Build Fragility and the Respec System

I'm sure this is something that is on a lot of people's minds right now with the announcement of the BotZ change. While related and worth discussing, I'm not sure starting a conversation on it was appropriate for Castle's thread.

When respecs were introduced, builds weren't that complicated; it was pretty much just SOs and HOs. How you slotted one power generally didn't ripple through your entire build, even in full HO builds. For example, when GDN hit, players in a full HO build would still be using Nuccleouses in their attacks. The fact that their defenses were downgraded didn't change their slotting. They may have decided to opt out of some attacks to stack more mitigation, but they still slotted defensive powers the same. (Note: I said GDN, not ED.)

Now, when a power, IO, set bonus, etc, is changed, it can ripple through the entirety of the build. In the case of BotZ, players lost defense, and in order to get that back they may need to change slotting in other completely unrelated powers - for example swapping from Hecatomb to Mako's Bite for more ranged defense. This change would effect their global recharge and enhancement value in the power. It can very quickly cascade into a half new build.

The current respec system doesn't handle this very well. The interface is very clunky, slow, and hard to correct a mistake. (Oh, I accidently took the wrong power at lvl6, now I have to back out of all of my changes.) There is the QoL aspect of it filling your trays with temp powers.

The point I'd like to talk about, however, is saving enhancements. As I said above, when builds were simpler, adapting to changes took shuffling less enhancements than now. As a player, it's easy to say "we should be able to unslot more enhancements at once, say 20, 30, or all of them!" That'd definitely take the sting away, no question, but it would have the side effect of saturating the game with them.

Consider this scenario: A player is leveling up a character and frankenslots them with IOs. Upon hitting lvl50 they respec and use a build utilizing set bonuses. Now they have 20, 30, or X of their old IOs. Next time they start an alt, they have that many more IOs to use to frankenslot. Or consider someone respeccing from an old IO build to a new, stronger one. Previously they'd have to decide which handful of IOs they wanted to keep or whether it'd be worth it to use multiple respecs. The more enhancements you can save between respecs, the more will be saved. Eventually, the game would become saturated with IOs. (This is the reason that mechanisms like "Bind on ___" were created. It's an attempt to: *prevent rampant power inflation and *preserve item value. We have a soft "Bind on ___" with only being able to save 10 enhancements per respec.)


So we're in a bit of a pickle. Right now builds can be very sensitive to even minor changes, but it wouldn't be wise to just allow players to swap IOs casually. Since locking powers/sets/etc from being changed isn't an option, what do you think a good idea to make respeccing easier would be? Try to list possible problems if you can.

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Example: Convert unsaved IOs into Merits
(Stolen from Castle's BotZ thread, forgot who suggested it, sorry)

Good: This allows players to adapt to new changes without keeping everything. (They'd still need to pay for salvage / crafting.)

Bad: Heavily exploitable. Slot a character with a lot of cheap, crappy sets, respec to get merits, use merits to buy more expensive/powerful recipes.
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So, what do you guys think would be both a palatable and appropriate compensation for respeccing in the world of IOs?


(Pardon the wall of text.)

Possible quick and easy solution.

Allow the mailing of enhancements while in the respec screen.

Not a perfect solution and people may have to empty out their mail boxes before they respec, but it's an option that may be easier to code than to rebuild the respec system, for now.

Sarrate,

I can't seem to agree that allowing the removal of all enhancements from a build to either store or sell would be anything but a good thing.

I'm not groking the whole "saturating the market" thing. As you state, I can do it now, but it costs me three respecs and the horrific waste of time that this is.

Instead, it would cost me one respec and waste far less time.

If this is possible now, why isn't the market saturated?

Granted, as always, I'm looking at it through my admittedly narrow field of vision. I have TWO characters with lots of setIOs. At best, my change would let be dump out all the basic IOs I have on character C and give them to character D.

What this would do would be to lower the demand on the market. Demand goes down, prices go down, newer, poorer players can start affording some of the better stuff.

Seem like a win/win to me.

Question thrown out generally:

Would you trade the ability to pull IOs out of a build at minimal cost for making set-IOs bind on equip ?

IOs are the equivalent of gear in many other MMOs. There the standard seems to be 'easy to change, but things are bound on equip' (or the even worse bind on pickup)


I doubt we will get a much more flexible system to pull IOs out without having them bound to an individual character.

I wouldn't mind the idea of an "Enhancement-spec", where I can just unlock all the Enhancements currently in my build and move them into my tray as I wish. Respecs to unlock Enhancements do kind of bug me, since I have so many macros. After doing the respec, I still have a lot of work to get everything back into place again.

The problem would be how to implement it. I agree that you shouldn't be able to just remove Enhancements willy-nilly, but being able to only remove 10, and trade in the rest, unless you want to simply move them around, seems too far in the other direction. Especially with dual builds. Maybe just a flag, which says, "This Enhancement is locked", when you slot it, then the respec unlocks it for any successive move, until again slotted and locked.

It would be nice if you could access Wentworths or the BM from the Respec screen. That way no new system would need to be created, and at least you could save like 25 or more instead of only 10 IO's. It would have to be one heck of a respec to have more than 25 IO's that you needed to trade out and were actually worth selling.

I'm just throwing out an idea but what if you were allowed during respec to 'break down' an IO you select into its recipe and salvage components? Assuming your salvage tray has 52 slots and is empty, and each IO uses an average of 4 pieces of salvage, then you could save about 52/4 = 13 more IOs than you can under the current system. Maybe add a prompt asking if you want to delete the salvage in order to fill up your recipe slots.

The reason for this suggestion is that a complete overhaul of the respec system would take a lot of time and resources. This would be a band-aid on the current problem, but maybe much more achievable under the current system.

It's late and I'm tired so I haven't read everyones responses, but why does the solution have to be just something done with the respec system?

As it stands now, we can have up to 9 trays of powers, thinking like this what about giving each character several (the figurative, not literal several) , maybe 3-4 trays for IO Enhancements.

Example
Each character can hold up to 40 crafted enhancements, and 10 SO/DO/TO.
Players can craft and hold these 40 IOs regardless of respec or not, or just to craft and hold until they can slot. You can only have the one tray pop up but you can use arrows to scroll back and forth on the regular screen. On the Respec screen you can put your IOs in the IO slots. I think this would jsut be a cool QoL thing for everyone anyway, and has nothing to do with specifically losing IOs during a respec.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Sure, the devs are supposed to listen to their customers, mister business 101 out there. And if I decide to start suggesting that the devs change the game from being about superheroes and supervillains to being about clowns that is my right as well, and technically Paragon Studios is supposed to pay attention to me. But I hope strongly that they assume a meth-head somehow managed to hack into my forum account and make paper airplanes out of my posts, because I hope they recognize stupid when they see it. I assume they will recognize futile just as accurately.

Unless I am misunderstanding the exploit is even easier

Roll say 20 recipes (200 merits) then cash any you don't want back for merits based off their direct buy price.

Then repeat

Any 'merit return' for a recipe has to be less than the cost of a random roll.