Guild Wars and Respecs

So I've started playing Hellgate: London lately. The dev team their has decided to go with a Diablo 2-style skill system, in which skill choices are set in stone forever, you can never change them. The community over there is hotly divided on whether this is a good or bad thing. Personally, I think the ability to change builds on the fly is the single best thing about Guild Wars, and singlehandedly makes it one of the best RPGs on the market. However..., well, here's a few quotes from those forums:

Discuss. Easy respeccing the best thing to ever happen to the game or a terrible idea?

Holy crap, ChroystmoBot has stumbled on the ultimate GvG meta; 8 wammos. What an unstoppable combination. I mean, they can do damage with swords and axes... AND heal! All 8 of them. I mean, how can anyone shut down 8 healers and 8 damage dealers at the same time?

I really like the concept of respeccing in GW. The same tactics can't work in every part of the game, so being able to respec lets us meet the different challenges head on and not be disadvantaged by being restricted to one build strategy. It also gives us more freedom to experiment with our characters strengths to find out which aspects of each profession that we like the most.

So overall, I think that the ability to respec is a good thing in this game.

Removal of att refund points, and making respecs limitless, was one of the best changes this game has seen.

Our respect system is definately good. If a noob in HG:L starts to spec incorrectly and doesn't know until too late, (s)he either deletes his/her character and starts again with the right spec, or remains a noob. In GW, (s)he just changes and maybe gets a couple of different runes.

By 'right spec', I mean not stuff like R/Mo with Beast Mastery, Marksmahip, Smiting and Protection for the pet, but no Expertise.

The WoW respec system kinda sucks. Gotta pay money for it, the amount increases every time you do so.


And yeah, Warrior Monks are immortal, we need more players like ChroystmoBot;304548 in our community.

EDIT: Made it seem like our respeccing sucks, bad wording.

Being able to change anything about our build at will is a really good idea, the refund point system was kinda crap.

I hated not respeccing in Diablo II when i played it. When you first start a game you hardly know what your play style is going to be all the way through. GW give you the ability to design your own, unique style of play, without having to replay the same game over again JUST to get a different build, only to get the one you wanted and think to yourself "why the hell didn't I go with this one to begin with. That's a few days of my life i'll never get back."

I like the system in Titan Quest, in the expansion they made it so that if you screwed up your specs you just pay to have it changed. It costs a little bit of money but money is so easy to come by that it doesn't really matter. In a game like Guild Wars where they intentionally make areas different from one another you need to be able to respec on the fly in a quick, painless way.

I think they both play to their own level. Respecs in Guild Wars is needed, as in Hellgate its not. I can understand the frustration on picking a skill that really sucks and not being able to take it back, but GW and HL are two seperate animals. Guild Wars you play your skill bar, constantly clicking skills over and over to beat your foe, hardly using just non-skill melee fighting. Hellgate, like its base, uses mainly the non-skill melee fighting and skills as maybe a support. This also comes down to having different mods on weapons. Guild Wars is limited on damage and mods you can have on your melee weapons, Hell Gates weapons continue to grow in level as your character continue to grow, also the mods are very vast.

I think a form or respec in skills in HL should not be ruled out. I believe maybe you should be able to try out the last point you earned in gaining a level to see which skill suits better and then when you reach your next level that last skill point becomes permanent.

But is this a general discussion? Your asking peoples opinion on a different game and game type.

I wanto to know what ChroystmoBot is shooting up, cause that stuff's got to be too strong to be street legal.

Wa/Mo's needed? Good lord, having even one Wa/Mo in a group is often a recipe for a wipe, not at all needed, let alone desired.


As for the preference of no respec's, I can understand it. For a roleplay focused player, its almost required that a game be that way. But video games just aren't the right place for roleplay.

^^. Can't really add to that.

...
The naivity of some people. Yeah, more people play WoW because it has no respec system. Yup. :\

The level 20 cap, "8-skills only", and infinite re-spec define guild-wars as a game. These alone put it leagues above most rpgs in terms of skill vs time. Admitedly, the new titles system means many people just play one character, which goes against the concept, but hey, that's another thread.

You know what really suck?

i remember my Diablo 2 sorceress with the ice comet and the thing who lower enemy ice resistence.

It was pretty much build around that thing.

They one day blizzard chosed to nerf the skill.

Gw approach -> who care time to change build
Diablo approach -> doh!

As a former Hellgate:London fanatic, I'd say that Flagship studios have made just about every wrong "game philosophy" decision they could. Including respecs.

A game with no respecs simply means that if you want to play a character differently, you have to start all over again. Pass all the tutorials, all the storyline quests, all the boring levelling,... This does not enhance replayability. It FORCES replaying that is not fun.

GW got the philosophy right. Make the character adaptable and then keep all areas interesting by forcing the player to adapt insted of level up and defeat the opposition with brute force. It also lets you focus on your character, instead of making you go for a thousand other characters to be able to do everything in the game...

@ BlueNovember : I think Harmony is referring to WoW and GW in union, not comparing as they both have repec systems

Its been a long time I've played something non GW...The very idea of not allowing respecs as in GW seems crazy. I really don't seem the point at all of forcing that. This is just another element of the GW game design that I overlooked and underappreciated.

I remember going and soloing the sand drakes to generate refund points I do miss not being able to move att points in a zone though .. was part of the core 55 build.

The only thing I can say to disagree with that is that in Guild Wars, every person is virtually the same as the next. If they don't have a skill that is helpful, they have a similar one. Everyones weapons do close to the same amount of damage, except for maybe one person having a +30 mod and another an armor +7. but they all have the same amount of health, magic, armor etc and can easily get whatever skills as the next person. Not being able to respec or limited respeccing in other games make sure that all characters are unique, at least until the internet is flooded with the "perfect" skill setup for each class.

that might be true, but a guildwars without respec will make me uninstall the game in a hour.

This idea of uniqueness is misleading. Being pigeonholed doesn't make you unique it means you have no options. GW characters are as unique as you decide to make them. You can setup a bar from a number of classes and skills and play them as you like. How would be forced down a certain path make the game better than giving people to option to do what they wanted with the character?

Of course there is another fundamental flaw here in the idea that every person is the same. Guildwars has different classes that each play very differently at about every stage of the game.

I think it's a great part of the game. Having played diablo 2, it was annoying to have to restart a char everytime i wanted a new build. Although you could be "rushed" through in no time, guildwars is a much bigger game and redoing chars so often would be hell. Not to mention you can't create new free accounts at will like on diablo 2, to store all these chars.