Is there an easy way to switch builds? I don’t mind the cost aspect. I have one setup for open world and one for bosses. (Bosses find skeletons delicious but not filling, so are always eating them.) I want to be able to switch between them easily. Is there a way or is it 36,000 clicks?
When I played D2, there was no respec’ing at all. Honestly, it made for painful character development as you couldn’t invest in the shitty early skills to get you through the levels. Instead, you had to suffer through the levelling process only putting 1 point in these early skills because they were prerequisites for your final skills. Then you finally hit level 20 or whatever to unlock the skills you want and suddenly you can start spending skill points. Then if you wanted to try a different build, you made a whole new character and went through all that grind again. But it was the only option we had, so we lived with it.
D3’s system was entirely flexible and you could switch at any time, especially after they added the armoury to store complete builds. I think I got spoiled by this and now I don’t see any good reason that we shouldn’t just be able to switch easily between farming and pushing builds.
D4’s system is halfway between. You can fully respec your character… but they’ve designed the UI to be hostile to it. It’s easy to refund all your skills and reassign them, but it’s impossible to refund all paragon points except by clicking through them all one by one. It feels like a big step backwards from what we had in D3. All this does is discourage experimentation in builds. Even if they don’t want us to have an armoury to easily manage multiple builds, why on Earth haven’t they provided a “refund all” button for paragon points when we have one for skill points? The cynic in me says “so they can put Scrolls of Amnesia in the in-game store”.
I’m always torn on this, I like the idea of easily respeccing but this is such a meta gamer issue that I also don’t really want it either.
These sorts of things eventually become requirements, kind of Ike what add ons evolved into if you play world of Warcraft.
I don’t want to feel required to gear and equip multiple builds per character depending on the part of the game I’m playing. Having trade offs isn’t a bad thing, Meta gaming for max efficiency isn’t my idea of fun.
I can understand why to some people it is though, just not the way I want to play
Yeah. In D4, I’m happy just having a single build for all content. I haven’t found any need for a farming build or a push build or anything.
So it’s only when I want to try something, experiment a little, that I really hate the lack of build storage. I can’t just park my ice build and respec into fire just to try out that cool new item I just picked up. It’s a painful process and then if I want to go back to my main ice build then I have to go through the whole process again. It’s almost like they wanted to us to build up multiple characters instead of experimenting with builds. But I really can’t find the time to grind up another sorcerer to level 70 just to try out that level 70 item I found.
I see your point but I think Bliz is walking the PoE path. Path of Exiles is currently leading in designing and shaping the ARPG landscape. In PoE, they encourage you to try one spec per season, then move to another spec on another character for the next season.
But PoEs is a more hard-core tone, their inventory system is very very good (as they sell that service) but doing other things in there might be a bit hard like the trading system.
I think Diablo is trying to mimic some of the broader system like the season, one spec per character, not easy to respec etc. But trying to win more casual players too. Like I can easily convince my non-gamer friends to play D4 but it’d be much harder to convince them to play PoE… something like that.
We might see the respect button if Bliz just think more like WoW and cater to more casual play tho. They have track record of going more casual and casual.
I think it’s totally possible to design a system where you can alter course, without it turning into ‘respec mid boss battle meta’. I disagree with OPs strategy, but I did wish I had an easier time switching things up after 50+ levels. I felt completely stifled and unable to experiment with any new gear drops because that would mean a huge investment just to see if I liked something else better. For me, that means I’ll probably eventually lose interest. Finding out I don’t like a spec means I’ll just leave and go to something else.