Changing Skills and Valor Stacks

[Archon_Wing]

The nature of the game has changed a bit since release, and I think this is one concept that needs to change along with it.

Currently, when you change skills, all your Valor stacks are removed.

The concept behind this is sound. They want you to create a reliable build and stick with it against general enemies. They didn't want you to change skills a certain way to handle certain bosses better and engage in repetitious boss farming like in Diablo 2. Bosses are predictable and thus can be planned for by exploiting this.

Ideally, you'd experiment with many possible builds until you found one that works all around. There are many runes and skills leading to many possibilities.

However, as the game has been patched, gameplay has changed and in practice this mechanic causes many people to never experiment with skills. Well, they could, but at a rather large expense of 75 MF and GF. I could think of a new and brilliant way to take down that tough elite pack or I could just stick to a cookie cutter build and get more rewards. Personally, I don't even know how inner sanctuary looks like, much less works.

The result is that the valor penalty encourages cookie cutter builds, making a lot of the designed versatility go to waste.

In addition, you lose your valor in between acts, and thus only need to adjust your skillset for a single act. If we didn't, then more people would venture into act 4 or even attempt true full clears of the game.

Furthermore, bosses are no longer an issue in the item hunt. Their drops are inferior to elite packs, and by the time inferno sets in, they're also easier than elite packs. Since Nephalem Valor is inherently an endgame mechanic, the concept of arbitrarily changing your skills to exploit bosses no longer matters. The main point of NV is to find elite packs to fight and there's no way to prepare against certain combos. Even if you did retreat to town to change your skills, there's already some time used up already.

As I don't expect anyone to permanently get rid of this idea and perhaps there needs to be a disincentive to go willy nilly with the skills, I would suggest a consumable item sold by inferno vendors. It would cost around 10k gold and and protect your NV from skill and act changes for one hour. 10k is very little to a level 60, and a minor gold sink would help other matters.