Yay, finally! Mastery respec. You brought me back!

Sure, that makes sense. We don’t have a full-free-respec system. What are your thoughts on loadouts in a gold and skill-xp cost system?

Yes, that would help to facilitate a function that we aren’t attempting to promote. It’s like the Faction swapping. When we announced it, there was a worry that people would be switching back and forth like crazy. I think this is similar. We aren’t trying to promote frequent switching but want to allow “un-bricking” a character.

I’m not saying that a loadout system is impossible to do in the future but it’s not an obvious or necessary follow-up to adding an option to respec your mastery.

I’m going to push back on them being effectively free and even if they were, it wouldn’t “absolutely promote frequent switching”. It could under the right circumstances but I don’t think we have those. I think the premise of the argument is on very shaky ground.

As I said previously, if it does end up being a problem, we are prepared to make adjustments as we always are. We will be paying close attention to feedback and adjust accordingly if necessary.

I promise that if mastery respec is meta defining I will push very hard to add a restriction. I understand the concern here. You’re right that it is harder to take something away than it is to add it. We are confident that if some limiting factor is required that it can be done cleanly enough that it’s worth it to just go to the system we think will be the best in the long run.

@DiceDragon
In this case, that loud camp I think actually delayed this. Low quality arguments for something can have the opposite effect by making the recipient dismiss the entire idea due to some reasons being ineffective. It’s not intentional but I sometimes find myself needing to figure out why on my own.

As an aside, I see the D2 approach being recommended quite a bit but I do want to point out that once you’re into deep end game in D2, you can “essentially freely respec” all you want. I think that D2 is actually more free than LE will be (assuming that the D2R system hasn’t changed in the last year or so). All the time that it takes in D2 is to allocate your points. In LE you’ll still have to re-level your skills up. Some combination of the difference in potential power for completing specific activities and the increased maximum potential reward would need to be very high to be enticing enough to cause people to want to use mastery respec as part of the endgame meta to switch frequently. I see 3 levers that we can pull to affect the desire to “abuse” the system. We can make the reward quality across various activities more consistent (good thing to strive for anyways). We can balance the relative power between the masteries at completing different types of content (good thing to strive for anyways). Finally we can increase the friction of the respec process (which is already higher than D2).

Last time I played hard I was rolling in tokens. I could easily respec daily without trying and I could easily afford to do it way more often than that. If that’s all you’re referring to, tokens are cheap.

Either way, I still don’t think people are going to do it because levelling the skills will take too long.

The reason that it being meta defining would be an issue is that it would create a burden of optimal play that would force players to take non-intuitive and tedious actions that aren’t fun. Frequently taking the time to switch your build completely like that to do content more efficiently is not something that we want to promote.