About permanent Ascendancies

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mrfox123#7595 wrote:

Classes should not have been locked to character models. And ascendancies should not be final once picked, least not when it takes hours just to unlock it.

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Sickness#1007 wrote:

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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?

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alhazred70#2994 wrote:

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Sickness#1007 wrote:

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?

You didn't answer mine though, but I'm sure you see my point; so sure why not. "ALL choices should be final" is not what I'm suggesting.

I agree both are generally bad because there are choices you want to have more impact or weight than other choices. To feel authentic you need some variation or nothing feels organic. But also you want some of the less interesting choices to be quicker and easier choices. If all choices are immediately maximum impact you end up with a game like "I wanna be the Boshy" an insanely hard platformer game where every screen can kill you a dozen times over and literally every mistake sends you back to the start of the game. On the other hand if every choice has minimal to no impact you actually end up with no real game. Pachinko is my favorite example of a proto-game. Sure you can choose which slot to put the token in, but you're not REALLY effecting outcomes and the choice isn't very compelling even if one of the slots might have some statistical benefit.

Class is usually a choice that designers want to be impactful and important, to have gravity. Therefore it has to have weight the only way it can have weight and be taken seriously is if its at least "expensive" (or difficult) up to "not allowed" to reverse it. Mostly this importance is tied to real life verisimilitude; you can choose to be an accountant and then change your mind and go back to school and learn to be a lawyer, but you can't take 6 years of accounting education and instantly transfer it into Law school credits.

You can argue if this grounding in reality is good or bad, but generally RPG's always choose to stick with this much grounding and I think its a good place to have an important choice.

I support my point with D4. I doubt anyone is going to argue that D4 doesn't kill build exploration and make rolling any class more than once a very uninteresting experience because you can freely and easily try everything very quickly without investment or importance.

In POE passive respecs are possible but generally pretty expensive. The tree is super convoluted, constantly interacted with; and Notables are not nearly as "important" nor as "one time" as class choice. So it's reasonable to have respecs that have a fairly sharp cost. You can undo... but its gonna cost you. (note I understand regret orbs have been powercreeped past long ago by the clear speed meta and no longer constitute much of a cost in SC trade, and I've not yet had to spend gold to respec in POE2 but I've heard its fairly expensive)

Easy come easy go. Anything unearned will be valued lightly its human nature. Do you want your RPG to have classes that are unimportant choices? I don't but I'm old school.

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alhazred70#2994 wrote:

delusional?

you know that most games force you to pick a class at character creation, like 99.9% of all RPG style games in history its a permanent choice you can never undo.

Are they delusional or is someone being completely unfair and also not particularity knowledgeable about how these games usually work?

I would argue that the mistake GGG made was EVER letting players re-spec their class choice in POE1 thus setting up an expectation that just made the first games choices less impactful, and when corrected made for some player confusion.

Its just one of those things I think some people feel entitled to that no one older even thinks is a problem because its not usually possible. Permanent class choice is the norm.

Make a new character, I promise you its not that big of a deal, some of us even enjoy it. Stop letting the illusion that you're "falling behind" or "not doing endgame where the game matters" ruin your fun. Trying stuff is why you have more than one character slot. Exalts and most important currency can drop while you're leveling, and alt is not a hardship. Gameplay is fun from lvl 1 to infinity. Only your own value judgements alter that and try to make it less fun because you assign a false meaning or importance to later progress.

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alhazred70#2994 wrote:

you know that most games force you to pick a class at character creation, like 99.9% of all RPG style games in history its a permanent choice you can never undo.

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Sickness#1007 wrote:

I didnt answer it because it was a stupid question.

You support your point with D4. D4 does not have acendencies.
I support my point with PoE1. PoE 1 has ascendencies.

I think you need a better way to support your case.

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You want class choice to feel temporary and unimportant, so tell us why?

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TwoToneDude#9771 wrote:

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alhazred70#2994 wrote:

you know that most games force you to pick a class at character creation, like 99.9% of all RPG style games in history its a permanent choice you can never undo.

Skyrim: no classes.

PoE1/2: shared passive tree, no class restrictions on skills or weapon types.

DnD: has multiclassing.

That's a lot more than 0.1% IMO. Also makes no sense. It's role playing, not class playing.

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alhazred70#2994 wrote:

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Sickness#1007 wrote:

I didnt answer it because it was a stupid question.

You support your point with D4. D4 does not have acendencies.
I support my point with PoE1. PoE 1 has ascendencies.

I think you need a better way to support your case.

Why get emotional? They're identical questions on opposite ends of the same extreme logic, you're essentially calling your own question stupid, which I don't agree with at all. Going to a logical extreme is sometimes a good way to highlight an idea or point to a logical conclusion. Your question or mine worked just as well to get my point across which is why I was fine with answering it.

As far as supporting an argument, perhaps you're projecting but I've supported my case quite a lot more than you've supported yours. To support your case you would have to address why class choice is better if its unimportant and easily undone. Which so far you've not even addressed. Only "it works this way in the previous POE" which isn't an argument.

You want class choice to feel temporary and unimportant, so tell us why?