffing … in really rare occasions) meta and core skills for our builds. So we have to pay millions just to try something new without recreating another character.
If at least we could save our builds and switch from 1 of these preset to another one for free when in town (not when a dungeon is in progress of course), but no, there is absolutely no quality of life here
The idea is that you are ultimately meant to make a new char like how it was, but they give an option to more easily adjust your character along the way. Presets/loadouts are also completely against this idea.
Just saying. Would be interesting to see if they will rework the system completely or stick to their original design decisions.
I mean… this is just a lie? There is a player to player economy. I don’t know how many people are going to outright lie that there’s no economy when there is, it’s kind of hilarious to see
8Mil is nothing… you are talking about less than an hour of gameplay… it’s around ~1 hour of gameplay to do a full respec
The game was fun, on Adventure and Veteran, throughout the campaign. I was customizing and swapping builds multiple times a day to see what I liked and didn’t like.
Then the fun ended. It’s almost like no one at Blizzard play-tested the entire last 50 levels of the game “content”.
Someone high up just says “We need to look like we put more effort than we did over the last several years of development. Just increase the level cap to 100 and make a handful of the dungeons Nightmare. Oh, and throw in a bunch of useless Uniques, but don’t actually make any of the high level content drop them. We want them to be rare so people don’t focus on how bad they are when they actually drop. And don’t bother testing any of this content to make sure it is playable, enjoyable, or functional. That’s a waste of money.” - Blizzard manager, probably.
Noone tested the game in tier 4 I think, 30 levels without gear upgrades, the longest levels @ that.
Resistances not working.
Sorc falling of a cliff compared to other classes.
No board/full paragon respec option.
No gem tiers.
No endgame.
So are drop rates, experience levels, skill / paragon point limits, monster health bars, any inch of terrain without a mob on it, etc. The whole of game design is about creating challenges and costs that make it more rewarding to accomplish things.
They could just give you a character editor that let you make every possible build and item the way you can at maxroll’s D4 planner, then drop that character into a corridor filled with whatever monsters you want so you can slay them. It would get boring very quickly.
Respec costs are fine as is. So are enchant/rerolling costs. They are the only currency driving the trade market and keeping it going. As a matter of fact the gold cost to upgrade items at the blacksmith and jeweler needs to be significantly increased.
I agree 8M is not that much, but when the balance is not done yet and we want to do many tests, take different routes in the paragon, test a dungeon, change again the skills/paragons, test another dungeon, etc… this is not enjoyable at all.
Personnaly, I never follow any build (popular or not) you can find on the web, I want to discover and adjust to my playstyle. So this means respec a lot until I find a good base.
This time, it was 8M, but it costed me way more during the last 7 days.
And again, it is only a part of the costs, the equipment itself can costs you a lot to get the expected affixes.
I guess the successive massive nerfs didn’t help me to enjoy the game so I also didn’t grind dungeons for hours in order to farm gold so I can finally do an “theory crafting evening” with guildmates
