Please improve retraining

[ÆtherNomad]

As everyone knows, it's possible to retrain any character (including the main character) by speaking to Hilor. I just spent a few hours playing around with this on my main character, and I'm extremely disappointed with this mechanic. Here are its most glaring issues:
- It is impossible to take a break in the middle of retraining. As soon as you have begun retraining, you are forced to make ALL your levelling up decisions immediately, even for mythic ranks. This is a huge problem for multiple reasons as we will see below, but the most immediately obvious one (though not the most dire) is that you absolutely need to take several hours in advance just for this.
- It is impossible to save or load in the middle of the process, and it is impossible to cancel previously completed levels. This is pretty stupid: it means that if you make even A SINGLE MISTAKE when retraining, your ONLY option is to force the game to close with Alt F4 or similar and start over from the very beginning. You even need to go through your character's appearance all over again every single time! But this is especially infuriating when you are following the Legend Mythic path and have 35+ levels to go through every time. This means that not a single mistake can be made during the retraining process. You absolutely need to memorize the exact order in which you must learn each ability to complete your build. You clicked the wrong button accidentally? Tough luck, gotta start over now.
- In fact, because it is impossible to load game while retraining, it is even impossible to cancel retraining without forcing the game to quit! You decided that actually you don't want to go through 35+ levels right now? Sorry, no can do, you gotta brutalize your PC and lose a good 10 minutes or more in order to get away! This is especially significant when your game has a lot of saves to upload to the cloud before you can launch it again without risking desyncs!
- It is impossible to take a look at your character sheet, equipment or inventory during this process. This is completely absurd! So, for example, we are not allowed to verify the properties of items we are using in order to take appropriate levelling decisions in response.
- Your alignment and the history of your moral decisions are cleared when using this feature. Although this is a minor issue as compared to the above, this is still extremely sad and disappointing. I want to feel like my character is the result and culmination of all the decisions I took during the game. I understand that when retraining to change alignment there is no other option, but when keeping the same alignment as before this should not be happening! More worryingly, this makes me wonder whether retraining also irreversibly erases other parts of your character's data, and this makes me very frightened to use this feature at all.

In summary:
Please make it so that retraining merely resets all levels and mythic ranks and lets you go through them at your own rhythm, save and load between them, check your equipment and stats between them, etc, just as you can when levelling up normally. Please let us save, load and check our inventory in between levels (or mythic ranks) when retraining. As it currently is, this very important feature is a true nightmare to use.

Additionally, please allow us to keep our exact position in the alignment chart and the history of our past decisions if we didn't change our alignment when retraining.

[TamTroll]

Additional request:

Let us pick and choose things that get retrained without needing to suffer re-building the entire character from scratch.

All i want to do is take that "Shortsword" weapon focus i took at level 5 and change it to "Longsword" weapon focus.

If that makes me need to re-train some other things that had Weapon Focus (Shortsword) as a prerequisite, then sure. but that's no reason to make me re-allocate ever single skillpoint i ever had.

[ÆtherNomad]

Originally posted by TamTroll:

Additional request:

Let us pick and choose things that get retrained without needing to suffer re-building the entire character from scratch.

All i want to do is take that "Shortsword" weapon focus i took at level 5 and change it to "Longsword" weapon focus.

If that makes me need to re-train some other things that had Weapon Focus (Shortsword) as a prerequisite, then sure. but that's no reason to make me re-allocate ever single skillpoint i ever had.

Oh yeah, that's a very important request for sure. Myself, all I wanted to do was to reallocate some skill points, and now I have to go through 35 levels and clear my alignment history just for that...

[Necessary]

Hi! Thanks for the suggestions, I'll pass it on to the team. But I'm afraid it's a complicated mechanic and would be too hard to redo

[ÆtherNomad]

Originally posted by Necessary:

Hi! Thanks for the suggestions, I'll pass it on to the team. But I'm afraid it's a complicated mechanic and would be too hard to redo

Thanks a lot!

[Moo]

My Woljif had the red portrait, and when I retrained him, he reverted back to the blue portrait. So, I am afraid history may have gotten reset as well.

[Duder]

I agree you can't exit out of it at all to check you character sheet, that's really annoying. Which you could in Kingmaker. Can't make a single mistake.
Shouldn't disable core achievements either, if you switch it back for everything else imo. You have to be an expert at the ruleset not to make any mistakes while leveling.

[D-Black Catto]

Originally posted by Duder:

Shouldn't disable core achievements either, if you switch it back for everything else imo. You have to be an expert at the ruleset not to make any mistakes while leveling.

and that's why core is difficult and there is achievement for beating game on it

or did you think it's just enemy buffs?

[Duder]

Originally posted by D-Black Catto:

Originally posted by Duder:

Shouldn't disable core achievements either, if you switch it back for everything else imo. You have to be an expert at the ruleset not to make any mistakes while leveling.

and that's why core is difficult and there is achievement for beating game on it

or did you think it's just enemy buffs?

I actually got the achievement for beating it, while retraining too. Turned off some of the others which I wish I knew.
Its mostly all about combat. Not like youre retraining in the middle of a fight.
Then again hardly anyone cares about achievements. This is the only game I've ever played than penalizes you for respec. Respec is a natural part of many RPGs

[igor140]

@Aethernomad... i'm not sure what you're looking at. I can do most of those things while respec'ing.

the only part of the respec you HAVE to complete immediately is appearance/ name/ background, and level 1.

after that, it should do one of two things (depending on exactly how you respec'd):
1) it pops up a small squarish window that shows how many normal levels and how many mythic levels you need to level up. It encourages you to do this immediately... but you could always just... not. save the game, do research, come back later... the exact things you're asking for.

2) it will automatically roll you into selecting your class for the next level. If you don't want to level up, just click the little "X" in the upper right-hand corner; same mechanic since 1993. it will roll you back to your last completed level-up, and you can level up whenever/ however you like.

now, the alignment thing is true... but that doesn't really matter much in most cases (at least, not the way I play). If I knew i was going to RP a character LE, then i can safely assume all of my decisions were LE, meaning i'm still... LE. not exactly sure what you're expecting it to do here...

FWIW, "other" features that you pick up along the way, such as buffs from books you read, etc ARE retained to respec. I was pleasantly surprised to find that, but yeah... no loss of function there.

The only part of this that I agree with is the "can't look at character sheet" thing. there are time it would be very helpful to look at stat distribution/ other feats/ features while respec'ing, especially if it's a character i've fiddled with two or eight times, and i don't remember exactly what I've done. The "spreadsheet" at level selection helps... but yeah, a full character sheet would be nice.

Now, if your experience is woefully different than mine, it's possible that this respec'ing thing is handled by one of two mods i use: ToyBox and Respect Mod.

TMK, ToyBox now has all of Respec Mod's functionality built into it... but i don't think either one of them deals with anything that you've described here.

[Duder]

My biggest regret while leveling is spontaneous casters. Usually the reason I'll respec. They get a limited amount of spells. Some spells are useful throughout the game, others only at low levels. Pick some of those spells and you're stuck with them so you have to be careful.

[.//slayer]

Originally posted by Duder:

My biggest regret while leveling is spontaneous casters. Usually the reason I'll respec. They get a limited amount of spells. Some spells are useful throughout the game, others only at low levels. Pick some of those spells and you're stuck with them so you have to be careful.

Toy Box is a very easy way to solve this, if you are okay with using mods.

[igor140]

I've never thought us using ToyBox like that...

normally I just take the best/ universal spells with my spontaneous casters, and have nenio/ whomever create scrolls for them to use for the more esoteric spells.

[Duder]

Originally posted by .//slayer:

Originally posted by Duder:

My biggest regret while leveling is spontaneous casters. Usually the reason I'll respec. They get a limited amount of spells. Some spells are useful throughout the game, others only at low levels. Pick some of those spells and you're stuck with them so you have to be careful.

Toy Box is a very easy way to solve this, if you are okay with using mods.

Maybe on a later play. My insecurity wants most of the core achievements this time so I can feel like a badass probably

[D-Black Catto]

Originally posted by Duder:

Originally posted by .//slayer:

Toy Box is a very easy way to solve this, if you are okay with using mods.

Maybe on a later play. My insecurity wants most of the core achievements this time so I can feel like a badass probably

didn't you say achievements don't matter?

[Duder]

Originally posted by D-Black Catto:

Originally posted by Duder:

Maybe on a later play. My insecurity wants most of the core achievements this time so I can feel like a badass probably

didn't you say achievements don't matter?

To most people but me