(Don't Fear) the Respec: Respecs, Multiple Builds, and Unslotters

[Yomo Kimyata]

We all make mistakes.  I know this because I make mistakes and you Rikti monkeys are no better.  So what do you do when you are in the middle of a TF and you run off to level and you hit the wrong power by mistake?  Or you six-slot Stamina and later realize that may not be the best thing for you going forward?  You fix your mistake!  Anecdotally, people *HATE* to do this, and frankly it's because you are doing all the things you have done for (up to) 50 levels all at once, so it's a time-consuming ordeal.  But don't fear the respec!

 

 

I'm not going to give you any deep secrets here, but hopefully I can help you with some "best practices" in order to make the process easier.  Also, we will discuss alternate builds and reasons you might consider them.  As always, this guide is a function of my own experiences and opinions, and your mileage may vary.  I'm always open to hear alternative ideas!

 

R-E-S-P-E-C (no T!):

 

A Power Respecification (click for the wiki article) is a way to change the powers you have chosen from your primary and secondary, to change the power pools and epic pools and the powers you have chosen there, and to change how you have allocated your slots.  It is a complete process and you can't stop halfway through.  If you are level 10 when you start a respec, you will be level 10 when you finish.  If you are level 50 when you start, you will be level 50 when you finish.  You know how every time you level up, you either pick a new power or add slots to your build?  A respec is that entire process in one swell foop.

 

What a respec is NOT:

 

It is not a way to change ATs -- you were born a scrapper and you will die a scrapper.  It is not a way to change your primary or secondary power sets.  It is not a way to change your origin type.  These all were baked in when you made your character and if you want to change them, you're going to have to make a new character.  Quell domage.

 

How do I get a respec?:

 

Lots of ways.  You get one for free every ten levels starting at level 10 and ending at 50.  You can run a respec trial on either blue side or red side (usually with a team, but hey, you do you).  When you run a Patron Arc on redside to unlock the Patron Pools (level 35 or later), you get a free respec.  You can buy them on the /AH as recipes.  You get them for rewards at some Veteran levels.  You can get them as drops in super packs!  There are all over the darned place!  It is difficult for me to imagine that you will be unable to end up with as many respecs as you want or need.

 

Why would I want to use a respec?

 

There are a bunch of reasons, over and above simply making an error that you want to fix.  A non-comprehensive list (and I'll add to this as per suggestions) includes:

 

- taking an extra attack early on, and then respeccing out of it levels later for another power

- realizing that the powers you have may be too endurance intensive, so wanting to add a slot or two to Stamina or Health

- trying out a power to see what it does, then deciding you don't like it for some reason

- hitting a milestone and discovering you may need less accuracy or endurance reduction in a power you already had

- hitting level 50 and moving around slots because you want to Superiorize certain sets

- gaining Incarnate powers that make some of your previous selections obsolete

- trying out new power pools, or epic pools

-  etc.

 

Best Practices:

 

Listen, I'm not going to claim this is the easiest and fastest process in the world.  If you have things about this you want changed, the Suggestions forum is right over there and there have been plenty of threads about this process.  What I'm going to do is to try and help you make this easier on yourself.

 

1.  Make sure you have plenty of time.  It usually takes me no more than 10-15 minutes, but that's not nothing.   Like I said, you are basically levelling up 49 times at once, so this is not going to be as instantaneous as clicking and dragging slots.  Yes, it is a huge pain to want to move one slot from one power to another and to have to go through this entire process.  For the most part, once you start the respec, you can't cancel out of it expect by quitting out, and your progress isn't saved.  And it can be a pain to start and get halfway through because the only way to get out of it besides quitting is by pressing a bunch of back arrows.  So plan ahead.  I feel for the Soldiers of Arachnos who have a mandatory respec at level 24, because if you are in the middle of a team when you ding 24, you're going to have to take a time-out to do this process.  So plan ahead.

 

2.  It's really going to help if you have a character planner like Mids so you know what you are planning to do at each step.  You can freehand it, but you're going to be less prone to make mistakes if it's planned out beforehand.

 

3.  Know when and how to start it.  Back in the day, you had to go to specific NPCs (check the wiki for details) in order to respec but now all you have to do is use the command "/respec".  Do not do this until level 3 or later -- if you want to respec your level 2, just delete it and start anew!  Do not start a respec while on a TF/SF/Ouro mission -- this may lead to failure for various reasons I am not clear about.  If you haven't already levelled up to your current level, i.e., you dinged a level but haven't gone to a trainer yet, you are best off going to the trainer and levelling up before starting the respec, as the respec might fail.  I've heard tell that very crowded zones might lead to failure as well, so don't try it during a Mothership raid.

 

Usually I will do a respec in Ouro, or Pocket D, but any non-crowded zone will do.  You can do it in your base, but then you cannot access the /AH, and you will often need to sell IOs afterwards.  I like to be near a vendor as well, in case I'm buying or selling SOs.

 

4.  Clear your enhancement tray of all extra enhancements.  Every enhancement in your tray will join every enhancement you already have slotted in the pool once you start the process, and it makes it hard to see everything that you may want to slot or reslot.  If the enhancements are sets that you want to slot but aren't currently slotted, fine.  If the enhancements are DO and SO drops from mob defeats, you are better off vendoring them before starting.  I usually use my enhancement tray to store IOs that I haven't gotten around to doing something with yet, so before I start a respec I will open up the /AH interface and (if there is transaction room) move all those IOs into the /AH to keep my trays clear.

 

5.  This is optional, but I try to have most, if not all, of the enhancements I will want to slot available beforehand.  Buy them, make them, pull them out of storage, whatever.  It's totally fine if you want to respec into a blank slate with no enhancements slotted, but I usually want to get started right away.

 

The respec process (with pictures!):

 

The respec itself has three parts: power selection, slot selection, enhancement allocation.  Once you start this process, you either need to finish it, back arrow out of it, or quit (which will leave you where you were before the respec started.)  The post-respec process is either reallocating powers in your interface trays, or clearing your trays and then allocating your powers -- since this is pretty much cleaning up it's not considered "officially" a part of the respec process.

 

I've got a level 15 Stone Melee/Bio Armor scrapper sitting in Pocket D :

 

 

 

Why do I want to respec him?  Well, mainly for an example, but I made him a while ago and one of his mandatory powers was Inexhaustible, and I don't need that so early (or maybe at all!).  I'm level 15 so I know I have one free respec from levels.  I've got a bunch of respecs in my Character Items from opening Super Packs as well, so I'm going to claim a Character Respec from there and type /respec.

 

 

The top center tells me where I am in the process:  On level 0 making my selection for level 1.  Since the recent revamp, you no longer need to take the first power of your secondary, so your first selection will be your level 1 secondary.  I'm going to take Hardened Carapace, and then Stone Mallet and Heavy Mallet.  After each selection, the Next button in the lower right will light up and you will press it to continue.

 

 

This is exactly like the levelling process at the trainers, except the first part is just power selection instead of power selection alternating with slot selection.  The top center tells us we are on level 3 to select our level 4 power, and all available powers are clickable (and unavailable ones are greyed out).  The bottom center tells us how many powers we have already selected and how many are left to go.  At level 4, you can start to select power pools.  I'm not going to do that at 4, since I want Environmental Modification at 4, but then I'll pick Combat Jumping at 6.

 

 

 

Now here is something that's kind of a pain -- when you select a pool or an epic pool power, you select it, and then you have to hit the next button.  To me that feels like double selecting, but whatever.  Note that if I wanted to get out of this process now, I could click the Back button a bunch of times, or I could just close the program.

 

 

Here I have finished my power selections and click Next to continue.

 

 

The top middle tells us we are at current level 14, which isn't quite right since we are at 15, but it seems that for the power selection it considers us at level 14 going on level 16.  No biggie.  Now we get to allocate our slots.  Now, I just picked Tough at level 14, and normally that means I could only have a max of 3 slots for Tough (the base selection at 14 and then adding two at 15).  The respec process allows you to allocate slots to ANY power in ANY amount up to six total no matter when the power was selected, so I could six-slot Tough if I wanted to.  But I don't.

 

For more best practices, I always start my allocations on the right column which has all the inherent powers and pool powers.  I do this because it is so much longer than the other two columns, and I worry about missing a power I may not see.  So I generally scroll down to the bottom and start allocating powers there.  The bottom middle tells you how many slots are remaining.

 

 

Click Next and we get to allocate our enhancements:

 

 

Edited May 24, 2023 by Yomo Kimyata

[Yomo Kimyata]

 

Finally, we get to click and drag!  I'm not exactly sure how the enhancements are grouped, but they are always grouped by set and in the order the set is listed in game, so if you have that kind of OCD you're set.  You can drag the enhancements either to where you want them slotted, into your inventory, or just leave them in Unassigned.  Back in the day, you used to get some reimbursement for SOs et al that were left unassigned and deleted, but now they just go away.

 

Best practices for me are to move everything out of Unassigned into inventory unless you really don't care if it is deleted.  I can vendor SOs or convert unneeded IOs, so I generally won't waste inf.

 

 

Confirm that you are finished and ...

 

 

All the powers you own now, even temps, are in your trays, and almost certainly not where you want them.  You could just drag them where you want them or right click to remove from tray, but best practices call for the command /cleartray and Bob's your uncle.

 

 

Open your powers and move what you want where you want it.  Again, I start with the far right because it scrolls down and I don't want to miss anything.

 

Edited May 24, 2023 by Yomo Kimyata

[Yomo Kimyata]

 

And there we go.  I'm not completely finished because I need to pick up some more enhancements to finish my slots, but that's good enough for this example.  Clearly, respeccing a level 50 will take longer.

 

Alternate builds:

 

Alternate, or Multiple Builds (click for wiki) enable you to have more than one build available for any given character.  It is like a respec insofar as you can not change your primary power set, secondary power set, or origin.  But you can have a second build available at level 10, and a possible third one at 50 after completing Mender Ramiel's story arc and unlocking your incarnate Alpha slot.

 

You may have noticed that when you talk to any trainer, one of your options under the "Train to a new level of power" selection is "Select or rename your active build" once you are level 10 or above.  If you select a new build that you have never accessed before, it will treat you as if you were a fresh level 1 that has never levelled up before.  Where this differs from the respec process, and this is a real pain in the butt, is that you have to run the levelling process separately for each level rather than doing the whole thing all at once.  The good part of that is that you can do it bit by bit and stop partway through if you want.  The bad part is that it is extremely tedious to do all at once, and you can't overslot late picks like you can in respec mode.

 

The other bad part is that even though you cannot change your core powers, it treats your alternate build as a completely different character, so you have to acquire new enhancements for the build.  Temporary powers, incarnate powers will be the same across all builds, but if you want a Performance Shifter +end proc in both/all of your builds, you need to buy one for each build.

 

Why would you want alternate builds instead of respecs?  Some thoughts (and I'm happy to add more):

- you have a solo build and a team build

- you have a build for exemplaring and a build for playing at 50

- you have an AoE based build and you have a single target build

- you have specialized powers for specific purposes, like speed runs of a TF

-etc.

 

Switching across builds:

 

The easy way to switch among builds is to do so at any trainer.  You can also use the command /select_build [1-3] where the number 1, 2, or 3 represents the build number (you can also rename these builds at the trainer to "solo" or "team", for example).  When you switch builds, however, there is a lockout period and a cool off period put into effect.  You can only switch your build every sixty seconds, much like the lockout time from switching costumes.  But the cool off period treats every one of your powers as if they had just been activated and must recharge.  This is no big deal for things like attacks, but longer recharge powers, like Mission Teleporters and such will take many minutes.  I presume the intention is to keep people from activating a long recharge power, switch builds, and re-activate the power.  Twevs, that's how it is and that's how it shall be.

 

Enhancement Unslotters:

 

For the sake of completion, I should mention unslotters, which are a type of special salvage.  If you want to move an enhancement slot around, or add a different power, you need to respec.  But if you want to simply put a different IO in a slot that already has an existing IO in it, you have a few choices.  You can drag the existing IO to the trash icon, which deletes it and leaves an empty slot for you to put a different IO in there.  You can drag the new IO over the existing IO and it will either try to merge the two IOs or it will delete the first IO and replace it with the second.  These two options are fine unless the item you are replacing is useful and/or valuable.  In that case, if you have unslotters in your inventory you can simply drag the existing IO into your enhancement inventory and it will empty the slot while saving the IO.

 

You can get unslotters from the /AH, you can buy them with merits at any merit vendor, or you can receive them in Super Packs.  I find them very useful, but I rarely use more than a dozen on any character during its lifetime.  If you open a lot of super packs, the unslotters are saved in your Character Items and you can access them from any character at any time, which is markedly easier than buying unslotters for every character that needs it whenever the need arises.

 

Thanks, enjoy, come again!  May all your builds have more cowbell!

 

 

 

Edited May 24, 2023 by Yomo Kimyata

[Parabola]

Something I generally do is take a screenshot of my power trays before I start a respec. Even following fairly universal layouts across my alts I've had the odd one not feel quite right after a respec when I haven't got the power trays back to where they were.

 

Good guide, well written with lots of useful info. Fyi the last video is greyed out for a UK viewer.

[GM Impervium]

 Not trying to hijack your thread, but I also feel this is a good as place as any to share the following tip:

If, for whatever reason, your respec fails or cancels out, and you're missing your enhancements:

Don't Panic!

This is usually solved by changing zones; or failing that, logging out, waiting a few minutes, and logging back in again.

I'll also note that we tend to see these issues the most (though not exclusively) when people are inside their SG base. My personal recommendation is to go to Echo: Galaxy City, or some other empty world zone with minimal population and no event scripts being played in the background (Kalisti and Echo Plaza are other good places... at the moment, anyway!). You mentioned Ouro and Pocket D, but depending on what shard one is on, there'll be more people in those locations than AP, so I'd shy away from those.

In any event, great guide, @Yomo Kimyata!

[Bionic_Flea]

Come on baby, don't Flee the Respec.

GM, take my hand, don't Flee the Respec.

We'll be able to fly (or jump or run).

Yomo is the maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan

[Herotu]

One reason I'm reluctant to commit to playing this game is the nightmare of builds. It's like I'm either;

• supposed to walk around with a gimped build or 
• know everything about every power in the game at every level

I really struggle with this. I know the former is true, and I know that "sub-optimal" isn't supposed to mean "gimped". 

 

It makes me feel bad, and I don't like that.

[Yomo Kimyata]

3 hours ago, Herotu said:

I really struggle with this. I know the former is true, and I know that "sub-optimal" isn't supposed to mean "gimped". 

All due respect to those who have their builds planned out from level 1, but I really don’t have the attention span to

[lemming]

6 hours ago, Herotu said:

One reason I'm reluctant to commit to playing this game is the nightmare of builds. It's like I'm either;

• supposed to walk around with a gimped build or 
• know everything about every power in the game at every level

I really struggle with this. I know the former is true, and I know that "sub-optimal" isn't supposed to mean "gimped". 

 

It makes me feel bad, and I don't like that.

90% of my builds are not optimal.  I think I spent the first couple years just with tossed together builds that worked fine.  Only in the last year did I really start messing with them.  And some chars I haven't rebuilt though I did put some sets in place.  The game is pretty forgiving.

[Herotu]

9 hours ago, lemming said:

90% of my builds are not optimal.  I think I spent the first couple years just with tossed together builds that worked fine.  Only in the last year did I really start messing with them.  And some chars I haven't rebuilt though I did put some sets in place.  The game is pretty forgiving.

I like to start attuned enhancements ASAP because I want don't want the anxiety of remembering to upgrade them all the time, but then I end up holding the enhancements that I don't have slots for. Then I have to remember to slot them instead, so it's a similar anxiety in the end. Ugh!

 

Then there's the whole "I got one too many slots in X power" which the OP goes over. Doh and Yuck! Maybe I want to be able to undo the previous level up - or two - or three. I mean, respec backwards, I think?

[tidge]

Background information for reference:

• My characters are typically Inf, Merit, and Catalyst "rich" from playing content
• My characters craft recipes and spin the converter roulette wheel
• I have a SG base with storage (for Enhancements, Catalysts, Boosters, etc.)
• I will "shop ahead" for enhancements, but I am also relatively happy with a "GET IT NOW" attitude

Here is something this occasionally grouchy (points to self) player does as part of respecs:

 

Before I perform a respec, I will:

1. move any enhancements not intended to be used in the respec to the Auction House
2. Grab any non-attuned(*1) enhancements I can incorporate into the (upcoming) re-build.
3. Use non-attuned enhancements and then catalyze(*2) them as appropriate(*3).

 

After the Respec: I put the previously attuned enhancements back into SG storage.

 

Typically: I end up running a LOT of content that has high-level recipe drops (i.e. level 50 recipes), which would not be usable by lower-level characters without being attuned. The level 50 respec allows me to recycle attuned pieces that had been in the leveling build out for the next batch of characters that will be leveling.

 

(*1) During converter roulette, I will land on pieces that are either in short supply or have a typical market price above (arbitrarily decided by me as) 3MInf. If I expect to use that Enhancement in a future build, it goes into storage.

 

(*2) There are only certain classes of enhancement where this is saving any Influence, since the Auction House will allow for auto-attuning, minus the vig and whatever price point the specific piece happens to be at versus the market price of a Catalyst.

 

(*3) Typical (non-ATO, non-Winter) Enhancements that I attune:

• PVP pieces that are BELOW level 50 <- I never attune a level 50 PVP piece, as it can get converted/boosted into another PVP piece.
• Luck of the Gambler +Recharge
• Performance Shifter (%+End, Endurance)
• Miracle +Recovery, Preventive Medicine %Absorb
• a couple Defense and Resistance sets that offer bonuses and/or globals that end up in most builds
• Some commonly used %damage pieces (Auction House prices vary for these, and not all %damage pieces are equal)

 

BTW: I usually do at least one respec in Pocket D to earn the "1 hour spent in Pocket D" badge. I haven't tried this in PVP zones.

 

Edited May 27, 2023 by tidge

[Yomo Kimyata]

An additional reason to respec:

 

When you respec, you get to put slots wherever you want them, and are not restricted like you are in normal leveling.  If you pick a power at lvl 49, it comes with the base slot and you can add up to three slots when you ding 50.  But if you respec, you can put up to five there.  Note:  to the best of my knowledge, Mids will not let you model this.

 

This also comes in useful at lower levels.  You can now pick your primary T9 at lvl 26 (*cough cough power creep*), but you can’t normally have it 6-slotted until you ding lvl 31.  But if you respec at 26, you can add five slots there (of course, you are losing slots from other powers).

[Bionic_Flea]

7 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Note:  to the best of my knowledge, Mids will not let you model this.

 

 It does, you just have to change the slotting to respec mode.

[Troo]

@Herotu and anyone else who worries about not having the best or most optimal "build".

Your character is your character.

This game was created as a journey of imperfection. (the game doesn't start at lvl 50)

We were meant to learn and experiment. For many that is a lot of the fun and increases the replay-ability.

Different people can have different play styles and/or different goals.

 

Between the multiple builds per character and the readily available respecs, it is easy to tweak and try different things to find what works for us individually.

 

There is nothing wrong with running an unslotted petless mastermind. Someone will love you.

Vengeance takers love a reliable corpse. 🙂

Edited September 1, 2023 by Troo