Why respec should be for free

Theres 3 groups of players:
1. Players that follow a buildguide. They rarely respec because the guide says exactly what to do. So the gold cost has little to no effect on them.
2. Players that know what they’re doing, and are not following a guide. They might respec more often if they’re not following a guide, but they know how to make gold quickly. So the gold cost has little to no effect on them.
3. Players that don’t know what they’re doing, and are not following a guide. They struggle and need to experiment a lot, meaning they’re constantly needing to respec, and they don’t know how to farm gold quickly. They get stuck with terrible passive trees and no money to respec.

The respec gold cost therefore really only really hurts the players that struggle the most. That seems unnecessary.

If you need to redo your whole tree, just making a new character costs zero gold, and getting back to maps takes very little time, even less if you keep lvling rares around.

This isn't an issue.

I still think orbs of regret were a better system, or both regrets & gold like poe1 currently has.

People said the issue with orbs of regret is it makes respecs costly early on when orbs of regret are scarce and then inconsequential to higher level players who find them constantly.

Gold has the same problem still but worse since it has other competing uses like gambling for gear in campaign.

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Oldcraft#9611 wrote:

If you need to redo your whole tree, just making a new character costs zero gold, and getting back to maps takes very little time, even less if you keep lvling rares around.

This isn't an issue.

You’re in the second category I’ve described. So I already explained that for you it’s not a problem.
My post is about the third category, the people for whom the campaign takes 20+ hours.

I know what I'm doing coz I've played the campaign tons of times, Learning is all part of the game, and refusing to do so is heretical to what playing an ARPG is all about, especially one such as poe.
What i described before is something any new player should get comfortable with doing in an ARPG such as poe.
When you stop learning, you don't get better at the game, it's that simple.

Asking the devs to give you a free pass coz you don't want to go through the time to learn and be more efficient at something?

Group 2 and 3 are actually the same group. The differentiating factor is perseverance.

I think any player who's "confused" about a respec or might feel like they need to redo a significant part of the tree is probably at a level where a point costs about 1k to refund and you can walk into tons of campaign zones and crush monsters and find a few thousand gold pretty quickly even on shitty builds. This is not a demanding ask.

Picking points has to have SOME significance and it's already pretty low because the solution to the problem postured here already exists in the form of "playing the game" and it doesn't get any more basic than that.

I have never once made an effort to "farm gold" and I have gone on multiple 10M+ gambling sprees and re-specced to my hearts delight on characters across many levels and I still have about 21M in the bank right now. I think we need more ways to spend gold lol.

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karsey#2995 wrote:

Picking points has to have SOME significance

The significance should be in making your character work. Not in whether you farmed enough gold.

It’s pretty funny that you’re both gatekeeping hard, and at the same time GGG is openly admitting they’re struggling to get feedback from people with less experience in the game.

You know why? Because gatekeepers like you two drive casuals like me away from providing feedback. And that’s how they end up only getting feedback from people who have no issues with anything but endgame, and how the playerbase doesn’t grow.

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TheBalrogslayer#7574 wrote:

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karsey#2995 wrote:

Picking points has to have SOME significance

The significance should be in making your character work. Not in whether you farmed enough gold.

It’s pretty funny that you’re both gatekeeping hard, and at the same time GGG is openly admitting they’re struggling to get feedback from people with less experience in the game.

You know why? Because gatekeepers like you two drive casuals like me away from providing feedback. And that’s how they end up only getting feedback from people who have no issues with anything but endgame, and how the playerbase doesn’t grow.

My disagreeing does not mean your feedback is invalid. We are just having a discussion.

Your position is that re-spec costs feel like another layer of unnecessary complexity or "punishing overhead" for inexperienced players who are likely to make poor passive point choices.

Mine is that the level of "punishment" (ie. amount of the gold fee) is non-significant until you are already at a level where acquiring the enough gold to experiment and re-spec is a commensurately non-significant activity, which is evidenced by the fact that they have been able to make it to that level in the first place.

So by the time your postured problem might start to be a real problem for people in group 3, they've at least got a foot into being part of group 2.

The respec cost is to maintain the meaningfulness behind a passive tree node choices and to discourage things like people re-jigging their tree before every single boss encounter to change it from their "clear" tree to their "bossing" tree.