True but MMO is a different genre, i know there are a lot of people who do like those type of systems. They like it because you cant just simply try everything out without putting to much thought in it. If you do it you might have made the wrong choice which brings a certain weight to the decision process. They like that part and i like that part aswell to some degree.
It gives me a good feeling when puzzling around with those combination and tend to strike the right balance.
I was thinking that instead of taking your character into the testing room, it just be a separate mode at the title screen. It would let you select any class/mastery, desired level, and allow you to freely move points around skills and masteries, set up as many dummies as you need, where you want, have them able to move randomly or patrol, assign groups of them to move together… stuff like that.
It’s still a fair bit of work, but seems much more manageable (and less work) than using players’ actual characters.
Edit:
The exclusion of gear in this mode would serve two purposes.
For me, it’s actually both. Meaningful decisions depends on both opportunity cost AND time/resource investment. You call it illusion, and before Diablo 3 release, I was saying exactly same thing like you are are saying now. I was just wrong.
Agree to disagree on that point then. 
Yes, that’s what many of us are saying for quite some time. And it’s fair to discuss it from position of different preferences, not call other solutions better of worse and downplay other preference by words like “illusions” or “opinion without reason”. Just saying.
Exactly. Doesnt mean everybody needs to like it though.
I tend to like it but sometimes it frustrates me aswell when i just want to try something quickly haha. Thats what i like about the try out area in lost ark. You can try different sub genres before committing to it.
I feel that’s giving players a bit too much taste of what’s yet to come, in a sense. Sure you could set a limit where one can’t create a character higher than the accounts max level or something, but this all feels like a bit of an overkill.
Having more advanced AI, setting up patrols, spawn some actual monsters, that stuff I would actually want. But to keep the “time investment : payoff” in a reasonable ratio, right now just some basic dummies would be enough for me.
Couldn’t it just create a temporary copy of your character instead?
But accessing it from the login screen would probably be the easiest way of implementing it.
Nope gotta stop you right there, sometimes the inclusion of a unique effect is very important for the sake of testing, and having no gear at all would make it much harder to judge how something feels as well as making it near impossible to use for minmaxing (since the gear you’re wearing will affect the relative value of skill nodes).
For me it goes beyond “preference,” but I just don’t think there’s much point in continuing chasing that rabbit down that hole in this thread.
There’s plenty else worth discussing.
That might be alright. The bigger point here was that doing in some instance separate from the actual game world would make it a lot easier on the devs.
Also, yeah. You make good points about the gear thing. I just don’t want it to be something that undermines the actual playing of the game.
Perhaps this should become its own topic. Seems like we derailed quite a bit here. Sorry, OP.
Yes without a doubt, having it in-game and using the original data of your character like I first had in mind would be like laying down a welcome mat for bugs and end up being a headache to code.
Yeah spawning in desired gear would feel silly, hence the character copy idea.
i think thats a fair point, however building/puzzling with a character is also playing the game for many people.
For you actually playing the game might be just killing monsters, for somebody else it might be puzzling around with the skills thinking about how to make a unique build.
Or getting headaches about how to integrate a certain build around a unique (this is something i do a lot).
Iam not trying to degrate your opinion or point. I try to let you see that there are different flavors/playstyles that people tend to like.
Not to mention cheaters
I think the test mode would encourage this, actually.
It may well be a pain to code & debug but it would also help us find bugs though it’s probably too close to the QA tools that @KissingAiur has access to :(.
You know, maybe it need not be an either/or thing with the respec. It might be alright to let people choose if they’d rather spend gold or exp. Some people would rather keep their points available and others would see it as less resource efficient. I think this could be a way to add meaningful choice to the cost side of the equation.
The thing is, if you would add gold it is more beneficial. Gold is easier to get then time you need to spend on XP. So maybe halfway? Less XP and a big amount of gold to reduce the XP penalty. Maybe even at a merchant in town to prevent abuse of swapping skills before a boss or something.
Front load cost, especially gold, has this risk to become irrelevant. Time cost, you have to pay after respect, will stay always same, yes, powercreep may help with leveling speed, but time cost will be relevant in week, month or years.
You were asking why they picked this specific solution. This may be it?
The best solution I have seen in this thread was this sandbox arena, where you can try anything but keep system like it is.
My 2 cents.
re: bold part
This keeps coming up and I totally agree. I’m not suggesting people should be able to swap it in a mono. It may even be argued that they shouldn’t be able to swap it in a timeline still in progress. Just in towns and EoT. I’m cool with either.
As for gold vs exp, this comes down only to the costs of each. The game already needs more gold sinks and things to make gold meaningful, so this is probably a reasonable compromise.
Let’s look at a couple hypothetical examples. Assume each point is 1,000g to respec.
Level 10, first character.
1k is a lot of gold this early in the game. Just resetting a skill level is probably not a big deal.
Level 10, subsequent characters.
1k isn’t much gold, but it still means waiting to buy more stash tabs, not buying Runes of Shattering, or less/no gambling. It’s affordable, but still carries secondary implications.
Level 70, plenty of gold in stash (say 200k).
1k is easy to make, but you may need to respec many points because you want to completely change the direction of your build (perhaps from fire crit to fire dot). You’re looking at either spending 40-50k gold, or a couple hours of leveling up again. Spending gold retains your power curve, but is not a small amount of money.
Veteran player, millions of gold.
The gold cost no longer matters to you, but you’ve played long enough that you have earned this kind of privilege. Perhaps you’re really stingy or just don’t find exp a big deal since you play so much anyway, so you generally just dump the exp anyway. Neither cost has a huge impact on you.
In general, I just see it as an overall improvement that keeps players engaged and willing to experiment with their builds because they are choosing the cost–it carries a lot less negative baggage this way.
just skimmed all the lame i know better that you posts.
so maybe its already postet,dident op mean passive as well?
its a beta game so it would make sence to get ppl to respec alot(make it cheaper)like op said
he has a full time job and a family and cant invest that mutch time in the game.
sry albinosaurus i hit the wrong reply should be a general reply 
No worries. I’ve done it a couple times.