They should drop character level and straight away have a paragon level as baseline.
In DI, paragon level is what used to measure and control your progression.
For e.g. You need P480 to equip P480 gear, P600 to equip P600 gear and etc.
The higher your paragon level, the better gear quality will drop.
The X legendary you found with your P560 character may be stronger than X legendary that you found at P495 if the legendary P560 rolled well.
Now I have a funny picture in my head of someone building a roof on the ground. Something must have gone terribly wrong.
From what I remember it’s 10 so effectively two per class. And yeah limited character slots discourage the whole idea of having a bunch of different builds, so it’s more important to be able to respec.
I personally like the levelling experience. I’m happy to have my hand held during it to some extent. Introduce the abilities and scale mob density/difficulty knowing that we have limited abilities. This gives us time to experiment with them and get used to what they do. Rather than throwing you in the deep end with toughest monsters, all abilities choosable and you not knowing how stuff works. It’s also the best time to tell the basic story beats. It also means at max level you’re at least partially geared from stuff you’ve collected along the way.
That said, I like the D3 approach where you can choose story mode or adventure mode. So once you’ve done the story once you can skip it and have a more freeform game if you like. I wouldn’t be averse to seeing a skip mode included where you jump straight to max level with a basic set of random gear and get to start from there. The key point though, being that the modes should be player’s choice.
That is incredibly limiting and definitely against any philosophy of build diversity. I get it, limited server space, whatever… But don’t tie respec cost into that.
I guess we’ll see how it plays out in practice…
You’ve touched on something key here. Different people enjoy different experiences and playing for different reasons in different ways. I think the goal should be to make it accessible for as many different choices as possible. And when it comes to something like a cheap respec vs an expensive one it makes more sense to go for the cheap one.
If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t believe in respeccing and wants your character to stay pure as you’ve build it then fine. You can just choose NOT to respec. If on the other hand you’re a player who wants to respec often then let them. If I respec five times a day what do you care? It doesn’t affect you.
That doesn’t really require a whole leveling process though. I’m not suggesting they simply just change nothing and make every character automatically max level.
The leveling system itself has mostly just become obsolete in Blizzard games because they don’t want to make level meaningful in any way.
It does when the game gets balanced around that people can always just pick the right skills for the right bosses or dungeons, hard immunities because “you can just swap elements can’t you?”
Indeed. The very purpose of limited respecs is to make it more enjoyable.
True. Hence why I am arguing for some kind of respec cost (in the broadest sense), and not Zero Respecs.
Fixing mistakes should be possible.
Albeit, speaking of good game design, the much better approach here is to add a Confirm button to the skill tree, so you cant missclick a skill etc.
Yeah. Wanting to respec after months should be essentially free.
Indeed. Others have said that it was not at all so costly.
Tbh, I think people have been grossly misreading Blizzards comment on this.
Yep.
I think it would be a terrible idea. But if lvling is meaningless anyway, it certainly makes no sense to keep it around.
I dont think it is possible to disagree more with a statement 
The demon killing is secondary imo, games like Diablo is ALL about creating builds.
Which also means, lvling and gearing IS the game, imo.
Yep, they need to have at minimum 50 character slots tbh.
It it hard to imagine Blizzard suffering from limited server space for characters.
There are clear limits to how much can be running on the server at any point in time, but since you can only be logged into one character at any time, I can only assume the limited character slots is because they either want people to buy more character slots directly, or buy more game accounts 
That basically can’t happen. Game devs need to pick a path. Making a game that does everything all at once is prohibitively expensive to make, and will probably be bad anyway, due to a lack of focus.
No you cant. The game will be designed around respeccing, if respeccing is free.
True, I dont care what you do in the game. But the ability to freely respec 5 times a day does affect me. Since it changes the game.