About permanent Ascendancies

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alhazred70#2994 wrote:

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Terzian#6850 wrote:

man, you're in a peth of exile forum talking about path of exile and you want to act like the very well liked precedent from their previous game was a mistake?

This crap is why I stopped playing last epoch without finishing it.

It was a mistake, don't believe me? Ask why they corrected it in POE2... All design choices have knock on effects. Easy respec of entire class = no need to level alts, case in point: the OP. It also means your choice at the altar is less important... Case in point: the OP thinking it still worked the same as POE1 didn't take it seriously.

The OP's post proves why its bad to allow players to fully explore classes without investment.

Why? Because human nature: we do not value things that come easily the same way we value things that required more effort.

Easy almost no cost respec in Diablo 4 allowed me to try literally every "build" and every configuration of the skill twig in just a few hours. Get bored and log out of D4 with like 30-40 hours total time played. Some of thats the loot system, some is the shallow puddle of "builds" and some of that is the dejected feeling of having completely explored an entire class in a couple of hours. Its not just how fast I explored every Druid skill, its knowing that people at Blizzard making important choices: aren't good at game design.

I'll never play that game again.

Meanwhile I have over 20k hours in POE1 and who knows maybe I top that in 2. All because important weighty choices feeling better to make than shallow easy choices.

But you have 20k hours in a game where we have what the OP is asking for? Why even bring up diablo at that point?

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Sickness#1007 wrote:

But you have 20k hours in a game where we have what the OP is asking for? Why even bring up diablo at that point?

You don't stop playing a game because it has a design choice thats a mistake, I would not be able to play anything if that was the case.

POE1 has a ton of things wrong with it that I would change, fortunately so far POE2 has actually fixed a lot of those.

The last couple Diablo's are just really great examples of what happens when Dev's allow too many easy unimportant choices where harder more important choices would have made a better game. Pandering to players who want their choices to not matter is a perfect description of what went fundamentally wrong with D3 and 4.

If we really want to talk about changing ascendancies as a feature, we can look at it from that point of view. Especially with respect to how other games do it. One of the big things Jonathan Rogers has said many times during interviews is to "Meet the minimum standard set by other games". BG3, another game where you are forced to choose a build defining class (since it seems like other games are important to the other posters in this thread). Has a system that makes it trivially easy to respec to a different class. I think it's unfair, to a new POE2 player (poe1 players or players new to the series), to make a build defining choice (Ascendancy) as early as act2 without demonstrating beyond a doubt that the choice is permanent.

To be clear, I would prefer the option to easily respec my ascendancy in a similar manner to the old system, but GGG has (apparently) stated that they will not be reverting this change. I'm pretty okay with that, like it's silly when they have trivialized other parts of respecing, like making it easy to rework your skills, and passive tree with gold. In-fact, it's so easy to change from say, a lighting caster, to an ice caster, that I would expect to be able to swap to something more extreme, as the game constantly touts it's endless buildability. So it's not exactly a small part of the game to choose an Ascendancy, which can be build defining in itself.

Its not like I'll stop playing the game because of it, it's just a massive failure to communicate important information, the ease of respecing in the skill tree and skill gems in act1 does nothing to imply that at ~lvl 25 you will make an irreversible change which will color your entire experience with a character. If they want this choice to be a lasting one, they can't make it so easy to misinterpret it.



So my overall stance is, I want it to be reverted, but I assume it won't be, so at the very least, make it abundantly clear. A single warning in big red text is NOT enough, even a button with a delay is a little lacking, but at least it's better, since I can't just click though it.

I'm not going to get into the specifics of building, because I think that there are many other ways which building sucks, like the lack of level 2 support gems... Not doing that in this post.

Anyone who thinks the system is fine as it is, should be very welcoming of a change which makes it unambiguous for any uninformed player, yes?

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alhazred70#2994 wrote:

Easy respec of entire class = no need to level alts

Have you got rocks in your skull? Genuinely curious.

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alhazred70#2994 wrote:

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Sickness#1007 wrote:

But you have 20k hours in a game where we have what the OP is asking for? Why even bring up diablo at that point?

You don't stop playing a game because it has a design choice thats a mistake, I would not be able to play anything if that was the case.

POE1 has a ton of things wrong with it that I would change, fortunately so far POE2 has actually fixed a lot of those.

The last couple Diablo's are just really great examples of what happens when Dev's allow too many easy unimportant choices where harder more important choices would have made a better game. Pandering to players who want their choices to not matter is a perfect description of what went fundamentally wrong with D3 and 4.

So every kind of respec is bad? If it was up to you we should not be able to change skill gems or respec passives?

I dont get why there is this Perma Ascendancy thing, like the Campaign takes ages, you will just screw new players if they realize they dont like their ascendancy at all and want to try something new

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evinta#2047 wrote:

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alhazred70#2994 wrote:

Easy respec of entire class = no need to level alts

Have you got rocks in your skull? Genuinely curious.

I mean... I'm not the one who threw out an insult on a forum where you get quick probation and then a ban for insulting people instead of discussing things.

More importantly thats an ad hominem, presumably because you're upset about something I said. Ad hominem, means addressing the person instead of the argument. You've not made an argument or a point here, so my assumption has to be that you're emotional and can't articulate one.

If you actually want to understand my point of view I'm happy to explain. It's based on over 40 years of gaming as a hobby and considerations of game design that often aren't obvious to everyone. In fact they're often so buried in the cause > effect chain that even people like Blizzard game dev's miss them or underestimate them. Which helps explain why their last two ARPG's have been so derivative uninspired and shallow.

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Sickness#1007 wrote:

So every kind of respec is bad? If it was up to you we should not be able to change skill gems or respec passives?

Not necessarily every game is going to have some less important and more important choices. You can change these up to some extent but let me ask you:

What happens to a game when you make all the choices trivial and unimportant by making them easy to undo?

Imagine the game where nothing you do "matters" at all and tell me if you want to play it.

I'm not really interested in turning this post into a flamewar of what people think is better. In PoE1, it was generally less expensive to reroll to a new character than to respec an existing character to a new skill/skill tree/ascendancy. Also, the cost of respecing in poe2 scales with your level, so while it's trivial in the early game, it most likely scales to an absurd cost, surely much more than ~120 orbs of regret, especially since unlike orbs of regret, gold has many uses.

So I imagine that it will still be the case that rerolling with be cheaper than respecing an existing character, but it would be nice if we could still experiment early on. It cost me ~8000 gold to unspec my two ascendancy passives in preparation to change my class, that's quite a lot, and I was aware of the potential cost when I made the choice to try out the other ascendancy.

I did not read the QA where they said that we couldn't respec them, but there was no indication from the game itself that the system was any different. Sure I don't like it, but I care much more about the lack of information than I care about being able to respec without rerolling. It's a big damper on my early impression of the game, which is why I bothered at all to make a post in the EARLY ACCESS FEEDBACK forum. I know that not everyone sees eye to eye about this change, some people clearly like it and others do not, please be kind to each other. Perhaps discuss potential solutions, if they WERE to re-add the feature, what ways could they balance it? There should be a cost associated with it.

Also, remember that there is a cost to rerolling characters, not just the time to replay the story and level up, but also the anxiety of choosing another good name. Back to time though, the time spent rerolling is time not spent on learning bosses in the endgame, or progressing your atlas. It's time which you could be using to enjoy other things (or like, having a life :C).

And always remember, you should think of what would benefit other players. While you might like it one way or the other, it does still affect other players, in what ways could it be improved?

A big part of what lead me to make this decision was just that the first two nodes of Bloodwitch were really terrible. I didn't want to commit to them right before the annoying act2 final boss who I had trouble managing my HP for the drawnout phase 2 where my potion charges wouldn't refill. I knew I could just get better at dealing with his attack patterns and I did, but I didn't want the bloodwitch nodes draining my HP for no good reason.

I do really like the thematic approach to the first two passives being a cost, the entire tree is behind that initial cost, which is very juicy lorewise. But the first two points of Infernalist can turn my into a demon while draining my HP, that sounds a lot cooler, and I wanted to give it a go.

There is an inherent imbalance to that logical choice yes? I don't expect GGG to make any significant changes to that before Christmas, but it's still neat to discuss it. I've been told that there are other Ascendancies with kind of boring or terrible first options, perhaps we could discuss making those first choices feel more uniform to prevent people from trying to experiment.

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alhazred70#2994 wrote:

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Sickness#1007 wrote:

So every kind of respec is bad? If it was up to you we should not be able to change skill gems or respec passives?

Not necessarily every game is going to have some less important and more important choices. You can change these up to some extent but let me ask you:

What happens to a game when you make all the choices trivial and unimportant by making them easy to undo?

Imagine the game where nothing you do "matters" at all and tell me if you want to play it.

And let me ask you: What happens to the game when you make all the choices final and mega important by making them impossible to undo?

Here are two positions I think we both can agree are bad:
1. Everything can be changed.
2. Nothing can be changed.

You cannot argue that ascendencies should not be able to be changed by simply refering to the fact that (1.) is a bad state, because then I can simply refer to the fact that (2.) is a bad state.

Do you have anything else to support your position?