Is there a full respec option yet?

I agree that improving the passive skill tree planning would go along way to help alleviate a lot of these respec issues. I think more then improving the website version we should improve the in game version. We should be able to search for nodes like we can on the website, and draw or set a path we want to follow. I know sometimes I lose where I was planning on heading and have to search around for the node again.

I just wanted to chime in again to say that I think you are all making some very good points on both sides.


I don't know, maybe just making Orbs of Regret easier to get??? It seems that there are valid arguments for both "no full respec" and also for "full respec but exteemely limited in when and how it can be applied" and maybe just upping the drop rate of Regrets would make both sides happpy?

That way, you'd still have to REALLY want that respec, and put out the effort, but if there were 2 or 3 times the number of Regrets as there are currently, it might allow a dedicated player to acquire those points, by either farming or through trading.

I still think there's a greater chance of players leaving the game due to periodic respec than by no respec, just because it';s fairly easy to level a new character in a party, but without an incentive to do that people might just not. But the points made by Total and others are very valid as well, and maybe there wouldn't be any way to tell without implementing something (which could be a bad idea) and seeing how it went, as PoE has such a unique system.

This has been debated for countless hours over hundreds of pages in different threads. This is why I was yelling. Because you say that you don't want an easy anytime respec, but you also state that you want to fully respec a lvl 58 for free. Do you not see how these conflict with one another? If you want to fully respec a lvl 58, man up and get orbs or reroll. Orbs can be purchased from vendors so you don't have to 'farm' all of them.

Quite simply D2s introduction of respecs completely killed the game for me. I played that game for about 10 years and quit about 2 months after the respec patch.

In summation, the passive respec system is PERFECT as is. It is very forgiving of a few misclicks but at the same time it encourages players to actually think about the skill choices, as it should be.

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Artophwar a écrit :

I agree that improving the passive skill tree planning would go along way to help alleviate a lot of these respec issues. I think more then improving the website version we should improve the in game version. We should be able to search for nodes like we can on the website, and draw or set a path we want to follow. I know sometimes I lose where I was planning on heading and have to search around for the node again.

We can do that, though, just only on the website. That seems cool enough to me, as that web tree page really helped me figure out my build.

I want to point out that it takes less than a month to get to the endgame content of PoE. Less than a single month. If you screw up your character and can't continue, make a new one and save the regrets. A month later, if you're slow, you'll have another character at the end of Merciless and 5-8 more regret orbs. Assuming you saved your orbs the first time through, 10-16 orbs and 16 points from quests is enough to fix an incredibly significant blunder.

If you're randomly throwing points into the tree without even thinking of a basic goal, you're doing it wrong and you pay for it. I'm no PoE expert, and I certainly wasn't when I first started, but it only took me 5 minutes of checking out the web to decide "I'm going to make my way over to Resolute Technique." That's as far as you need to think when making a character for the first time.

No, your first character probably won't be the server's strongest. After you get a really good concept of what works, you'll make another and it will be better. Allowing a sudden respec at any point with little to no effort on your part completely undermines the point of building your character. Even if it's only once.

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That said, there are many things that can be done to ease the burden on new players. I suggest having a simple option available that comes with creating a new account or perhaps downloading the game. Have a little box ask "Would you like help planning your first character?" If the user selects yes, it asks some simple questions (What type of weapon are you interested in? Do you know what class you want to be? Do you want to focus defensively or offensively? Are you interested in physical damage or elemental?) and a few other branching questions. Based on the answers, the website presents the player with the skill tree and a path that could be used for that characters first 20 or so points, leading to one of the gold nodes (what are they called again?) This gives the player a basic idea that he could choose to follow, or not, and then leaves him to design it from there. This should then be available on the website for them to use when starting another character, in case they decide they want something different but still don't really know what they're doing.

There are a lot of things here I want to reply to, but I don't have time to respond to all of them. Sorry! Hopefully i can get back to other posts later, not sure.

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SavageMinnow a écrit :

I want to point out that it takes less than a month to get to the endgame content of PoE. Less than a single month.

This is a great point. The current system works okay for now. We need to keep in mind however that "for now" is a closed beta, in which we only have two acts out of a planned four (five?), and that GGG has said they plan to include free expansions for the game as well.

It's pretty easy to get to the current endgame, but we're only playing a fraction of the game. Heck, GGG has even explicitly stated that the current endgame is only a temporary placeholder which they're going to remove entirely.

I suppose you could flip this argument around and say that, once the game is mature, people will have more orbs of regret handy than they currently do. That's possible, though I suspect that the constant influx of new players and new characters will lead to a long-term shortage of regret orbs (using current numbers).

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If you're randomly throwing points into the tree without even thinking of a basic goal, you're doing it wrong and you pay for it.

Eh. I agree to an extent: again, I certainly don't want to coddle players. I just think that we should coddle newbies. As it stands, they begin the game on the edge of a cliff and they get shoved off it on their very first levelup, after 3-4 minutes of play.

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I'm no PoE expert, and I certainly wasn't when I first started, but it only took me 5 minutes of checking out the web to decide "I'm going to make my way over to Resolute Technique." That's as far as you need to think when making a character for the first time.

This is kind of exactly what I'm afraid of. My first instinct when I began levelling was...to go check the web and see what other people think. To look up builds that work, to find nodes people agree are must-have, and to follow it.

Basically, because the choice was too complex for me to confidently make as a newbie, I let other people make it for me. If a proven, functional build had been posted for the patch at the time, I would have followed it exactly. I am not the only one who will react this way.

Those are the two things I'm worried about. Causing rage-quits in half the playerbase and scaring the other half into following cookie cutter builds. We're given so many options that it is intimidating, and intimidating people don't want to take risks or experiment.

Like I said in my last post: too many choices can almost be the same as too few. If there are (example numbers, obviously) 100k builds and only 1k of them are truly viable, and only 10 of those viable builds are posted, what're people going to do? Experts will be able to improvise well, but without any form of safety net then I argue that many will just go with whatever is known to be "safe."

Maybe I'm not giving GGG enough credit on balancing the skill tree. I just assume that a lot of skills inherently oppose other skills, and it'll take a great deal of planning to avoid conflicts. I also assume that a lot of skills will be viable but not fit a player's style, even if they sounded cool at the time.

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No, your first character probably won't be the server's strongest. After you get a really good concept of what works, you'll make another and it will be better. Allowing a sudden respec at any point with little to no effort on your part completely undermines the point of building your character. Even if it's only once.

I actually agree 100% with the bolded part. I think that'll be fun and interesting for the people who do it.

I also think that it'll probably get old after a while, though. So at the beginning of the game we have newbies burning themselves, and middle/late game we have people restarting over and over and over and over just to test out minor variations.

I don't know. Maybe repeating the same content a bunch is part of how GGG intends to expand the game's shelf life? If that's truly the case then respecs would indeed damage the game. (Though I'd still argue that orbs of regret could be made a bit more common.)

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That said, there are many things that can be done to ease the burden on new players. I suggest having a simple option available that comes with creating a new account or perhaps downloading the game. Have a little box ask "Would you like help planning your first character?" If the user selects yes, it asks some simple questions (What type of weapon are you interested in? Do you know what class you want to be? Do you want to focus defensively or offensively? Are you interested in physical damage or elemental?) and a few other branching questions. Based on the answers, the website presents the player with the skill tree and a path that could be used for that characters first 20 or so points, leading to one of the gold nodes (what are they called again?) This gives the player a basic idea that he could choose to follow, or not, and then leaves him to design it from there. This should then be available on the website for them to use when starting another character, in case they decide they want something different but still don't really know what they're doing.

This is a nifty idea, and I do like it somewhat. It also does a good job of reinforcing just how overwhelming the game is to a new player though: you've been playing PoE for a grand total of 3 minutes. Do you want to focus on physical melee or elemental melee?

"What does that even mean?" is a valid question.

Likewise, you're starting a new melee character. What're the relative advantages of axes, maces, staves, swords, daggers, and claws? Why would I pick one over another? Do I want to use a shield? Do I want to dual wield or use two handed weapons? My marauder is a melee guy who has a lot of HP, right? Maybe I should go work my way towards the claw nodes!

All of these are pretty major questions, and decisions you have to make pretty darn early in the game. Maybe by the time you finish act 3, you'll have decided that dual wielding isn't for you after all. Time to start all over. "Part of the game," you say, and maybe it is. I'm just worried it'll cause all sorts of problems down the road.

(The more I think about it, the more I think maybe 1-2 respecs per character lifetime is a good medium, perhaps as a quest reward for finishing Act 3 or 4...)

I guess that a great deal of documentation and guides will help solve this, actually. Maybe by the time the game is fully out, people will be able to make informed decisions right away? That would be cool. I still cringe, just a little, at the idea that people will need to alt-tab and read a forum after 5 minutes of play...but it could work.

So, just to sum up:

--I kind of agree with you.
--Excellent documentation could be an alternative solution to newbies burning themselves.
--Maybe repeatedly re-playing the same content is part of the game's model.
--Excessive, forced re-playing will get old.
--XP boosts might be a partial solution, eg once you've reached end-game on one character you can designate a new character to have boosted XP until they reach end-game. Something like that.
--Other possible solutions are limiting respecs to 1 per character, or just increasing orb of regret frequency, or something like that.
--Crazy, badly thought out idea: being able to shift so you "lose" xp per mob kill and can selectively untrain nodes per "level up"? Nah, that's probably silly...

Repeating the same content is exactly what these games are about. I dont know how many times I played through diablo 2 but im sure its in the hundreds if not thousands.

I think that is part of the issue. People view this as an MMO where you have 1-2 main characters for the life of the game. This is an ARPG where its not uncommon to have multiple characters going at the same time. Its also designed to play through the same content multiple times at different difficulties.

But I agree better documentaltion, and I think an improved in game skill tree would help. It could have a Details Tab describing what your changes do to your current skills. The more informed the choice, the less likely people will be to regret it.

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Artophwar a écrit :

Repeating the same content is exactly what these games are about. I dont know how many times I played through diablo 2 but im sure its in the hundreds if not thousands.

I think that is part of the issue. People view this as an MMO where you have 1-2 main characters for the life of the game. This is an ARPG where its not uncommon to have multiple characters going at the same time. Its also designed to play through the same content multiple times at different difficulties.

I knew someone would point this out, perhaps rightly so.

I know the difference between and MMO and an ARPG, however, I keep coming back to this line from the FAQ, written by GGG themselves:

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A level cap of 100 is currently planned, but players will find that they level up more slowly as they gain experience. You'll need to be very high level and be very well-geared to contend with the end game content on the hardest difficulty level. These diminishing returns mean that the game doesn't suddenly end when the player hits some arbitrary point. If a player wanted, they could improve a single character for years on end.

Based on this alone, I feel like they intend for this game to be an ARPG with MMO-like character reusability. Maybe that's naive of me, maybe the FAQ is out of date or incorrect, I don't know.

Just pointing out that it's something they have officially stated. If it's wrong or misleading, then many of my arguments are indeed bunk.

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But I agree better documentaltion, and I think an improved in game skill tree would help. It could have a Details Tab describing what your changes do to your current skills. The more informed the choice, the less likely people will be to regret it.

Yay! Well, at least this is something probably everyone can agree on. It will definitely help!

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Saela a écrit :

I also think that it'll probably get old after a while, though. So at the beginning of the game we have newbies burning themselves, and middle/late game we have people restarting over and over and over and over just to test out minor variations.

Why would they start over and over and over to test 'minor variations'? This is precisely what the current system allows for... minor variation.

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Saela a écrit :

Based on this alone, I feel like they intend for this game to be an ARPG with MMO-like character reusability. Maybe that's naive of me, maybe the FAQ is out of date or incorrect, I don't know.

and if you want to full respec your level 100 character It should cost you a lot to do it!

Edit: I didn't quite quote enough to give my response context, but if you reread that part of your post you will get it.

Personally I always find it refreshing when a video game doesn't assume you're a ten year old that needs to be babysit through the game. I realize that skill tree can be a bit daunting to the newly stranded exile but that is one of the intrinsic beauties of the game. The magisters have already given you one weapon of your choice...what more do you want? Exile!!