Ultimate respec

I was just reading along on some other posts (mainly about colour changing and a thought occured to me. A grueling Respec trial, in which all missions must be completed and no speeding through can take place. This trial would be rewarding in drops, and have many AVs. It would take quite a bit of time. The reward i had in mind.... changing your secondary or primary power, i was thinking both but that seemed to much. I doubt this idea will go through, and am assuming you have seen it before. I believe a secondary change would be more prefered as primary i feel is going to far. This trial should be for level 50s only, who have been at level 50 for at least 2 weeks, and would maybe cost influence/infamy, thats up to you to decide.... if it gets passed through.

I was also thinking that after choosing your new secondary, you could keep one build with the old secondary and one with the new, so you could have a Stone/ SS tanker and a Fire/ss tanker at your disposal from one character...(the fact that this defeats the purpose of being a hero with 'unique' power's just occurred to me as i was typing, that statement is only regarding this last paragraph, and it defeats the single power set of a hero. I still belive the respec should change your secondary however, if the player wants. primary is your desicion.

its late im tired, and i appologize for the unnorganized writing form and messy grammer.

Short answer: No.

Long answer: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooooooooooooo.

I see some people already beat me to mentioning that the subject had come up before.

It's come up before... well. pretty much everytime a new issue hits... and each time, the development staff has given a pretty big thumbs down to the idea. Thirty_Seven hits on the number of characters you can create as being one reason the devs say no. Granted, Cap'n Jack's idea of the game long ago is that you would level a character to 50... then start again. Aaand if you screwed up on powers or slotting, you just needed to delete and start over. Thankfully, that vision of CoH has largely given way to a world where players can field multiple avatars, and respec within their slots and enhancements.

That being said, one of the design goals of the game is for players to experience the content as they level up. The developers had to drop an anvil on Architecture Entertainment because of the sheer number of players blowing past levels without learning the game. The developers have to at some point, maintain and direct the player-base in the way the developers want the game to be experienced... whether or not portions of the player base like it that way.

Allowing players to just automagically change their primary and secondary power sets... well... Take stone armor for example. It's a freaking pain from 1 to 32 as it's pretty much defense only with only minor smash / lethal resist. Once you get into IO's though, and you've got the defenses and rooted slotted, it's easily as good as the other poor tanking sets (fire and dark) outside of granite... and king inside of granite. Letting players change their primaries would see a flood of invuln and willpower tanks, which are really good at low levels, who then convert to other armors that they want to play at higher levels.

As of right now there's enough problems with players in the game that don't know how to use their powers, or just skip powers they think are useless. Case in point for me, I've had to explain to vets well over the 45month badge mark that O2 boost prevents end-drain and stun... while fighting malta. I've had to explain to countless fire / kins on freedom that increase density protects against knockback, stun, and adds smashing / lethal resistance. On the subject of kins, I've also had to explain that fulcrum shift isn't always for the player casting it... but rather for the team that's in melee range. Sure, if you can get in FS range on your own, great... but if you're fighting something with a huge amount of AOE (Praetorians, Cimeroran Traitors, Rularuu)... and you keep dying in melee... just stay out of the melee fight and support your scrappers / tanks / brutes / scrappers.

I can only imagine the horrible pain that would result in players being able to change power sets... to something they haven't spent any time with. I've got enough problems with power-levelers that crank out 50's on a weekly basis that have no earthly idea how to play time. I really don't want to think about the entire player-base having access to that sort of change up.

Just because I can...

...mind you, I'm not all in favour of the idea but as an ardent opponent of power-leveling in all its forms it can be a bit arduous to take a set, Primary or Secondary, to its logical conclusion. Sometimes it just so happens that even after level 32 or 38 (or later if you decide to slot up a little first) you find out that a given Powerset just doesn't do it for you. I've deleted at least one level 50 (maybe two, not sure anymore) and several high 30s/low 40s in my time for this reason. If I found only one powerset lacking (case in point, my first Stormie's Elec Secondary) I might actually welcome being able to spec out of it rather than sink a lot of time into rerolling with another Secondary.

There are other possible reasons. I really don't like playing my EM Brute anymore since they changed the animation for Energy Transfer to the retarded cheerleader shove (the only thing BABs has ever done wrong as far as I can tell) and there's no customization in sight for those attacks. I wouldn't care if I had to settle for a numerically weaker set, as long as I don't actually have to reroll the guy, because he's IOed out to the gills.

Sometimes, **** happens. Being able to respec a single powerset on your character once in its lifetime might not be the worst idea ever. Hell, excluse the Buff/DeBuff sets for all I care, or only allow it for people with five years of Vet Badges. There is merit to the idea.

Oh look, another powerset respec thread. Anyone got the copy/paste response as to why this is a terrible, terrible idea in any form?

I've never liked this idea (sorry to the original poster), but I got a really good feeling of why I don't like it during I16 beta. Characters with proliferated powers got 2 level bumps during the duration of beta, once to 35, and then again to 50. Obviously the devs wanted us to try out the high-end content and powers without spending 30 hours of playtime.

I had a Dual Blades/Electric Scrapper.

I had no idea how to slot the powers. I had no clue on the utility of others. I had a lvl 50 that I didn’t earn, and it wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be. It was cool enough that I made one on live, but I don’t lament starting from lvl 1.

Some people think crafting wasn’t added into this game until Inventions. True crafting has been around since day 1. Everyone has forged their characters in the fires of experience, finely tuned to fit the needs of the player. You may unlock your powers at certain levels, but you earn them as you use them.

Hi all, I'm new to the forums, but have been a loyal player for many years. Now I'm opposed to a "Full" respec, but I think the ability to change your primary or secondary wouldn't be that bad. For instance, I have a level 40 robotics/devices MM. Now after playing him for a long time, I realize how much I would rather have the Pain domination set, which was introduced after I had created my character originaly. Now I know what you are all going to say, "Just remake him." Now I would do that but I also have some very specific badges on him, specificaly the Rikti Invasion badges that gives me access to a very slick looking Rikti blaster for my robotics set. Now I understand the basics of what you all are saying, and the possible downfalls of such a system, but I worked long and hard on this character and would recreate him, but I would not be able to get this badge again, and thus, not get this blaster for my character, seeing as the Rikti invasions no longer happen. Now on top of that, I Have a full time third shift job, and work hard at my job to make money to get a slick computer to play this awesome game and other MMO's, and I simply don't have the amount of time to spend on making new characters like all these unemployed people who do nothing but play on their computers all day. Bottom line is it would be nice to have a one time per character option to change your primary or secondary powerset, or if you choose to recreate the character, have the cool weapons and other costume extras transfer over some how. Now please don't chew me all to hell over this, I'm just giving my two cents.
P.S. If a dev reads this post, please consider the rammifications of my point of view, I'm sure I'm not the only one in this type of position, and if you want to keep people from exploiting this, put a 30 day trial period with the powerset respec where they would have the time to thouroughly test out the new powerset and if doesn't work for them, simply give them the option to chance it back to the original set. Just food for thought.

Not going to quote the wall of text above me (seriously man, break it up into paragraphs, you made some good points but people won't read the wall of text) but there is a point in there.

You know what I'd get behind? A paid for 'Badge Transfer' option that lets you transfer your badges from one character to another...the one you transfer off of has all their badges completely stripped, they're reset to nothing, nudda, zip, they ain't keeping them badges!

The transfer target gets all the badges given to him along with any unlocks those badges grant.

It's a great way to strip some of those 'hard to get' badges from characters you don't play anymore to ones who would find it more useful OR like above use it to grant all the badges to a new remade version of an old character where you didn't like their secondary/primary.