Preventing over the top skill point juggling

[Doctornull]

How would that work: only allow respecs of the last points (as now) when in town and for a gold cost (100ish ? )

That would have me walking around with a bunch of unspent points, instead of putting 4/3 of them in skills that I wasn't certain that I wanted to keep.

It would cater to the spreadsheet-builders rather than the organic-try-stuff players. I'm not a spreadsheet-builder so it wouldn't help me much.

[RaginCajun]

Doctornull what did you think of my idea? I want to know if that's something that is somewhat catering to your play style. Maybe you might convince DG to combine the two. Spending money would be reserved for those who had to commit points to early skills they didn't want. Where as the training room would give you the option to essentially test the skills before trying, but not effect game play in any way.

Edit. I figure I'd throw out my vote tho towards the gold dump. I personally like the similarly themed gold dump in path of exile. It's one of the better ways to do it.

[Doctornull]

Doctornull what did you think of my idea? I want to know if that's something that is somewhat catering to your play style. Maybe you might convince DG to combine the two. Spending money would be reserved for those who had to commit points to early skills they didn't want. Where as the training room would give you the option to essentially test the skills before trying, but not effect game play in any way.

Edit. I figure I'd throw out my vote tho towards the gold dump. I personally like the similarly themed gold dump in path of exile. It's one of the better ways to do it.

Spending money is a fine idea, and spending money in a specific place (town, world map, fortress, whatever) is also a fine idea. Both of them are easy enough to do when you need it, but not so easy that you'll be incentiveized to cheese the mechanic once per turn or even once per dungeon level.

The thing I dislike is paying to unlock only the 4/3 last talent points spent. Limiting it like that means I still need to meta-game my experimentation, instead of fooling around and then fixing it all at once later.

[RaginCajun]

Hmm. No that actually makes a lot of sense. I personally as someone who prefers a hardcore experience would definitely be open to the idea of being able to buyback all your points if you really had that much money. Takes away being able to buy some nice end game items. Maybe others would be willing to concede that as well.

If it were like that I'd just like to see a curve in money. For instance starting at 100 a point to a grow of about 10 every point you buy back. I have become filthy rich in some of my playthroughs. 100 works at the start but won't scale well if you were allowed to refund all your points.

[Suslik]

I concur with idea of refunds getting more and more expensive. 1 point is 10g, 10 points is 500g, 20 points is 5kg. I'm strictly against any kind of full respec because it kills strategic build planning, does not reward strategic thiking in otherwise strategic game and harms replayability a lot.

[RaginCajun]

Ya that sounds about right Suslik. Hopefully that is a middle ground so that we can get this crutch out of the game. And a new useful feature into the game.

[Doctornull]

I'm strictly against any kind of full respec because it kills strategic build planning, does not reward strategic thiking in otherwise strategic game and harms replayability a lot.

Here's the thing. You spend time before you play mapping out your character. You are rewarded for that with reliable and expected power growth.

Full re-spec is irrelevant to your play style: you would not need it, because you make your decisions in advance.

So it won't hurt you at all: you won't use it if it's there, you won't use it if it's not there.

The only difference is that people who aren't you might enjoy a better game.

Serious question: Why would you want to spite people with a different play style? What's in it for you?

[HousePet]

Did nobody like my suggestion of starting players at level 10, so that they would have access to whatever they wanted to shunt the points into, or was it just not considered?

[Suslik]

I'm strictly against any kind of full respec because it kills strategic build planning, does not reward strategic thiking in otherwise strategic game and harms replayability a lot.

Here's the thing. You spend time before you play mapping out your character. You are rewarded for that with reliable and expected power growth.

Full re-spec is irrelevant to your play style: you would not need it, because you make your decisions in advance.

So it won't hurt you at all: you won't use it if it's there, you won't use it if it's not there.

The only difference is that people who aren't you might enjoy a better game.

Serious question: Why would you want to spite people with a different play style? What's in it for you?

Imagine there's a button that you can hit for free and get +100 to your character level. I'd never use it as well because that would just waste the joy of levelling my character. Your strategic, tactical, lore, game mechanics skills instantly become irrelevant since you can hit 1 button and then roflbump high peak. But will the game be fun to you with this function?

For me the option to respec your character is about as bad as that: you can build any crap you like and then just respec it. It would also allow abuses to play earlygame with builds that are viable in the beginning but suck in the end, yeah for me it's an abuse.

So while I'm not going to use this function, it will lower my overall level of satisfaction when I build my character properly, because there's no such thing as a "proper build" when you can respect any time. Am I being clear?

Another example. I always play roguelike, I enjoy immersion with my character, having 1 life and I enjoy challenge of playing the game without dying. If the option to play on rl is removed I'll have multiple lives then even though I'm still going to play until the 1st death that's going to kill the whole point of playing the hard-mode and spoil all the fun.

And if you think I'm some kind of one-in-a-lifetime weirdo, then surprise! There's plenty of hardcore gamers here and removing any challenge they enjoy overcoming will no doubt make the game less appealing to them.

[grayswandir]

One idea is to make the, er, higher talent points cheaper to reassign, like maybe dividing the cost by the current talent level or something? That way you wouldn't be penalized as much for testing out if 5 points in a skill were worth it - but it'd be another story if you wanted to remove all points from the skill completely.

[Davion Fuxa]

Did nobody like my suggestion of starting players at level 10, so that they would have access to whatever they wanted to shunt the points into, or was it just not considered?

It seemed like an off the cuff floated idea for humour.

Anyhow, the main problem I see with this idea is that the game would have to be heavily rebalanced for the adjusted level. The first few dungeons only scale to like 10 levels and then you start skipping to the end of the instance, dungeons like the Dark Crypt would be coming much early, Urkis would be attacking Derth pretty damn quick, etc.

I don't think it's necessarily a terrible idea, it might make some classes that have initially harder starts easier to use; but it seems like a lot of redesign would be needed.

[HousePet]

I'd don't see a problem with Urkis attacking Derth or the Dark Crypt happening earlier. Its supposed to be hard.

The starter dungeons would be interesting.
The skipping only kicks in after you have killed two starter bosses.
They would hit max scaling level, but that would actually be a good thing, as it would give you a chance to get some equipment together, before being creamed by rares.

AFAIK people have been drowning npcs for items and levels before entering any dungeons currently, so this would just give the same stuff, but without the bad gameplay.

[RaginCajun]

Housepet if your serious. The reason you don't start at level 10 is because then what is the point of having levels 1-9? if your never level 1-9 then your technically...level one. The first level always has to be the first level. That's really the semantics of it. If you wanted the power of being level 10. I myself will hopefully work with others in my thread about difficulty to properly balance anything left that people don't feel is balanced.

[HousePet]

Semantics be damned, nightmare and insane are challenge modes.

[Davion Fuxa]

Semantics be damned, nightmare and insane are challenge modes.

I have to ask, what happens in Normal then - since I assume that we would see characters entering at level 10 there as well.