I’m with @stusser on this one, if I’m stuck with early game choices that affect my late game character negatively it will turn me off of the game. I struggle with this on Path Of Exile. Why does it matter to anyone else how I want to play my game? Me being able to easily respec points to fix bad choices I may have made doesn’t affect how you play your game.
Maybe. I can’t tell you what your preferences are, but maybe you would find that being able to respec 10 points is all you need to do the experimentation you like to do. After all, enabling a skill to play with it only requires moving 1 point. Or maybe you would find that starting new characters in this game is a lot more fun than doing it in D3 because you actually get to make meaningful choices as you level and leveling up is the fun part of the game. Maybe you’ll find that the total cost to shift your build (in terms of time spent farming) is exactly the same as in D3, you just save some gold as you farm gear, then spend it on shifting the skills when you’re ready.
For me, if I have a build that is working well, it will likely have a ton of items that have been carefully selected to support it. Changing to a significantly different build will always feel worse, because the skills won’t play well with the gear until I’ve spent a long time committing myself to farming that gear. In comparison, starting a new character with a new approach to gearing up doesn’t present a great experience in D3 because I end up using the same skills as I level and only gradually shift into the targeted build once I’ve gotten enough of the items and unlocked the skills/runes/passives to make it work.
In D4, the leveling-up experience would be different because there would be an incentive to put points in the targeted skills right away, because you get access to more skills earlier, and because you have a bit more determinism in the gear hunt. Those first two points are enabled by adding friction to respecs, and I suspect that even the gear hunt is able to be more deterministic because characters are more unique without gear.
Maybe all those things are true, and if so, wunderbar! I’ve only played to level 20, and I can tell you this much, if that was in the live game and I had to start over to respec like in Diablo 2-- even just to level 20-- I would stop playing the game. Probably forever.
This is why it’s a piecemeal respec cost. You can fix those bad early choices (or late choices) for low cost, it’s just a high cost to completely re-work your build. Also, the costs go up as you level (not as you respec), so you can play around all you want at early levels if you aren’t sure what you want to be yet.
Yes, I think this is where the divide is. Every gamer is different and looking for different things, but it’s why D3’s rune system didn’t really work for me. I tend to use analogies for strategy games because it’s another genre where you make choices on which direction to go (what to build, what to research, who to ally, etc.) and it fundamentally undermines the enjoyment of the game (for me) if you can just switch tracks whenever you want. Why do I have to choose whether to research Bronze Working or Writing? What if I choose Writing and then I get a war declared on me and I need better military? That’s the interesting part! If I can just convert my libraries into axemen and back again as needed, then it’s not an Interesting Decision (as Sid Meier would put it) anymore.
In a ARPG, maybe I want to make a mage built around Meteor. And Meteor is awesome! It blows up hordes of guys, it’s great! But oh no! I run into an area or a boss that moves so quickly that Meteor is at a disadvantage, so now I’m going to have to figure things out. Maybe I rely on other abilities. Maybe I have to struggle through the fight and get better at avoiding damage since I’m not applying it myself as effectively anymore. Maybe it’s time to diversify my build a bit and look into other abilities that I’ve been neglecting. And maybe doing so leads me to new ideas for a build I want to try, which is an excuse to either work for resources to respec my guy or make a new character and enjoy the game’s content all over again in a different way.
That’s just me, I don’t think there’s really a right/wrong way to do it but for what hooks me in these games, I really need to have interesting decisions to make along the way. And if I can just go back and redo all those decisions any time I want, they’re not interesting anymore. They’ve been reduced to UI clicks as I turn myself into a Chain Lightning build for the battle or whatever.
I loved the D3 skill/rune system. Every aspect of its mechanical design was downright spectacular.
Implementation, not so much. Most runes were useless even in D3 1.0, and post-expansion only runes supported by legendaries and set bonuses were competitive. But the mechanical design, that was great.
From what I could tell from the beta, this shouldn’t be the case. You’ll be able to change your early game choices really easily in the late game. What we’re discussing is after you did that, you decided to once again respec again to make a completely different type of character.
We’ll see. I bet you respec will be pretty easy going for most use cases. In Grim Dawn, for instance, they have the same system where in theory the more you undo previous choices, the more expensive it’s supposed to get, but in practice I’ve never been wanting to respec something and been stopped because I didn’t have enough gold.
My biggest complaint was that it meant you didn’t have access to all the skills until level 60, and you never had to actually commit to any choices with it. It was more like unlocking cards in Marvel Snap than like leveling up a character.
The first part I accepted because you leveled pretty quick. The second part I saw as a huge plus.
This actually isn’t how it was working in the beta, though I’m not sure if it changes at higher levels. In the beta, the cost was a fixed cost based on your level, not a scaling cost based on the number of times you respecced.
Did you play seasons at all? Especially in a game with seasons that reset your character/economy, I think anything that gives leveling up more variety and more meaningful choices is a huge benefit. Re-unlocking my cards in Snap in the same order each season would be extremely dull.
It’s a 100 hours to reach max level, and your gear is entirely RNG. So if lots of legendary gear drops which just isn’t what you specced, you’re just gimped.
The idea that you make “interesting choices” gets less interesting when it becomes a 100 hour max levelling time investment into an RNG-dependent loot drop which just keeps not rolling your way.
Is that Diablo 4 that you’re describing? I don’t think D4 is going to work for me either, for various reasons. I bounced off the beta really hard, but I’ll give it another go at 1.0.
What you’re describing just sounds like a badly designed game, not an indictment of having build choices matter, IMO.
I did two or three of them, a couple weeks in so people powerleveled me to 70 in like 10 minutes. They were aight, nothing particularly interesting.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear - yes it’s Diablo 4, and based on what I can tell from the loot drops, like Diablo 3, the legendaries are very specific to which skill they buff. So if respecs become expensive, there are going to be a lot of rather useless legendaries. Given that the developers have ballparked 100 hours to max character levels, it would be rather crazy to level up the same class again for that amount of time just to be able to use all the gear or sets you find.
Not necessarily. I don’t know if he’s describing D4, but I’d say the description fits Diablo 2 pretty well. The whole game was leveling up your character through Normal, then Nightmare, then Hell difficulty, and it took over 100 hours to do so, and you could indeed get unlucky with equipment. But I wouldn’t agree that D2 was a badly designed game. But it was one where you were expected to have multiple characters going and some characters would get amazing items for other characters of yours.
Having experienced D2 and it’s variable loot drops, I never felt totally gimped if I didn’t have the right legendary (edit: sorry, I mean Unique, but you get my meaning). It’s the idea that in order to make your character work you need specific legendaries combined with 100 hours to reach L100 that seems like its poorly designed to me, at least on paper.
I was often lusting after a particular unique in D2, but I had fun with my characters and they could farm stuff in Hell without having to have specific ones.
I’d have to wait to experience it myself, but that doesn’t sound great. If it’s as you say and Legendaries are tied to specific abilities and they’re a critical part to having a character work, it seems like there does need to be a way to adjust on the fly to the legendaries you do find. Particularly on a first character.
God, that’s amazing. I will say this for Diablo 3 after the re-design: it really is amazingly friendly and respectful of the player’s time. It really is possible to play D3 for a very short amount of time and to experience all possible classes and their variants. I personally happen to really like Diablo 2 so I didn’t mind the literal thousands of hours I put into it, but I have to give D3 props for being easy to pop in and out of and to finish really fast and experience the whole game in a short amount of time. It’s not something I wanted out of a Diablo game, but with any other game, it’s something I greatly desire, usually.
The way D2 does it these days is a pretty nice middle ground, imo: You get one respec for free after completing the first quest of each difficulty. After that you have to farm act end bosses in Hell for a chance at a token. Cube up the 4 tokens for a respec.
You can argue about the number of free respecs or the drop rate on the tokens, sure. Given the fact that end game builds in D2 can have major skill variance vs viable leveling builds I like that you get a few do overs and then have to work for more.