I find myself not choosing the fun CC type nodes in skill passive trees beacuse I want high single target damage for boss fights, which often don’t have any additional units spawn.
What if at certain levels (5, 10, 15, 20) you gain a special skill point, a toggle skill point. You allocate the point in two places on the skill’s passive tree and have a hotkey in game to switch between route A node(s) (for mapping) and route B node(s) (for bossing).
For instance, spirit plague has really cool spreading or aoe abilities, which for a boss are mostly useless. So you could 4 toggle points in Route A, allocated into Conductor of Plagues for mapping but then switch those 4 points in Route B, allocated into Concentrated Rot for bossing.
This would affect balance, and is maybe just part of making a building and deciding if you want to map or boss more, but it would be neat to not always have to fully choose. Lore wise, it could be something to do with your previous self in the past specializing differently, and the two world overlap slightly while you hold the power of the epoch.
Build choices are dependant on the content you like to run, so no 2 players will weigh passives or skill nodes the same way. Giving us Wardrobe or a similar insta-respec removes the reason to ever have hybrid builds and leaves us with 1 build per content that’s always ‘better’.
Giving the player limitations is good for the game, it creates players to actually make choices.
You’re right, it would reduce build variety which is important, so maybe the idea would never work, but for curiosities sake, I wonder if there is a way for it to work. Perhaps it’s less than 4 points. The idea stems from Path of Exile, where you can easily level and swap support gems out. So during mapping you have increased AOE, but when you get to the boss you can switch to Concentrated effect (lower AOE and higher damage).
