I’ll say it again as I have.
There are so many variants of 1 build, and there are many many many many builds.
The ability to change 1 point in your current build should not cost 100ks of gold, just because it’s farther away.
ARPGs should be able experimenting and testing out things. Just because you personally like making 1 character and playing it till death, doesn’t mean everyone else doesn’t love trying out all the cool builds they can.
At it’s current pace, I cannot see LE being relevant for long, because players will spend weeks leveling 1 build, and basically being pidgeon-holed into playing that spec forever, or at least spending their entire bank re-specing, and spending a week re-leveling spells. People will quote POE or D2, but those games are largely figured out, and I bet money that a lot of players just follow the herd, the pros, the streamers, and pick the most optimal builds. But what if I want to make my own optimal build? I can’t, because I don’t have 10 hours a day to spend re-rolling characters and re-specing. I want to be able to test out all the passives and spells in the game, but that’s impossible. How can restricting access to try out all the different builds being behind a “free time to play” wall be a good thing? That’s like Dota have all heroes unlocked for anyone, no P2W, even playing field. VS League of Legends where you’re at a disadvantaged state on day 1.
Giving players an even playing field (but high ceiling) on what they can do is critical for any game.
How do I know if passive A is better than B? Well it sort of reads better I guess? Or big streamer told me to use it. So I pick it. Can I test out the difference? Nope, because for some reason you don’t want me to, so I blindly choose.
There is no real choice, because you cannot test anything in the game. Also you cannot experiment because once you decide it’s almost over in terms of choice. Just changing re-specing during beta will be an advantage for beta players, new players will never be able to test anything, so that’s not a good solution.
Choice is always better than no choice. To make an informed choice, you need to be able to look, test, and feel all the options. Blindly choosing things and then being stuck with uninformed decisions later is not a good game model.