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This is such a fantastic QoL change aspect, I can't wait to play with it again to speed stuff up.
Quality of Life is a big focus for our next patch.
Here's a link to the patch preview thread in case you haven't seen it already.
This is excellent! However, I'm kinda hoping there is also a way to potentially speed level, at least while in Beta. Gold doesn't have much use yet, but to level builds, there is a lot of effort to go through.
Is there possibility a merchant could be added to buy passive and specialisation points for gp, at least while there is no real use in the game for gold currently.
I really want to try a Sentinel, but after making a Druid and a Spellsword, the idea of having to spend so much time in a game that runs quite slowly and buggy in certain areas is pretty off-putting. It is that which is stopping me from playing the game again.
Alternatively, a Teleport to the monolith to level without having to play the story Again would be nice.
I'll discuss your feedback with the team.
In an earlier stage of development we made a subset of our developer tools available in-game, which could be used to level up a character either 1x or 10x, to generate a 'Lootsplosion', to unlock all waypoints, and so on. The community really liked this.
The primary issue with it was that it made the reliability of feedback much worse. People would level themselves up to 100, start farming the Arena, and get absolutely butchered. Then they'd post feedback saying that it was grossly overtuned. The problem was simple - their character was level 100 in an area which scales with character level. They had only a level 1 character's default equipment, and their gear was thus substantially worse than would be expected at that level. In some cases they even had all of their skills with only a single point spent in their specialization trees, which is similarly not expected at such a high level.
The reverse is also possible. Maybe someone would activate invinicibility and the speed boost, and skip past what they considered the 'easy' and 'boring' start of their game. This would lead to a level ~ 3 character (not killing enemies = not getting XP) in level 15 zones. Even if someone doesn't provide feedback on their experience immediately after having modified a character, once they have done so it taints the experience from there on. Between skill trees, equipment, class passives, and more - often in subtle ways, their experience isn't representative, and if they don't tell us that they used Developer Mode on that character, we cannot try to account for that. Though even if they do, it can be difficult to try to salvage any feedback given in that context.
Last Epoch began development in mid 2017, got funded mid 2018, and is planned for release in mid 2020. That's a quick pace of development for a small team, and the game will definitely be in a better state if the majority of feedback we receive is 'legit'. If we always need to be secondguessing what the community is telling us - sometimes even spending hours to follow in their footsteps - it eats into our time and will have an impact on game balance and the level of polish the game will have at release.
I've heard your feedback and we'll talk about it. But I'll be honest and say that you aren't the first one to ask, it won't be our first time to discuss it, and I don't really see the conversation having a different conclusion this time around.