As I’ve settled into the end game I’ve found myself wanting to try a variety of builds for my character. This is currently an enormous pain.
Even more bothersome than the gold required to fully respec is the very manual process of removing paragon points and reassigning them (as well as skills but to a lesser degree).
I’ve thought through a couple of possible solutions for this and I think I’ve arrived at a reasonable middle ground that would vastly improve things:
Allow the player to save and name builds. The biggest issue I have with changing builds currently is that if I want to revert to my prior (still better!) build then I have to go through the same manual process again and pray that I kept information on the build up to date somewhere.
Keep charging gold to respec. This might be unexpected, but I don’t really mind paying gold to change my build. Even if I’m going back to a saved build: tell me “that’ll be 15,000,000g” and that’s okay.
Add a slightly new mechanic to make it easier to earn gold. I think this is the wildest suggestion I’m going to make, but hear me out: what if the local town paid you out for your remaining cinders at the end of a Helltide. This might require some balancing, but I think it could be relatively easy to balance and introduce an interesting mechanic. Players would have a new incentive to participate in the Helltide, and a new choice to make: do I want items, or gold?
I suspect I would pull in around 1000 cinders if I were farming them for the full hour in a Helltide (I’m sure Blizzard has more extensive data on the numbers across the player base, data ftw!). I feel like 5,000,000g to 10,000,000g (or 5,000g to 10,000g per cinder in WT4—less in lower tiers) would be a reasonable payout for a high level character trying to earn gold for a respec. I like this approach because the amount of gold earned would naturally scale with both the player’s ability to clear events & mobs as well as their desire to prioritize gold over items in the Helltide.
I really do hope that some changes to improve the player experience for switching builds—as well as giving the player more choice in how they earn gold—are on the horizon.
its not that bad ive done it quite a few times on my barb. its like maybe 2 mill gold which nothing when your rolling 4/5 mill and increasing on items.
the inability to easily change specs, AKA do testing and experimentation, is a major pitfall imo. it’s ok that it costs gold or something, but it is too difficult and time consuming laborious. we WANT to play your game more. do you know how many people i know that wanted to play more but didn’t before s1 because it’s too time consuming and pricey to respec?
It’s like 10-11m at 100. I think it’s too expensive. Although I do have quite a bit of gold, it’s still not true to what they said before release, they said you could try other specs, kinda see what you liked, they said it would be expensive enough that you couldn’t really do it several times a day, but inexpensive enough that you could explore other specs and see what you liked, and I don’t feel like that’s true at 10m a pop. I think you are basically locked in a few differen’t path’s when it comes to which way you wanna go with your spec. Maybe the gems from the season will give it more diversity, but I’m not gonna hold my breath. I also think it’s silly you have to unclick one paragon point at a time, just let me remove boards or click a point and remove everything after that.
Pain? I’m sitting only like 400M gold because I can’t find an item to reroll. Haven’t found a single helm, chest, legs, ring, or amulet to reroll since level 67. Using 14M or w/e to do a full respec is too much?
Clicking off of points takes just like 2 minutes max. Not a life ender.
Say whaaaaat? It’s 2.5 million gold just to refund all of my skills. Just calculated the cost to manually refund each of my 197 paragon points as well and I believe it’d be just shy of 5 million gold… where’d you get the hook up?
Yeah respec is too costly. It’s just there to chop fun out of normal people. It’s just there to please the math lords from path of exile that got their builds fully fleshed out before they even create their level 1 character, so the math lords can feel an advantage of sorts.
If there are 100,000 players playing this game and you’ve made them each spend 2 minutes to respec (I believe both of these numbers are drastic underestimates), and they each try a fresh new build 10 times within a month then they’ve spent nearly 4 years changing specs in that month. My son is 3 years old.
Obviously I’m being obtuse, but the larger point is that this is time unnecessarily wasted and it will continue to be wasted in perpetuity as long as the game is being played and it hasn’t changed.
I am also level 93. At the start of level 93 I believe you have 177 paragon points (miscalculated before) if you’ve completed your renown and each point appears to cost 24,414g to refund. That’s 4.3 million gold. I suppose like the skills you wouldn’t need to refund all the way down but probably at least into the starter board.
And now if I’m not going to use the “Refund All” button on my skills I’m going to look at a build somewhere and comparing it with the points I’ve already spent and go back and manually unspend points only where needed… but I might need to unspend some points higher in the tree before I can unspend them lower in the tree due to unlocks… and this is just the skills, which are about 100x easier than paragon, and the whole thing is going to take me 2 minutes?
And now I’ve tried the new build, and I don’t like it… and I want to switch back to my prior build…
Why would you want to spend this time respecing to a build you’ve already used before? Don’t you want to spend time with friends and loved ones?
This game will evolve. Skills will be buffed and nerfed, their behavior will be changed either directly or by adding new legendary powers, new skills will eventually be introduced. Builds that are great today will become lackluster in every way. Builds that are lackluster will become great. New builds will become possible. Not everyone wants to read a guide and be told what’s best. Some of us want to figure out what’s best for us.
Either free respeccing in general should be allowed or the game needs a target dummy area which allows free respeccing and experimentation while in it and you only pay when you choose to leave and only if your final build is different than your original.
Reading comprehension fail. I was not making a serious assertion that my son’s life was in anyway related (also he’s 3 years old). “I’m being obtuse” means “I’m being an idiot.”
No, the laughter was at your (perhaps intentionally?) missing the absurdity of the first paragraph of my post.
I very clearly said I was sorry for the loss of your son.
This conversation has been illuminating, but I think we each could’ve respec’d 30 times since it started by your calculations, so perhaps this has been the true waste of time?
Remember when you were 12 and you were curious? Did you want to taste your own? I tasted my friends and he tasted mine. Was crazy 10 years later when I was working he came up as a customer. Absolute insanity! Was in a different country even. The world works in weird ways. You shouldn’t laugh at the death of a child.
Exactly that. Every modern arpg allow respec easily, without spending too much. Right now :
Drops are abysmal AND it cost everything to actually change a trait to what you want (a single trait, come on, you didn’t need to go the exponential route for no reason).
It cost too much TIME and money to respec your paragon build. Especially since you also have a rune leveling to do. So it’s not like it’s easy even without a money cost.
Whatever happens, I think at the very bare minimum we players deserve to be able to right click on a pinnacle node (or a dedicated button) to clear that board. I don’t mind if I have to manually clear the boards in reverse order. But let me clear a whole board with one click.
It’s rough edges like this that make this game feel lika a beta, sometimes even an alpha version.
I think it costs too much gold to respec and the fact I can’t undo all the paragon nodes at once annoys me quite a bit. Honestly, I feel respecing should be free. People would be much more likely to try off meta builds if they didn’t have to constantly grind for resources just to have fun with a different build. This is why everyone plays the exact same meta build. Because it’s a huge pain in the rear to do otherwise.
