What loadouts? What are you talking about? Dude, only you are talking about loadouts.
Or let me say it more clearly, I’m not talking about loadouts. I’m not entertaining any slippery slope conversation, if you want to have that, you can have that with yourself.
It’s not technically a loadout, but it amounts to the same thing. You end up with a boss killer spec and an AoE spec. So you have the same thing you have now (where you can switch between both but you have to level both times), but with half the penalties (since you’re “suggesting” removing one of those).
All in all I think it’s still cumbersome.
Cumbersome is bad, that was after all what’s to be avoided. The option to switch between miniscule AoE and miniscule single-target is mostly a downside for swifter burning yourself out as a player through ‘optimal’ gameplay and hence causing a reduction in retention time.
To be fair though… that’s the exact same thing, and even worse in my eyes after personally experiencing the awful chore of going through 30 weaver items and having to re-apply the skill-point - which isn’t shown where it was removed - over and over again.
It sucks plainly spoken, and I think the ‘overoptimizing’ person happens less often then someone re-doing a item several times in hopes of a good outcome, because that’s what you do with weaver items after all.
My solution would be to enforce general equipment changes to be only allowed in town or at the ‘in between’ area of monoliths. This would ensure both the switching being impossible and the annoyance of the removal of points being gone as it could just re-apply the last point since it’s not in a combat situation, ever.
I don’t think anyone really got what he meant.
At least I got it differently…
There wouldn’t be a loadout. You’re basically free to respec the skill whenever you like, once they’re fully leveled, but if you take points out and reassign them, those specific nodes will be “inactive” if you choose to enter a boss map right away, and you’ll need to “activate” them by gaining experience (as if you were releveling the skill) to be able to fight the boss with those nodes active.
So you would only be able to get a “free respec” one way, making the whole system work towards gating the bosses only, not normal maps.
Not saying I like or dislike this, just trying to get people to understand each other, cause it seems there’s some noise. 
Spot on. 
With the idea I was playing with, the only thing changing was the skill system. And that change is, “you can respec at anytime with no penalty as long as you aren’t doing a boss run. Before you can do a boss run, you need to re-enable your new skill selection”. Because I actually do this sort of thing for a living (non-gaming software architecture and systems design), and I immediately went into that mode, which is why I was talking about vector arrays.
I’m kind of pissed off that folks don’t seem to remember that I was asked to take a stab at what I thought would work, AND I said that without knowing the codebase, it was just a mental exercise. Don’t like my suggestion? I’m completely ok with that, as it is likely not even on EHG’s list of things we need to do. Think the current system is good? Fantastic, everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
But you know what? Maybe at least follow the thread prior to responding. (Not you F0lk, you are spot-on) I’m am kinda crabby today, so apologies if I’m over reacting.
This is a problem I ran into as well. Have seen +skills in other games before but with the twenty points of customization allowed here that sort of bonus maybe ends up as more of a complication than anything else. The items which change how abilities work without the added hassle I think make more sense and are maybe more fun to find/use, like the rogue relic that converts acid flask into a cold skill etc.