Not offering a full respec is a bad design choice.

Path of Exile was never meant to be a game for casual players who have no sense of planning, looking ahead, and doing some research.

If you offer a full re-spec:

1. You will never get a sense of achievement that you built a good character.

2. You will never experience the fact that you might one day have a better understanding of the game.

3. There will never be a community about strategy or character building, only the "who have the better items" community that is Diablo 3.

4. You will never make more than 1 character of any class. Sound familiar?

You see, often the most rewarding bits of a good video game comes from learning and building up understanding and knowledge. In short it is a sense of personal improvement that really makes the best video games. Games like Path of Exile, because of the ease of making stupid decisions, offers the player an endless sense of re-playability for that "perfect build". Once the player has learned through mistakes and carefully builds up a good character, there is the satisfaction.

Making full re-spec an option would ruin the game.

I think full respec would be worthless unless it was at a high level. Honestly, how many mistakes can you make by lvl 20 that can't be worked around? BUT By offering it at a high level, you destroy character progression, uniqueness, and hurt the economy (by hording more gear).

I plan on making 2 Characters.

1. A duelist that focuses on evasion and life. The damage nodes are taken only if required to get more defense. Life regen and resistances will be his friend. I've only made it to 32 so far with such a build, but my death from the HC league was to desync with my crappy computer. I was face tanking all kinds of mobs, though in groups I felt less useful except keeping a boss's ES from coming back since I didn't have to retreat..Oh, and I was mostly Physical damage.

2. A Templar that is going to focus on elemental damage and blocking and possibly CI. I can't give experience on this yet since I have not tried it, but I like the thought of it.


Both of these builds may fail, only 1 may fail, or they both might work. The point is, I got to research what I wanted to do and I have a goal set to achieve. What kind of goals can you set in other games like this? Raise crit from 45 to 50 without leaving the Auction house screen? Just so you can be exactly like all the other people of your class, wearing the exact tier set, exact same stats, same build to the point if I lined up all the characters, I could never distinguish yours from his?

I want my character to be special to where when someone decides to look at my character, it's a mystery how it will actually look until they actually see it. You can't do that with the other games.

If you aren't capable of rational thought to decide from experience what works and doesn't so that mistakes aren't repeated, there are other games out there that will make sure you kill that end boss, no matter how little you actually know about the game or your character for that matter.

All the blah blah blah in this thread defending the no-respec status quo is idiotic. You people don't understand that you, the elite, paradoxically don't matter whatsoever in the long run for the long-term success, support and development of this game.

What this game needs so that it can be supported by the devs and developped further through patches and expansions are millions of casuals who will respond to a fast pace and not having to start over because of an absurdly complex passive skill system.

The pace of the game is already way too slow. Gigantic, sprawling areas where nothing is happening, full of mobs to grind. Size does not equal content, the game could be easily be a quarter of the size and have more xp per mob for faster leveling.

So then one finishes the first playthrough with a haphazard build in a few hours and starts again, or respecs (I suggest one respec per difficulty) and goes on.

But no, this is a grindy, insanely complex game where each class basically uses 2 skills + a support skill to kill thousands of pointless mobs while spending equal time on the internet researching the skill system ... THIS WILL NOT ATTRACT THE CASUALS NECESSARY FOR MAKING THE GAME A BUSINESS SUCCESS.

And then the game will die, largely in part because of the small group of elitist closed beta testers who can't see past their ePeens and support the idea of respeccs for the greater good.

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Kurkikohtaus wrote:

All the blah blah blah in this thread defending the no-respec status quo is idiotic. You people don't understand that you, the elite, paradoxically don't matter whatsoever in the long run for the long-term success, support and development of this game.

What this game needs so that it can be supported by the devs and developped further through patches and expansions are millions of casuals who will respond to a fast pace and not having to start over because of an absurdly complex passive skill system.

The pace of the game is already way too slow. Gigantic, sprawling areas where nothing is happening, full of mobs to grind. Size does not equal content, the game could be easily be a quarter of the size and have more xp per mob for faster leveling.

So then one finishes the first playthrough with a haphazard build in a few hours and starts again, or respecs (I suggest one respec per difficulty) and goes on.

But no, this is a grindy, insanely complex game where each class basically uses 2 skills + a support skill to kill thousands of pointless mobs while spending equal time on the internet researching the skill system ... THIS WILL NOT ATTRACT THE CASUALS NECESSARY FOR MAKING THE GAME A BUSINESS SUCCESS.

And then the game will die, largely in part because of the small group of elitist closed beta testers who can't see past their ePeens and support the idea of respeccs for the greater good.

What you don't understand is this game is ran by a small company that wants their product to be how they want it. They don't have shareholders to please. They don't have to appeal to the casual mass for fear of backlash from the upper management. They stated from the beginning this is a hardcore game for hardcore players. The fact it is free to play means you should accept it for what it is, as you haven't lost anything. You didn't buy this game, they don't owe you anything. They are KIND enough to share it with us.

Sorry for the short and concise reply. But please never offer a full respec or anything of the sort in this game GGG. I know it's not a constructive post, but I feel that another voice should be hear against respecs

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Kurkikohtaus wrote:

All the blah blah blah in this thread defending the no-respec status quo is idiotic. You people don't understand that you, the elite, paradoxically don't matter whatsoever in the long run for the long-term success, support and development of this game.

You sir really don't understand the stance that GGG has taken with this game. If you want casual please go back to Diablo.

Seriously though, it is SO NICE to finally find a company that is sticking to what they say. Unlike those fellers over at Blizzvision.

Each point you put into your passive tree carries with it a certain weight. This arises because it requires finite quest rewards or orbs of regret to undo the choice. And from this weight the character develops a degree of uniqueness that would otherwise not be there. A counterpoint to this would be that characters are still unique to a degree even with a full respec (or respecs) because of gear or skill gems. This may be the case, but it is also the case that offering full respecs dilutes the degree of uniqueness for each character. To say it another way, a character is unique because of gear, skill gems, and passive tree points. To make changing one of those too simple or easy would reduce the uniqueness of each character.

The argument put forth in the original post depends on how optimal builds require research by the player. But the truth of the matter is this: if a player invests in the game, the player becomes better. From what I assume to be careful thought rather than randomness, the developers have decided that an important facet of becoming a better player is investment through time in carefully planning a build. In doing so, the player is given another opportunity for what essentially amounts to advancement from planning a build carefully. Other forms of advancement are obvious- the most obvious being investment in time to advance through playing a character to level up. The point here is that the player is rewarded for investing time in the game. It just so happens that this game is constructed such that investment in planning a build is arguably worth as much as time spent merely leveling up, if not more so.

The original post also takes the point of view that players are punished for not researching their build, rather than rewarded for researching their build. Both are equally true. No risk, no reward; no pain, no gain. Part of what makes this game fun is that the player is equally punished for poor choices as rewarded for good ones. Without failure there is no success. The argument might be made that the degree to which the player is punished for poor choices like misplanning a build outweighs the degree to which the player is rewarded for good choices. This really comes down to a matter of taste, rather than an inherent flaw or benefit in design of the game.

To summarize what I've said, choices in the skill tree carry weight behind them, and allowing the player to easily or quickly change their path through the tree dilute the uniqueness of each character. The developers have chosen that players can undo their progress through the skill tree if they invest enough time in acquiring orbs of regret or doing certain quests. This is a reasonable common ground between not having respecs and full respecs as it offers players the ability to undo progress while still allowing a weight behind each point placed in their respective skill trees. Furthermore, time spent in planning a build is rewarded similar to how time spent leveling up a character is rewarded. If a player spends time on the game, they're rewarded. And there is no inherent flaw in the design of the game by not offering respecs. This is because the choice to not offer respecs is a matter of taste rather than a natural benefit or flaw to the design of the game. Choices carry consequences, and the developers have decided that this consideration will even affect choices made in skill trees.

As I said above, I have nothing against not re-speccing. If you want to play that way, play that way. But one should have the choice, within reason. "Reason" IMO is once per difficulty level.

How will it hurt YOUR experience if that option is available? What do you care if other people choose to use that option? Will it somehow make you less elite? Or is it more that those who don't want the respec would in fact be too "tempted" to use it if it were in game?

Discussions about the company "sticking to what it said" are irrelevant if not enough people buy and play this game for the devs to continue to work on it. Why shouldn't they attract a larger audience? It has nothing to do with shareholders or "pressure from above". It has to do with giving more casual gamers a chance to experiment with a complex system without forcing them to replay hours of tedious grinding, only to have to do it again and again...

Honestly, those of you against a respec are elitist and selfish gerks who just want the game to yourselves so that you can bask in your hardcore gamer glory. It's an illusion though, folks, someone else having the option to respec within reason does not affect your own gameplay what-so-ever.

this isn't a good idea. there are lots of builds that are far easier to level up with than others. would be really cheese mode if you could do that and then just respec to the harder to level builds later. not offering a full respec increases replay value as well.

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dashgalaxy86 wrote:

It comes down to this. I will never do PvP if full respecs are offered in any form except when the skill tree is updated. Even that is pushing it for me, and I hope it won't happen again.

You do not deserve a free respec. You didn't earn it. The only correct way to "earn" a build is to carry that build through the game and level it up yourself. It's meaningless if you just get to max level with a safe build and then respec into something crazy and fun without having to actually work at it.

If you don't get that, then this discussion is over, because frankly there is no discussion going on when some new guy just decides he knows better than the devs and the paying supporters who've been with the game since the beginning... This game was clearly not designed for you, sir.

I hope you come around, I really do, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

This post the post above it are so short sighted that it boggles the mind. There is a reason virtually every RPG/ARPG/MMORPG allows respecs, and it's because it's the smart thing to do.

To put it bluntly, every games lifeblood is casuals. Especially for a smaller company like GGG producing a FTP game, they absolutely NEED hordes of casual players who are willing to spend money on micro-transactions. The model absolutely works - look at LoL and HoN, but it needs more than hardcore gamers. While you and others are getting on your elitist high horse exclaiming "well this is a hardcore game! do your research or go back to diablo 3!", you fail to understand that this game will not last long without casuals. If you think that a casual will want to reroll a character because they can't progress any further due to a shitty build, then I don't know what to say other then you are terribly, terribly mistaken.

Moreover, I don't even understand the arguments against respecing. "You didn't earn it", what the hell does that have to do with anything? Since when do you have to "earn" a respec? You want to punish players for experimenting without doing research before hand? How would a respec negatively impact YOUR game? Lots of people (read: casuals) just want to experiment with different builds without having to reroll. That's not to say it has to be free - there could be a repeated quest or even a moderate amount of materials required to respec - but the option should absolutely be there.

I will predict right now that full respecing will eventually occur. GGG can either be proactive about it and do it before every casual player gets up and leaves, or they can do it when all that remains are the hardcore players who are circle jerking each other about their moral victory as the game quickly perishes from lack of funding.