You play a properly balanced, fair and fun class. Liking the class, you dump all 15 mill SP to your name into the class. Suddenly, new build/patch comes around and your class is nerfed without your consent and you now suck at the game. You spawn in your proto suit or your vehical and you are killed over and over, loosing all your ISK. You are told you can not play PC because the one class you are good at, sucks. Nobody wants you in any serious endeavor in dust because your class is nerfed to the point of uselessness. Like current shield tanks, dropships, lazers, plasma cannons and soon to be armor tanks when they fix the bug that is causing them to be balanced. You no longer want to play dust, as the class you played is ruined and so is your ability to enjoy playing dust, because the developers ruined the class you speced into. CCP later anounes that they will not be fixing your class for many months and they ask you to accept their most sincere apologies, despite changing the class that you speced into many months beforehand. Should you get a respec? This happened to the classes mentioned previously and will happen again when the fix the armor tanks

Once we've reached some semblance of balance, respecs won't be necessary. But the people on this forum are dellusional if they think we are balanced now or will be balanced by the end of the year.

FOTM is a symptom of bad balance, not of the ability to respec.

So if we had a perfectly balanced game and unlimited respecs... There would still be FOTM chasing?

Isn't 1.4 supposed to be some massive shakeup?

How are we supposed to plan for the future when we have absolutely no idea what is changing.

:/

It's up to the game design philosophy at that point and i can live with either argument just fine.

Until we're even remotely balanced through, I think respecs would help more than they hurt. For reasons already listed.

That tells us nothing. Not to say it's not a useful devblog, but apparently the entire Shanghai team has essentially been gutted, and 1.4 is supposed a big design leap. Vehicles and AV are getting a "balance pass" which with CCP, could literally be anything. That tank you love to drive today, might feel like garbage to you tomorrow. That forge gun you really enjoy all of a sudden just doesn't function like it has for so long, and the style is no longer fun. Those AV grenades you dumped oodles of SP into? Nah sorry, balance, those suck.

We have no idea

It's a crap shoot.

Don't be dismissive out of hand. There is a plenty of room between DUSTs current level of balance and fictional perfect, and you know it.

Think of League of Legends as an example. You essentially "respec" every game by picking a new character. Some champions go through phases of popularity or FOTM. But that doesn't ruin the game, because balance is so tight that other champions are viable if not always popular. Now imagine you had to pick our one champion, could never use any others, and Riot nerfed your one guy. Sounds like super duper fun right?

Respecs don't do anything except allow people to use different skills they otherwise already earned the points for. All whey did wrong was not correctly read CCPs mind months in advance.

Respecs have a few unique advantages though.

1. They show the metrics for FOTM much clearer to CCP, getting us closer to balance faster.
2. They allow people to spec into FOTM counters until FOTM can get fixed.
3. They don't alienate players who've been nerfed into oblivion by a 'balance patch' like tankers and scouts and heavies.
4. They can clearly see which suits are underutilized since people don't have to use them anymore, instead... People are just stuck with ****** suits and left to complain endlessly on the forum until they give up and quit the game.

You give it 2-3 weeks and it would all settle to equilibrium.

I skilled into:

Remote explosives

Proximity mines

Nova knives

Shotguns

Plasma cannons

SMGs

Mass drivers

Minmatar scout

Out of all the things I just listed the mass driver is the only thing I can truly say I can depend on at all times because the other gear is A:bugged in someway or B:not powerfull enough to do it's job effectively.

I have not once asked for a respec because of the reasons abovementioned opting to attempt to get the gear balanced, while this is difficult due to much of the gear I choose to use not being 'mainstream' I'd rather a long tearm fix then a short tearm one, this is why I find the recent outcry for respecs due to the coming rebalancing of the flaylock and calldari logi suit humorous seeing as both were being used in unintended ways by those who wanted an unfair advantage and are not being unjustly brought down.

Oh and warning: my grammar sucks