"much the way gear works right now, but that's another discussion"

Is it?
Blizzard has made it clear that they not only know people swap gear based on circumstances, but that they expect it and consider it part of the game. Is there any reason to suspect that talents should be different? Sure, there's an initial outlay of work in order to get your gear, but that's also true of talent points - the only difference is that in order to reuse your talent points on a regular basis you pay exorbitant amounts of gold, but to swap gear you pay nothing.

And yes, that's kind of how GW works, as an aside. You have a plethora of skills you can choose from, but you can only have 8 equipped at any given time. PvP plays almost more like a card game at that point, or an overly complicated game of paper-rock-scissors - my build may be able to completely trash someone else, but then someone else with the same character classes may be able to smoke me with their build. It makes characters more perpetually interesting, I think.

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The very fact that you could respec nightly - and would probably want to - is the reason why respec costs were put in the game in the first place. The problem is that Blizzard's three-tiered development structure is so simplistic, that you end up having a limited number of cookie-cutters per class. Thus, I would agree that they should take them away: it's not like locking a player into one of the three paltry molds is any more restricting than the naturally poor system they've already created. Maybe next time they should actually try to devise a system where players wouldn't be forced into a specific spec for a specific purpose.

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I disagree, I think with no penalty to respec you lose the feel that you're playing a "type" of warrior or "type" of rogue. It makes much more roleplaying sense to use your "+5 against orcs" sword when, ahem, you're fighting orcs, than it does to say, I'm gonna go change the person I am every night so I can do whatever job I have to do that particular night. Druids would just LFG in IF, and wait to see if the group needed a tank/rogue/healer/moonkin and spec accordingly. Thats proposterous imho, I think that while the system is rather archaic and simple, it makes sense that you can't change your fundamental character aspects nightly.

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Dan,

Actually, Druids are not likely to respec accordingly. We really only have two ways to build: Feral for playing and having fun, Resto for raiding. But what Druids raid anymore? Haha

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this will never happen because blizzard has specifically said in the past that they dont want people to be able to respec for every situation and that they want people to take their spec/respecs very seriously

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the current way is fine, you should think about choices, if some people should have their way to game would become so easy it is less funny.

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I don't know why people always make a big deal about these sort of things. My guess is they want everything available to them. The problem is that being a certain spec offers you something slightly different. It may not be game breakingly different but somewhat. If your a Feral specced Druid, go for it, you have a purpose in raids and in PvP. People actually rely too much on certain specs to be the best at what they are doing and hate these talent point restrictions because of that. That isn't the point.

The point of talents is to be something you want to be. I'm a Paladin 30/0/21 and I like what I can bring to both PvP and PvE, that doesn't mean that I specced this way for any other purpose then to offer what I wanted to offer. I like to heal and jump in the battle if I'm needed, it gives me a diverse set of options, but I've also tanked. I mean I shouldn't be able to tank being that I've not got a single point in Prot, still I've done it.

Thats the point though, even if your a feral druid you can still heal, hell you can put 20 into resto and do a decent job of it. Its just people who want to be perfectionist and have every option available that miss the big picture.

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The gold cost for respecs is simply moronic. EVEN IF you're arguing the role-playing angle, you can't justify the associated cost. Place a time-decay on it and still require that you visit a trainer at a major city - that I can buy. But there's no point to a gold cost for training other than to keep mudflation in check...which is still a rampant problem, even on less mature servers. It's not like trying to afford an epic mount or paying for epic-gear repairs after raiding isn't already exhorbitantly expensive. Talent respec costs = BOHICA.

Of course, playing devil's advocate, talents weren't even in the original design of the game. They were added during a phase closed-beta, don't recall exactly when. It's interesting how much focus we now have on that aspect of the game.

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What about a week or so when respecs were free, then back to the default prices you had gotten to beforehand? Let people mess around for a certain amount of time but make sure to change their spec to what they want before it becomes priced again.

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