Re: News from Bashiok: skill-tree re-specialization in 1.13
I would actually have hoped that they'd spend less time on unnecessary features like that, and more time on actually useful stuff
Unnecessary features = features I dislike. Useful stuff = stuff I like.
So to us ignorant people who have never WoW'd, what is the cost for re-skilling? Is it a gold cost or do they take away skill points?
Last time I played WoW (admittedly over a year ago), the first respec was free and each subsequent respec would cost an additional 5 g, up to 50 g which was the cap. At level 70 (the level I played at), 50 g was about ~30 minutes of efficient farming. A respec refunds all your talent/skill points and allows you to spend them however you want, by the way.
Granted, you cannot directly compare WoW and D2 in that respect because WoW calls for respecs far, far more often than D2 does. In WoW, respeccing once or twice a day isn't unheard of and was one of the reasons Blizzard decided to add a dual-spec feature that, for the price of 1000 g, allows you to switch between two specs whenever you want (barring in combat).
Titan Quest allows respecs in that you can buy back 1 skill point at the time. The price increases for each point you purchase until you hit the price cap, which is rather high. I'm guessing this is how respecs will work in 1.13, making full respecs very expensive but minor changes relatively cheap.
Instead of spending item resources, how about each respec would actually cost you a skillpoint(s)? Sure, you can respec all you want, but the more you do, the less effective your character will eventually be. Knowing how OCD D2 players can be about their characters being absolutely perfect, something like 5 skill points lost to respecing is huge.
As you concluded, such a feature would be useless because the people who would perhaps want to use it the most would not want to use it at all.
You cannot introduce a feature that allows you to buy back stat points at the cost of stat points. The currency with which you purchase respecs needs to come from a renewable source, such as gold, rather than your own character, not only because the alternative doesn't make any sense, but also because respecs then become a gold sink which helps balance the economy by reducing inflation.
And as to 1.13, I fully intend to 4) wait to see what the SPF community has to say about 1.13 before I even consider installing it.
You're suggesting a community that allows several third party mods would ban an official content patch?
Well, let's say I want to try out a Charged Boltress with Fireball. Under the current system, I google, check forums (this one and several others on the diii site and other rival sites), play with the skill planner, crunch some numbers on paper, write out a skill and attribute allocation scheme, and sleep on it before I even fire up D2.
Now, suppose I could re-spec. I know that I need CB/L/LM to max Charged Bolt. I know I need, say 20 FB, 10Fbolt/FM. I start up D2, play for some number of days. Then I find that FB and CB don't work well together (or maybe I just don't like it). *poof* I move the FB points to FO, and the FBolt/FM points to CM/IceBolt, and I suddenly have a perfectly viable CB/FOrber, dig? Or maybe I don't like CB either: I take those points and put them into CL and have an even more viable CLOrber.
Re-skilling sortof ruins the fun/excitement/drudgery of testing out builds, at least on my completely noob view.
I understand your concern, but in your example above, you could avoid the whole respec scenario just by planning a bit better and avoiding putting points in poor abilities to begin with.
That aside, it's odd that you say re-skilling ruins the fun/excitement/whatever of trying out builds because that's exactly what I believe most people feel about lack of respecs. Being forced to create a new character just to try out a certain skill or synergy alienates the part of the player base that do not have time to go through the levelling up procedure just to try out said skills. It's an excellent example of bad and archaic game design and probably one of the reasons 1.13 features respecs.
I worry, however, that to re-spec means another overhaul of the skill synergies. This would be troublesome since it would (probably) render a whole lot of characters completely useless. It would be fun to come up with new viable builds, of course, but its frustrating to have level 90+ characters rendered no longer viable.
In WoW, if a class' talent trees change a lot then all (class) players have their talent points reset for free. If the D2 team decides to mess around with the skill trees, a similar solution to the problem you mention seems likely.
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