I think we could be allowed to change the mastery, but we would lose all these points. It would be a kind of punishment, maybe. Either we keep what we have in our starting class (we keep our Primalist points and lose our Druid points for example) or we lose everything except 20 points. Respec would be a tough decision because we would not switch from a level 50 Druid to a level 50 Shaman, but from a level 50 Druid to a level 20 Shaman. You want to change? Change and become a beginner! 
Losing 20-40 passive points permanently really would brick your character. And what happens if the devs bring out a new skill for that mastery that changes how it can be played and you really enjoy it? Would you want to change masteries again for another 20-40 point loss leaving your character with only the points you have in the base class & unable to actually play the mastery?
I understand that it’s a choice of designers. Just, when I choosen druid, I tested the bear form and I don’t really like it. I was not charmed by the appearance of the bear, and a little bit disturbed by the skill changes. I tried to go to the spriggan form to test it also. And I finally decided that I’m not a fan of the shapeshifting mecanism (I understand it could be powerfull and interesting but not for me ^^). So I have a character lvl 40+ that will don’t use the druid mecanism that I finally don’t like.
And the subject is not just to go to the end of time, because your need 10-15 level more to be sure you like it or not. Maybe it’s just for the druid, because before choosing the speciality, there is no example of shapeshifting. It means you don’t know if you like it or not the mechanism.
Of course, I will do another character and this is not a big deal. But it was really frustrating to grow up a character and on level 40, and you understand that you will just abandon it because you don’t like the gameplay.
In that case, imho, I prefer to do a quest to respecialize my character, I don’t loose my exp, but of course I loose skill points and I have to respec. Maybe it could be done just one time at level 45 (when you unlocked all the skills).
Anyway, thanks for your answers 
I really get, that some people are “afraid of making a bad choice” or they want to test stuff out before doing an important decision such as mastery choice.
But i really want to keep the mastery choice permanent.
I already suggested in the past, that we maybe could get a “trainings-room” where you could test out stuff freely, before permanently choosing.
This could be connected to the “time-traveling” aspect of the game, where you “explore your potentialy futures”, can choose passives and active skills as you please and once you go back, everything will go back to normal.
This will be probably kinda hard to program for the devs, so it might take some time.
But anything close to this idea, could give people a way to test out skills.
Yes, it would almost be a fresh start. I feel the only acceptable way to allow mastery change is to make it punitive. If it’s a price players don’t accept, I agree with you: we should not be allowed to change mastery.
I cannot disagree more.
I mean guys, let’s get real now.
If you download a game and within 2 hours you realize that your character is utter shit, then you’re not going to replay the first 2 hours AGAIN - you’re just not invested enough.
I personally uninstall all games which don’t allow me to reconfigure my character with minimal cost if I do happen to by accident choose the worst class which doesn’t work with my settings - especially if it’s a non-competitive game.
Not allowing players to respec their speciality is a terrible move.
Fair enough
If i realize my char is bad (which very few char are, it just the player that isnt experienced enough to play it), i just move on to another char etc. This teaches me about the game and makes me try chars i normally wouldnt play, all while gathering gear to actually make my fail builds work later on.
I can undestand some people want to be able to respec everything (and only find loot that fits your char), move through the game within a week and be done with it, but that imo isnt how you make a game last long. If most people were to uninstall their game if char wouldnt work then D2 wouldnt have been the succes it is, because that was really hard back when it started and there wasnt much guides or knowledge to go buy, and most people got wrecked in the last boss of the Den.
But to each their own, we all have different opinions about it.
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Every new player by definition is inexperienced. Punishing new players with strict unchangeable decisions seems like a deterrent to me. There needs to be a way to gain the knowledge and experience prior to making unchangeable decisions.
I would also point out that, no, it isn’t always just the inexperience of the player. Some characters are just bad in some games. It is the lack of knowledge of metagame that new players get hurt by. A game shouldn’t require days of research prior to playing to not waste your time on a brick of a character.
Even if a player does days of research though, sometimes playing a character just doesn’t feel right and ends up not being fun, no matter how good it looks on paper.
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I don’t think making “Diablo 2” arguments is adequate for almost any productive discussion which you prove yourself by claiming that it was a completely different era of gaming.
We’re playing games in 2021, not 2001.
Also Diablo 2 has respec l0l.
As always, this topic turns into “Your arguments are wrong, my arguments are right” battle thread.
People share their opinion, why something is more or less an issue for them. There is no wrong or right in making a mastery class you can spec into, a permantent decision. This is a design choice made by the devs. Some people are cool with it, others dislike it.
But that game design doesn’t make a bad game.
There obviously other people that disagrre. That’s ok. I respect that. Let’s just not asume that the own opinion represents the vast majority of players and that anybody else is a weird outlier.
And it doesn’t need “days of research”. That’s just hyperbolic. You just google “Last Epoch Druid” and browse the numerous vids that show the druid gameplay.
Or you come to the forum and say “Hey guys, I’m new. What melee build would you recommend? I like playstyle XYZ.”
In general you can’t say new players will turn away if they discover a bad build or start with a character they don’t like. New players aren’t always brainless idiots that don’t want to learn or discover a game. Same goes for casual players. People always asume that new players want to work for nothing and don’t read anything. Casual gamers always want the hardest content handed over immidiatly for free. This is a false generalisation.
I doubt that everybody that still is playing LE just was lucky to pick a character he facerolled the game instantly without any further knowledge of the game.
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As @XLVI_carpo pointed out this wil turn into a opinion “battle”, so i will say as i did in my last thread “we all have different opinions about it”, and leave it there 
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i mostly agree with @Heavy on this subject. as i’ve stated before when this subject has come up, i like the ability to fully respec in poe, and i like that it has a significant cost. for those who don’t know: to change your ascendency in poe, you need 5 respec points for each ascendancy node (40 points for a character with all 8 points allocated), and you have to run the lab again to choose your new mastery. (the usual method is to run the lab, then unspec all your ascendancy points in the reward room, then access the altar which now allows you to select a new ascendancy.) this, to me, is a suitably steep cost for fundamentally changing your character. you can’t do it by accident. only experienced players would ever go to this much trouble, and would know well enough to have gear and skill gems prepared for their switch. trading makes this process less painful, but still costly.
with LE in its current state, there’s no analogous way to implement a mastery respec system. respecing only costs gold, which is trivial for anyone who’s played a character into endgame (and hasn’t wasted it on gambling), and the points in the mastery trees are not distinct from base-class passives. there’s also no trading (yet) to soften the blow by making acquiring new gear easier.
i only see a couple of ways to give a significant cost to a mastery respec given these facts: one would be to massively raise the cost of respec’ing points in the mastery trees, which would be punitive to players who just want to change a few points around (since gold acquisition is fairly trivial, this isn’t the worst idea, but still a bit annoying) and wouldn’t address the issue brought up in the OP of a new player realizing that they chose something they don’t like.
the other would be something like what @Shtrak suggested, where the cost of choosing a different mastery isn’t monetary but rather that of player time. this seems like a horrible idea to me. we already have something similar to this with skill respecs, and many players have complained about it. if the same method was used for character levels, i think it would alienate a lot more people than the skill respec system has. (for the record, i think skill respecs are generally in a good place and feel much better now than when the only choice for choosing a new skill was to start over from level 1.) furthermore, what are you supposed to do with your newly hobbled character after losing those 20-30 levels? go back and grind story content at a much lower level? isn’t that exactly the thing people who want a mastery respec don’t want to do?
i think it’s worth considering that harsh learning experiences can be very good for a game. it may turn some people off and lose a few players, but it can also be the trait that people love and celebrate about it. the dark souls games are a perfect example. i’ve tried to play them, didn’t like them, and haven’t felt the urge to try them again. but they are extremely popular and the series has sold 27 million copies, so clearly i’m in the minority. it’s fine for a game not to appeal to someone for what’s perceived as a harsh learning curve.
when i first played poe, i didn’t look up any build guides. i took what i knew about hack’n’slash games, picked a class that seemed interesting, and struggled through the massive skill tree and gems system. i don’t think i got past level 40 with that character. i tried again. i failed again, but i got that character further along (i “fail(ed) better” in the words of samuel beckett). i played the game like that for a while before deciding i needed some help making a build that didn’t suck. i struggled to get the gear recommended by guides, i made do with what i could find, and eventually got a character all the way through all three difficulties (this was a long time ago). it felt like a major victory. i kept playing for a while, but at some point, i got burned out on the game and put it down for a year or so. i came back for abyss league (about 3 years ago) and re-discovered my love for the game. i’m nearing 4000 hours in the game by now, and have spent at least a couple thousand dollars on supporter packs over the years. the point of this story being: i struggled a lot with the game at first, found it engaging enough to keep trying, and even after experiencing burn out, came back and continued to play and spend money on the game for years.
i agree with the devs on this topic. Simple as that. Right now and for a while after release there is no need for easy respeccs. In the future there might be a reason for it but right now everything is fine as it is.
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I remember a while back the developers actually had specializations be fluid and all that was required was just using gold to refund all your points from one to the other specialization. After that, they made a pretty large change to their system. They mentioned they wanted to have more class identity, strong mastery bonuses, and even class/mastery locked wearable items (this was before we had class-specific armor). At first, I kinda resented it because just like everyone else I used to respecing over and over again test different builds out to see which one was more optimal. But after a bit of playing with the new system, I understood where they were coming from. They wanted you to pick to play sentinel and then when you picked each mastery you felt like you were playing a completely different character verse the other masteries. I think that is a really cool functionality at the end of the day and it makes rerolling more fun because you have extremely different themed masteries within one class.
It also keeps players from doing other stuff too like, oh this is a really tough void boss so let me just spec out of being a pally and be a void knight to max out void resist, etc. Oh, this mastery is really good in this zone or this quest so let me completely respec to get that benefit. I think at the end of the day some limitations are good and some “freedoms” just open up a lot of interactions which might be problematic in the future.
Agreed. On another hand, imagine you play a certain kind of Paladin and want to try another build. You don’t want to change your main, you just want to play something else for one hour or two, just to have an idea of how it feels. In that case, bringing a hero from level 1 to level 60 seems too long. Or maybe we should have two heroes of each mastery, one “main” and one for test purposes.
I don’t think it has to be so all or nothing.
The devs could do something like let you freely change your mastery until level 50. That way, it still gives you 30 levels to try out a mastery and see how all the skills feel. Maybe even do something like cap your level at 50 until you finish a quick quest to unlock the rest of your levels (a simple yes/no quest in the End of Time) to give even more time to play with your level 30 skill.
No one likes commitment now a days! Hehe.
I think PoE follows a good model where it is very expensive to fully respec your “mastery” and passive points, but you have the option to if desired. 90% of the time I decide to just level a new characters, but sometimes the build is only slightly off from a new direction and I invest in respeccing.
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