Preventing over the top skill point juggling

[Suslik]

At some point of gameplay on a not too successful nightmare/roguelike characters I noticed that I spend more time juggling points to situational abilities like high-damage aoe nukes or corrupted negation than on, you know, playing. Investing into talent A and talent B 5/5 is not worth it if i can invest 5/5 into talent A, cast it, then remove 4 points from it, invest them into talent B then cast it. This technique is as useful as it is widely abused on higher difficulties. And prohibiting skill reallocation at all does not look like a solution.

Now what if we allow to remove points only from skills that are not on cooldown? OR what if we put skill that we invest point into on a cooldown?

Yep, that's gonna be a nerf that will mostly affect higher difficulties, but I really don't think that these mechanics are ok as they are. Better tweak balance in other ways like buffing underpowered classes than allow such abuses.

[Davion Fuxa]

In terms of skill point refunding in general usage, it's use is for players to refund skills they didn't mean to invest it or didn't find useful after testing it out. Maybe this feature should be removed from Nightmare difficulty and higher?

[Suslik]

Nah that may be too rought. For example you're very unlikely to beat the first dungeon as a temporal warden on insane without any paradox skills to get mindstar mastery in zigur. With current mechanics you can still invest 4 points into paradox talents and remove them when the dungeon is done(which's still extremely challenging).

[Sradac]

mindstar....temporal warden....

Why did I not think of this sooner?!

[Davion Fuxa]

I'd probably consider getting into Zigur on a Temporal Warden a bug. In any case, skill juggling shouldn't be a necessity to beating anything. If it is then the instance where it is needed should be changed.

[Doctornull]

At some point of gameplay on a not too successful nightmare/roguelike characters I noticed that I spend more time juggling points to situational abilities like high-damage aoe nukes or corrupted negation than on, you know, playing. Investing into talent A and talent B 5/5 is not worth it if i can invest 5/5 into talent A, cast it, then remove 4 points from it, invest them into talent B then cast it. This technique is as useful as it is widely abused on higher difficulties. And prohibiting skill reallocation at all does not look like a solution.

My proposed solution (in an earlier thread) was to allow full re-spec, full re-allocation of talent points, but only on the world map. Gives you all the strategic benefit of being able to test out talents which might or might not be useful, but takes away the tactical cheese of use X -> swap X to Y -> use Y.

[Suslik]

full skill reallocation? diablo 3? how about no? any solipsist can go 5/5 into mind sear, then 25/25 into distortion tree and in lategame switch to dream hammer without paying anything? no thanks.

I'd probably consider getting into Zigur on a Temporal Warden a bug.

why call a bug something that's far from being op but diversifies you gameplay experience? you may very well go for any conventional build with temporal warden, but why prohibit an alternative?

[ZyZ]

Disable skill point juggling on insane / madness.

1) People playing on high difficulty levels know what they are doing. Often they know how character will look like (in terms of skill / generic talents) even before they start playing it
2) No one bothers to do it on normal, so it is not a problem for most players

[SageAcrin]

Skill point juggling fails to work on sustains and passives in any meaningful way, and in the end there's only so many points you can save by juggling actives.

The main impact from skill point juggling is earlygame, where you can keep access to any status options or L5 talents you need. It's not a matter of "Oh, they can just build better", Nightmare and up players that are playing well are actually doing partial rebuilding for each dungeon. (At least, I did.)

The problem is, Normal doesn't really reward this-it helps a bit, but it's not a major deal because the earlygame isn't crushingly hard, and it requires levels of knowledge that your average Normal runner simply does not have, on average. And higher difficulties don't really need the challenge buff.

I wouldn't mind changing things up-it is tedious. But I feel like just saying "Oh well it'll make it harder" isn't the right answer either. If there's some way to compensate Nightmare and higher without the tedium, while removing the option for Normal(which really does not need it), I would love it, but I haven't been able to think of any.

I still like the idea of respeccing an Active talent setting it on 1 turn of cooldown, though. It doesn't remove the tactics, but it does make juggling your low CD blasting talents really, really stupid, and you don't need to do that anyways.

[Doctornull]

full skill reallocation? diablo 3? how about no? any solipsist can go 5/5 into mind sear, then 25/25 into distortion tree and in lategame switch to dream hammer without paying anything?

5/5 Mind Sear remains useful for the whole game, even if it's not as dominant in the late-game.

I guess your complaint is that Dream Hammer scaling is imbalanced late-game? Why the heck not just fix that?

Never played Diabolo 3, why do you think it's relevant here?

[Davion Fuxa]

@Doctornull

Diablo III let's you basically enables you to have access to everything your class has to offer - restricted to what your character level is at any given moment. The only catch is that the player has to pick what is available to them, or to respec out of a skill to another when they want to use another skill.

Anyhow, I have to agree though that a full respec is probably a bad idea however. You could have the advantage of building a character that is stronger in the early part of the game and then respec to a new build later on - whether that be a more optimal build, or perhaps a build you desire to play but would have difficulty or had difficulty getting through the early game.

@Suslik

Because a Temporal Warden being a spellcasting class should raise a red flag for entering Zigur, seeing as how ingame lore regulates them to being hostile to any form of spellcaster.

[grayswandir]

A note from the git log:

Zigur is no longer hostile by default towards the Keepers of Reality (mostly because they never heard of them)

[Doctornull]

You could have the advantage of building a character that is stronger in the early part of the game and then respec to a new build later on - whether that be a more optimal build, or perhaps a build you desire to play but would have difficulty or had difficulty getting through the early game.

Yeah, but that's not a sign that respec is imbalanced -- it's a sign that some trees have poor scaling.

Another way to look at respec is grinding reduction. You can eventually get a character through the early game with poorly scaled starting trees (Dream Hammer instead of Mind Sear), but it may take many tries.

Since when is it a design goal to force grinding? Since never. This game has gone through several rounds of grinding-reduction.

Why the heck would anyone want to keep this specific grinding incentive?

[Suslik]

If some tree is well suited for lategame and some tree is better suited for early game it does not mean that they should be adjusted to be equally suitable for both. On the contrary, it rewards planning if your build will suffer in the beginning but will be way more powerful later or vice versa. If you can respec anything you can go simply levelling any beam you want on arcane blade completely ignoring on-hit procs and respec later anyway. I find that far from being acceptable since levelling a tribeam arcane blade is a very cheap earlygame strategy that will not pay off later because the class is designed to be built in a more complex way.

Same goes to wyrmic casters - you can level to 5/5 cheap tier1 nukes that you're never going to use later game because you're going to concentrate on t4 breaths. With free respec that removes any tactics from planning your build which's one of the reasons D3 is hated so much.

[Davion Fuxa]

To throw in one tidbit on top of Suslik's below - Player Choice and the consequences of the decisions he makes.

It's not an imbalance if the player has the option to build his character differently. If he wants to take talents that leads to much more difficult gameplay then that's a consequence he has to live with; he could have always changed his character's build so that it focused a little bit on talents that would make gameplay easier with him (and perhaps not as strong later on).