Skill idea: "unlocking" skills

One rather interesting discussion in games like this that I've seen is the idea of skill and build permanence. Essentially, the idea that your choices for building your character are permanent, and can't be changed. On one hand, this gives you identity; a character focusing on one build will be vastly different from one focusing on a different build.

On the other hand however, this can easily lead to frustrated players who realize that the build they picked isn't very fun (or very effective), and want to change it, but can't because it's permanent. Some people who only play casually but still want to be an effective character (myself, for instance) can easily be turned off by a game if they know that one mistake will mean remaking the character from scratch - especially in a game with as many choices as this one!

So, my idea: keep the same skill tree, but allow players to unlock more skills than the maximum.

What do I mean by that? Well first off, a skill can be either locked (completely unusable), unlocked (available but not active), and activated. Characters gain "activation points" through the same methods as now, by leveling up and by completing a few quests. However, characters are also able to earn "unlock points"; every time someone gains an activation point they get an unlock point as well, but unlock points can be earned in other ways as well, and especially when nearing maximum level (which takes an incredible amount of time to reach, from what I understand), can be earned much more quickly than activation points.

On the skill tree, in order to use any skill, it must first be unlocked by spending an unlock point. Unlock points are permanent; they can't be undone at all, but there's no limit to how many skills can be unlocked. Eventually, a player may manage to unlock the entire tree (although doing so would likely take as much time as leveling three or four characters to max level).

Activation points can then be used to activate unlocked skills, much like how the game works now. The difference is that activation points aren't permanent, and can be reassigned freely (with some minor restrictions, such as "only while in town", perhaps resetting all instances or something of the sort if you change them). You can still only activate unlocked skills, and you can't reassign unlock points, so while you can eventually open up more builds for your character to go with, you don't actually gain more character power (since you don't get more activation points aside from the current limit), and it still takes a lot of time investment to completely respec your character to a different build, but with the option of going back to the old one if you change your mind later.

So, an example: a level 20 character will have 20 activation points from leveling, maybe three or four from quests. However, at this point he may have gotten 30 or so unlock points. He still needs to pick a build to go with, and he can't break away from it very easily, but he does have some wiggle room. By the time he gets 50 activation points, he may have 70-80 unlock points, giving him a lot more options for what build to go with and possibly having two distinct builds he can switch between, but he still can't do everything, and there's still going to be other characters that have different options. Eventually, once he unlocks all of his activation points, he may have 200 or so unlock points; still not enough to see the whole tree, but he'll be able to pick quite a few options and open up a lot of builds, even though he's still a long ways from unlocking everything.

That's a very long and wordy way of saying you want respecs without calling them respecs.

There is a veil in there, but what you are asking for is the ability to freely jump between options on the passive tree that you have "unlocked". This is just another way of getting full respecs after you grind enough, except you remove the necessity for Regrets/respec points (which are also permanent, unlike your idea where you don't have to think about how you use your respec points) and ultimately let a character build jump at will. Which is exactly what the current system is supposed not to allow you to do.

I suppose my main question, then, is "what's wrong with respecs"? What is it that makes people think that you should be "locked in" to a build unless you want to reroll your character?

For that matter, if I decide to reroll my character to change my spec, how is that any really different from grinding more unlock points under my idea? Admittedly, maybe attaching a small currency item cost to respeccing (and still limiting you to unlocked skills) would be better.

Maybe it's my age showing through, but I really don't see forcing us to reroll a new character or grind for a ton of respec items to change our spec around as anything more than fake longevity. On a personal note, it's why I can't get into Torchlight; I tend to get pretty strong analysis paralysis, so I often end up banking a ton of skill points while I decide what to spend them on, since I don't want to end up with a gimp build. And honestly, this game looks amazing; the limited respecs are the only thing making me wary about it, but it could end up being a game-killer for me.

Sethala, you can't win here.. GGG an PoE fans made it pretty clear they want this game to be as oldschool as possible.. so no easy respecs here.. But I agree with you ..arbitrary locking players into one build and forcing them to reroll should be thing of the past..

The topic of respecs has been hammered over and over so much that I don't really want to go into this again since I don't really have anything new to say, but at least it is relatively clear what the intention of the activation posts were. Somewhere in my post history you can see my personal stance on the topic, but thats not relevant to the discussion at hand.

At any rate, yeah, this is is pretty much just an attempt at introduce respecs which probably won't fly with a good chunk of the players here and seems to go against the stance GGG has on respecs in general.

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ManiaCCC wrote:

Sethala, you can't win here.. GGG an PoE fans made it pretty clear they want this game to be as oldschool as possible.. so no easy respecs here.. But I agree with you ..arbitrary locking players into one build and forcing them to reroll should be thing of the past..

Why SHOULD it be a thing of the past ? You know what makes a great game ? Character involvment.

When you play your character in path of exile you have to make meaningful decisions, which is important. You can choose to have an OP lvling build for fast races. You can choose to be strong in a certain field, it's all on you. But you make that choice ahead of time and if you made miserable choices, then you have another choice: reroll or farm wealth to fix your mistakes.

Games nowadays are forgiving. They require no forethought, no education and no commitment. PoE gives something that's lacking in today's game. Weight to our decisions.

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Charja wrote:

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ManiaCCC wrote:

Sethala, you can't win here.. GGG an PoE fans made it pretty clear they want this game to be as oldschool as possible.. so no easy respecs here.. But I agree with you ..arbitrary locking players into one build and forcing them to reroll should be thing of the past..

Why SHOULD it be a thing of the past ? You know what makes a great game ? Character involvment.

When you play your character in path of exile you have to make meaningful decisions, which is important. You can choose to have an OP lvling build for fast races. You can choose to be strong in a certain field, it's all on you. But you make that choice ahead of time and if you made miserable choices, then you have another choice: reroll or farm wealth to fix your mistakes.

Games nowadays are forgiving. They require no forethought, no education and no commitment. PoE gives something that's lacking in today's game. Weight to our decisions.

Amen, brotha/sista. Didn't know what I was missing until I played PoE after D3 (focusing only on the respec on the fly vs locked path approach. For me no other games came immediately to mind.)

Yeah, I figured this wouldn't be a popular subject. It's sad, PoE has a ton going for it, but a complete lock on respecs and forcing me to either grind a ton or reroll (and grind a ton to level up again) seriously kills it for me.

Now, I agree completely, there should be weight behind decisions you make for your character. But there should also be some lenience, and the ability to experiment without completely screwing yourself over. One thing that looks amazing with this system is just how extensive the customization can be, but it means nothing if I can't experiment with my choices and have a relatively easy way to fix things if I don't like it. A lack of respecs may mean characters are diverse because they can't switch on the fly, but I'm willing to bet it will mean most people will just find a cookie-cutter spec and stick to it, as any attempt to deviate will mean a ton of wasted progress if it doesn't work.

Edit: One thing I want to clarify about my main idea. Earning more "unlock points" should be difficult, likely more difficult than earning respec points now (or at least not any easier). The idea is that, if I want to redo my spec, I have to put in the same amount of effort as now, but if I completely screw it up and it doesn't work like I thought it would, I have the option of going back to my old spec without too much difficulty. Or, if I keep grinding, I can eventually unlock everything for one character - but doing so would be a significant time investment. In other words, I want to move away from "You earn X skill points, but you can't change your mind once you've used them all up" to "You can keep earning skill points and eventually unlock everything, but you might want to start over if you want to change everything". Obviously, being able to have all skills active at once would be horribly OP, hence being limited on how many you can actually be using, but not a limit on how many you can eventually use.

Can't work, because for exemple, with your system, I could just switch CI/non CI whenever I know that I'll be dealing with chaos dmgs or not, increasing/lowering my Health by 500 when I can ....
I could do the same with Iron reflexe if it has an utility.

You can use Orb of Regret to reroll your character, plus you get respec points from quests. Stop being lazy.