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Quote from "Inevitable" »

I am pro and against this.
Against- this will destroy the chance of people to remake their chars, and try to better themselves everytime. There will just be no fun to it anymore. You will not have to work hard for your chars' supremacy.

I don't understand this concept. Sure, I can work at making myself better at leveling up through the game, and respecs will mean I focus less on that, but you still need to work hard at playing the high ends of the game. Even more so than the leveling/progression part. The end of the game should be the hardest part, and will be the best to hone your skills as a player. After doing that for some time, when you do decide to go back to make another class, you'll find that the things you learned playing the end game, while not neccesarily the same things you would have learned playing through each time, are at least as important, and in many cases more important.

When I play a game, my ultimate goal is to be the best player I can be and destroy whatever opposition is presented to me, human or NPC. Playing through early and easier stages of the game doesn't promote that as much as late difficult stages.


Regarding cooldowns on respecing. (i.e. back on topic)
An in game timer simply won't work. I'll just afk overnight, job done. Gradualy increasing costs in conjunction with those costs going down with a real world timer is an interesting idea. One I don't really like, but I am willing to compromise with those who don't want constant respec to be what this game is about.

I think respecs should be alloud in any outpost/town. Having them controlled by an NPC is a great way to control this. To elaborate on my 'I want to respec as many damn times as I want' rant, in this scenario I fully expect the difficulty of the game to reflect that, i.e. I'm going to spec to resist magic damage, not becuase it will make killing this area easier. but becuase this area will hand my ass to me on a silver patter if I don't.

Also, having it cost gold means people want gold. If people want gold, then that means that gold is worth more than a few potions.

I don't agree with the quest reward concept, as that basicly implies that it can only be done a limited number of times (presumably 3 per quest). Yes, I want to repsec as many damn times as I want.

@ nkobc

Believe it or not, I agree with planning being a huge part of making a successful character. The part I disagree with is that respecing takes away from it. I used to play Guild Wars religiously (my hours logged is in the thousands) and respecs definitely did NOT take away from planning. Having been a PvPer in that game, planning went a long way towards success, and you didn't just plan one character, you planned your entire 8 man team. Every skill. Every stat. 8 times.

Back on track now, the respecs in GW were allowed as many times as you wanted, and were free. This actualy encouraged you to find the better builds, and to optimize the good ones.

Lets take a look at the planning process from the 2 games.

Diablo 2:LoD
1 choose a function (this boils down usually to farming PvE or PvP)
2 choose gear (and farm it if nessecary)
3 choose attributes based on gear, and skills
4 level a character (trist/tomb run, rush, norm baal run, rush, NM baal run, rush, Hell baal runs)
for new ideas, go back to step 1
Guild Wars
1 Choose a function
2 choose gear (and farm it if nessecary)
3 plan skills and stats
4 level your character ( doing this goes hand in hand with aquireing money for gear, and getting skills)
for new ideas, use steps 1~3

Now, I've said before that the part I don't like is the grind, and this constitutes step 4 in both scenarios. I enjoy story elements of most games (and diablo is no exception), but not over and over again, especialy when you have to do everything 3 times (norm, nm, hell) each time you want to try something new.. Respecs eliminate that part of the game and allow you to focus more on the planning.

Quote from "nzkobc" »

How about : IT REMOVES A GIGANTIC PART OF THE GAMEPLAY.

Now, if that wasn't an important part of the gameplay for you, that fine. But it was a HUGE part of the gameplay for me. It was the main part, along with collecting gear.

Here is where I stand : One point every level is great. and then either gold or exp to respec more than that. I think you should be able to tweak your character's skills some, but make it impossibly expensive to complete change it.

Exactly what part of the gameplay are you talking about? The part where you screw up and start over from scratch, and get your friends hammerdin to rush you? Thats not good gameplay IMO, in fact, I'm only paying half attention to the game at that point because thats all i need to. It's grind.

Needing exp to do it is an interesting idea, and would depend largely on how leveling up in general works in D3. As for gold, yeah, making it obscenely expensive is fine.

I'm all for it, and I havn't seen a good arguement against it yet. Some counter arguements to those posted:
Respecs will generate cookie cutter builds.
Cookie cutter builds are going to exist no matter what. Remember the hammerdin?

It only takes 2 or 3 days to get to level 80 anyway.
Believe it or not, grinding 30 hours or how ever it's going to take to get to level 80 is NOT fun to some players.

It makes your character less unique.
Theres nothing stopping you from making unique characters if you don't want to respec, demanding other players to go by your own ethos is kinda messed up. On a related note, the game Guild Wars allows infinite respecs (for free even) and it didn't stop people from making duplicates of the same class (I've heard of people buying an extra 10+ character slots so they could accomodate this).

There should no respecs in HC mode.
No respec in HC is definitely acceptable and goes with the overall theme of the HC game style. This one i do actually like.

Respecs will allow players to build for the early game (pump high bash) then change for the late game (change bash to double swing) making it too easy.
There's no reason the difficulty level can't accomodate this.

A few other thoughts;
Respecs should cost a considerable ammount of resources (and make for a good money sink for that matter).

As said before, respecing has nothing to do with WoW specificaly and is a game dynamic found in many games.

Someone else mentioned that you still need to gear your character
, and this is absolutley right. In general, it's not so simple as just clicking the skill tree again. Planning still needs to go into it, and time invested to make the truely good builds work.

As for respecing being too easy, I like to think of myself as a power gamer, and finding the easiest method to do things is exactly what thats about. I'm going to pull up the example of the hammerdin again. The build took a small ammount of skill to actualy run, requireing you to manage 3 skills with 2 mouse buttons (tele, hammer, and conc) but past that made the game exessively easy.