Give everyone 1 or 2 passive skill tree RESETS

"

konfeta wrote:

That is an often ignored point.

Respecs are not just wanted to "LOL TRY COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BUILD." They are also wanted to compare and contrast the practical application of taking 10 points out of let's say stun passives into life leach passives, etc. To compare +elemental damage passives with crit damage passives for DPS. Etc.

These kind of adjustments make it infinitely easier to actually test balance and don't require rerolling a character just to see the variability inherent in switching a few passive nodes while retaining the same build.

I don't understand how you seem to think that moving around skill points on a compete and equiped character offers any sort of quality feed back.

To give you an example; if I built a Marauder with balanced skill allocation between HP/Armour/Damage I would, hopefully, have a well rounded character. If for whatever reason I got a chance to respec him, and I put all my points into weapon damage I might create a godly damage hose because my high level gear would cover up the lack of HP passives.

I could then tell the developers how 'broken' dps Marauders are. However it would totally ignore how much harder/weaker the character would be at low and mid levels, if leveled normally, from lack of HP or other passives.

Also as an aside you have the privilege of playing this game before almost everyone else and you can't take 5-6 hours of time to put a level 40-45 character together from scratch?

"

Wargamer08 wrote:

I don't understand how you seem to think that moving around skill points on a compete and equiped character offers any sort of quality feed back.

To give you an example; if I built a Marauder with balanced skill allocation between HP/Armour/Damage I would, hopefully, have a well rounded character. If for whatever reason I got a chance to respec him, and I put all my points into weapon damage I might create a godly damage hose because my high level gear would cover up the lack of HP passives.

I could then tell the developers how 'broken' dps Marauders are. However it would totally ignore how much harder/weaker the character would be at low and mid levels, if leveled normally, from lack of HP or other passives.

great example! while there are some legit things we could give better feedback on with respeccs, i think they will provide more false feedback than good.

"

this sounds like you are just asking for a way to test and maximize builds.

This sounds almost like exactly what I said. You know, to test the balance of extreme optimization cases.

"

Give them respecs and they'll just min/max and continue on their ladder grind, making almost no difference at all in the amount of feedback-producing testing.

It's almost as if GGG is shooting themselves in the foot with no-wipes-cause-we-are-nice and letting people grind forever stance.

People won't reroll with respecs? How is that at all different with people not rerolling because they are just farming items and levels? You can't take half-assed measures on this and use them as an excuse. You either force people to reroll, or you don't and watch people accumulate power. Whenever levels, item farming, or respecs - people will do it, it's essentially the primary, distinguishing feature of this genre. And when it comes to finally getting bored and rerolling, when all the dedicated players are eventually coaxed into rerolls, it will happen with massive amounts of twinking.

Ooops.

"

I don't understand how you seem to think that moving around skill points on a compete and equiped character offers any sort of quality feed back.

Horrible example, for a wide variety of reasons.

1. Balance at end-game and balance at leveling game are completely different things. Just because a "DPS MARAUDER BUILD SUCKS WHEN LEVELING" doesn't mean that it should be able to trivially make a mockery of Chaos or the like.

2. Twinking, party play, random, way-above-average drops skew much of the feedback anyway. Even simply switching up skill gems, trading can do so. There are many ways to take the idea of "this build sucks while leveling" and make it largely irrelevant. And passives are largely terrible at defining builds until you have a ton of them.

3. They are adding respec via currency item. So, yeah, your example is fairly humorous because you can have an awesome marauder while leveling and then transform it into an awesome DPS marauder at high level.

4. Yes, I can spend 4-6 hours to test every minor build permuation. Alternatively, with respecs, I could spend a fraction of the time and go through 10, 20, 30 variations on a build to identify if its broken, and then reverse engineer a leveling path that will work even with a completely untwinked character.

That's 50, 100, 150 hours saved. Ton of time freed up to level up completely different builds the natural, rerolling way. Much better for my sanity as well - instead of playing 10 almost-identical marauders, I can play 3 completely different marauders, 3 completely different witches, and 4 completely different rangers.

6. Just to reiterate an example in #2 - builds are highly mutable while leveling. Gear and skill gem selections are already essentially "respecs" type of a build component. A DPS marauder can use tanky gear/skills and then just transform himself into a DPS Marauder come late game.

In practice, while leveling, builds will be a LOT more similar between each other and easier to balance than in end-game. Why should the brunt of my time be wasted on utterly pointless grind of remaking the same character ad nauseum if I want to explicitly test end-game stuff?

7. And, ultimately, every single player will not instantly convert into a devout, "i refuse to reroll" min-maxer. There are plenty of people not in Chaos. As far as I am aware, the people who spend their time in end-game style situations are almost always the minority in RPG games. There will still be masses of feedback from the leveling game.

This point, I think, is the most relevant:

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konfeta wrote:

Why should the brunt of my time be wasted on utterly pointless grind of remaking the same character ad nauseum if I want to explicitly test end-game stuff?

Why would you grind (ad nauseum) above the current content we have, especially when it's not the end-game that we will have at release? What's the point in devoting all of your time to a temporary end-game state? Levels 55-70 will be a bump in the road to 100 once we get Act 3, so what's the point in focusing the brunt of your time on it? That's terribly illogical and short-sighted. Save the end-game testing for the actual end-game, and use the time we have now to test other stuff. That's far more logical than trying to provide balance feedback that will be completely negated by Act 3.

"

konfeta wrote:

3. They are adding respec via currency item. So, yeah, your example is fairly humorous because you can have an awesome marauder while leveling and then transform it into an awesome DPS marauder at high level.

The first part is true, but you won't have enough respec points or orbs to drastically change your build. You'll get a few points per difficulty at the most, and the orbs will most likely be some of the rarest in the game. So no, you won't be able to drastically change your base build.

Why do people think this is a bad thing? This lets people try every build, thus providing more feedback. Hell, there's no reason to limit the number of times someone could change their passive skill tree. This gives people the ability to test different builds out at different points in the game.

"

Wargamer08 wrote:

"

konfeta wrote:

That is an often ignored point.

Respecs are not just wanted to "LOL TRY COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BUILD." They are also wanted to compare and contrast the practical application of taking 10 points out of let's say stun passives into life leach passives, etc. To compare +elemental damage passives with crit damage passives for DPS. Etc.

These kind of adjustments make it infinitely easier to actually test balance and don't require rerolling a character just to see the variability inherent in switching a few passive nodes while retaining the same build.

I don't understand how you seem to think that moving around skill points on a compete and equiped character offers any sort of quality feed back.

To give you an example; if I built a Marauder with balanced skill allocation between HP/Armour/Damage I would, hopefully, have a well rounded character. If for whatever reason I got a chance to respec him, and I put all my points into weapon damage I might create a godly damage hose because my high level gear would cover up the lack of HP passives.

I could then tell the developers how 'broken' dps Marauders are. However it would totally ignore how much harder/weaker the character would be at low and mid levels, if leveled normally, from lack of HP or other passives.

Also as an aside you have the privilege of playing this game before almost everyone else and you can't take 5-6 hours of time to put a level 40-45 character together from scratch?

So because that person maxed their char out doesn't mean that, for the sake of testing (seeing as this is a BETA), they will never touch it again. I know a lot of people here would try out different builds seeing which one makes a more efficient fighter.

"

Why would you grind (ad nauseum) above the current content we have, especially when it's not the end-game that we will have at release? What's the point in devoting all of your time to a temporary end-game state?

By that logic, why test the game at all? It's obvious the real game will have a wider variety of enemies, improved level design and pacing, moar skill gems, and god knows what else.

Just because the current end-game is not representative of what we will have towards the end, does not mean we cannot identify design flaws, find obvious mechanical imbalance signs, and amass useful data that allows GGG to have some idea as to what might or might not work in end-game design.

Chaos might not be the final end-game solution, but it can still be one of them, and even if not that, it is still a tool to test various end-game design concepts. Like what happens with drop rates, what kind of area shapes players prefer to run (ledge), what kind of challenges you need to put in, how much farm you expect players to do in order to transition into the end-game, etc.

"

The first part is true, but you won't have enough respec points or orbs to drastically change your build. You'll get a few points per difficulty at the most, and the orbs will most likely be some of the rarest in the game. So no, you won't be able to drastically change your base build.

You could have at least pretended that was part of a bigger message. You don't need a full respec to transform a DPS Marauder-Pretending-To-Be-Tanky via early skill choice, gear, and a few splashes into defensive passives into a full DPS Marauder.

"

konfeta wrote:

By that logic, why test the game at all? It's obvious the real game will have a wider variety of enemies, improved level design and pacing, moar skill gems, and god knows what else.

You're just reaching for an argument that's not there.

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konfeta wrote:

You could have at least pretended that was part of a bigger message. You don't need a full respec to transform a DPS Marauder-Pretending-To-Be-Tanky via early skill choice, gear, and a few splashes into defensive passives into a full DPS Marauder.

Good luck accomplishing that by removing the ends of paths along the tree. Sure, it would be easy if you could change nodes in the middle of your paths, but you can't.

"

You're just reaching for an argument that's not there.

Seriously?

Alright, we are done here. If you'd rather parrot and deny instead of argue, we are most definitely done here.

there is no "end game", there is just a bunch of people who leveled way to high and continue to do so.. for no real reason.

The state of your character at high levels is pointless and irrelevant to balancing issues, because the game isn't intended to be played at those levels yet. so asking for respecs, to try out "end game" builds, isn't anything that needs to be implemented.

Not saying that respec's shouldn't be offered, on a very limited basis, but the "end game build" argument is just moot.