Originally Posted by Vitani
Originally Posted by Potatoo
I have to agree that these new changes to core rules are not very pleasant to hear.

I was planning to make gloom stalker/battle master/assassin multiclass with 8 STR 17 DEX 15 CON 8 INT 16 WIS 8 CHA stats. Now if I find some magical item from the game that changes my WIS to 17 or higher I can respec my WIS to 8 and raise my other stats significantly. This makes these regular not so good magical items to be legendary status magical items.

Some might say that well you don't have to respec your stats to abuse the game but I have to because this is now built in game mechanic and the game wants me to do this or else I'm being a dumb for being a bad player.
Yes, you CAN. You don't have to, but now you have the ability to.

I don't get this thread, so many faces here that were screaming "choice!" in some of the mega-threads and when Larian gives us a choice (albeit in a different thing, that might have something to do with it "why are THEY getting shinies and not US?" mentality and all that) it's suddenly bad?

At it's core it is a single player game, and saying it will make multiplayer unbearable because people will want to respec mid game...well, find people that like to play your way, it should be obvious in a RPG.

Also to all hardcore D&D fun-killers here - remember that this game might be the first contact with D&D for some people, if they get into it they'll learn the rules themselves and not ruin your single player experience any more...

I think at times it can be best to use extremes in order to drive a point home as to what people are saying.

Let's say you run into an NPC who is rather bad early in the game and easy to kill. You can either talk to them or kill them, but either way they will either give you or have 'THE CAP OF AWESOMENESS!' on their corpse. 'THE CAP OF AWESOMENESS!' sets all of your ability scores to 100, gives you every spell in the game and makes you have a million hit points. Is this good game design?

What is you run into other characters that drop the belt of awesomeness, sword of awesomeness, etc. And some of them set your ability scores to 30, some others set them to 50... but they overall all make you absurdly powerful. Is that good game design?

After all - you could just choose not to use these absurdly powerful items that are dropping all over the place... right?

The balance of a game matters and it is definitely part of the fun. It can be a tricky thing to get right because people are going to have different opinions on it. But I don't think this is a 'choice' thing. They are making these (total respec, multiclassing) fundamental parts (systems) of the game that will be presented to everyone to use. So they should at least try to make them balanced and make sense, even if it is a single-player game.