Hello everybody. I like Grim Dawn the same way I liked D2 back in its days. I am verry happy to see, that new expansion is comming with new level cap and 2 new masteries. What bothers me is when some changes will be made to current mastery trees to fit new skills in them, would be great to give to our current maxed out characters chance for full respec(including mastery points).
I dont want to level up my 85´s spellbreaker, witchblade, warlock, warder again from scratch because of mastery tree changes.
Use Grim Defiler.
iirc there are no new skills for existing masteries. So don’t worry about it.
Besides, the next add-ons and patches will introduce new areas, new monsters, new items, new devotions etc, which likely means new challenges, new bonuses, new abilities etc, which will to some extend turn some old builds into what they will be: more or less out-of-date.
So you will have to adapt, which is likely going to mean starting new builds.
Nothing as complicated as that. As long as you actually left room for growth, the bonus levels/devotions/etc should make it possible for your characters to progress as normal.
I fail to see why you’d want to refund your mastery points when you’ll now have many more extra points to work with.
That’s not going to happen. It’s not that your build is going to be useless in the expansion. Sure you want the perfect build to play. But if we could respec our characters so easy, it would take away a lot of the replayabilty.
How so? There are multiple ways to use basically every skill in the game. Making a build to use X skill in Y fashion…and having it fail, or spending one mastery point too many, so you need to redo it… That doesn’t add replayability, it just forces you to redo exactly what you already did up until the point you screwed up.
With the level cap raised to 100, going 50/50 on the mastery bar will be quite common. So, don’t really see the point of allowing to refund mastery bar points.
I am actually worried about this: until now, the players had to make sometimes hard decisions to max the masteries and the skills the best that it would fit with the build idea, but I fear that with the new level cap, there is just going to be enough skill points to max all the relevant abilities for all the builds that may be possible, and that this will lower both the variety and the strategy.
No more grimcalc to see if your build idea is possible or not, just click click click click until you have maxed the abilities you were thinking about.
No, because even single mastery builds require proper skill planning to work.
Grim Dawn is nowhere near as generous with skill points as its predecessor Titan Quest, and if you have to plan your skill points carefully even when you only have one mastery to work with then I fail to see how 30 extra skill points (given the same progression) is going to affect other builds that much.
Finally, the presence of altered skills bonuses will likely revolutionize skill point distribution for many builds. These mods will basically make skill points invested in specific skill lines MUCH more valuable, and if the mechanic is employed properly you’ll probably end up wondering whether you should use your extra skill points in a skill line which increases their value (but which don’t directly benefit your build) or whether you should just go the traditional route and improve the skills directly relevant to your build (although their value would then be much less).
Even playing TQIT I always check my build idea first, just to be sure. And then sometimes I change what I want to do so go back to TitanCalc to check it again.
And of course we’ll also have some more Devotions/Constellations to play with which will add more variety and checking out in GrimCalc. 
Hm, my thoughts:
If there will really be no significant changes to the mastery trees then a way to completely reset your skill- and your mastery-points won’t be necessary.
Yes, you always have the option of using e.g. “GD Defiler” to adjust your character’s variables.
And for some characters chances are pretty slim anyway that you would wanna re-assign mastery-points.
In general though it would be rad to have the option to hand out a single reset per character if and when mastery trees have changed significantly.
E.g. I remember having had the situation where one of my characters had skilled Blast Shield and suddenly it had changed it’s position within the mastery so that I did not have access to it any longer but still had that point in it.
It would just be a sensible thing for Crate to have that option of refunding skill- and master-points should the need for it arise.
Well, I don’t: some 30 extra points means getting that second mastery you are struggling so much with finally from 40 to 50 without much planning and maxing 2 additional abilities/passive you would have otherwise left with very few points. That’s a lot.
Second, as you have pointed out, the +all skill items are going to turn all builds into all-abilities-enabled builds. Whatever build you will go from that point onwards will have all skills enabled guaranteed by the end of the game.
I think that keeping the same skill points gain progression is going to disrupt the game, and that they will likely reduce it to +1 point per level past level 80-90. The skill trees are not designed in my opinion for more than 200 total skill points at most. Giving the players more points without any rework of the masteries is only going to turn the game into a max-all fest and make all end-game builds alike and kill what remains of the necessary thinking/planning/testing/etc that made the game exciting and challenging.
That is just my opinion, though. Some may enjoy a supermarket game where clicking here or there is not going to make much difference at the end. I just cannot consider more a game than how much this game considers my own choices.
One of my Spellbreaker builds with +5 to all Arcanist skills 100% agrees…
Now another Spellbreaker with no plus skills (because I’m sick of seeing everybody running in Deathmarked set) really needs those 15 extra levels to be complete.
The unability to respec stat points and mastery points is pushing me away from this game. There are (and will be more) tons of multiclasses and some builds (which are changing from patch to patch) require specific amount of stat and mastery points distribution. Some missclicks or changes via patch and you can start leveling new multiclass. Ok, no problem, but playing same content 3x per char again and again and again? Boring as hell. Just my reason why i am not playing this game as often as i wish. The boredom of leveling cought me.
Grim Defiler allows you to reset both things. Use it. Love it. It sorts out.
I use Grim Defiler rarely, but when I do I love to roleplay it as being a “dark ritual”, I which my character would go through unspeakable means to acquire new powers - like, say, a mage getting tired of his usual spells and going to the dark side by turning to a dual blade assassin.
Also, as long as you’re not giving yourself bonus points and you keep it exceptional (when you see that what looked like a promising build starts to fail or run out of steam as you’re into Elite), it’s a very acceptable form of cheating IMO.
I hardly even call it cheating. IMO the game should already offer the ability to fully respec your character. Refusing it a way to create false replay value by forcing you to repeat a character if you’ve made even one mistake. In practice, though, what it really does it drive you away from making that character at all, and if it happens enough, from the game itself. GD isn’t the only game to make this mistake, nor is it likely they’ll be the last.
That’s only assuming builds in general make it a point to pigeonhole you into gearing/skilling your character in a very specific way.
Fact is the only builds I know of that actually do this are builds designed around specific items, and that is simply their failing. It’s a side effect of their design.
Every other build just follows a general direction rather than a specific destination, and game gives you many roads to take. This is one of the things that makes GD game mechanics different from a similar game like Diablo 3, where items (and items alone) are the end game and so you really have no choice but to design your build around them.
None of my builds have nothing left to pick at level 85, by 100 they might be close to that. I do not see a problem with that, it still was a decision what to pick and what not to pick, it’s not like you actually have all skills by then.