Early on, I was trying many things, and anytime I wanted to switch say from flurry to twisting blades, it wouldn’t let me, since skills above that have certain prerecs (spending amount to unlock) would stand in the way. So, i’d reset it fully and then I had to remember what I wanted and how much… Obv I understand why it’s done, but how about…
Allow free respect without skill prerec limitations, but unless they are met, do not allow saving new spec and clearly identify what is needed at each stage. This way, if I want to switch from flurry to blades, I only have to reset 1 skill into other and if my flurry has 5 points, I know I need to put 5 back to blades to save, OR total of 5 to blades or lateral skills or anything below or above, to meet the requirements of he next tree.
This way, you can respec all you want in any part of the skill tree, without having to reset most skills, and still keep the requirements of unlocks amounts.
Being able to make changes to the tree before committing, certainly makes sense. Seems like a no-brainer Quality of Life feature to add.
On the other hand, I also thing it should cost way more to respec only few points, and if a system like this that allows you to reduce the number of points changed, this only becomes more important.
Like, the minimum respec cost should be maybe 25-50% of a full respec. So if you change just 1 skill point, you have to pay those 25-50%. Changing half your points would still just cost 50% too of course.
Otherwise, it just becomes too cheap to make small adjustments imo.
Of course, this should only apply in late-game. From lvl 1-50 or so, it should be cheap to make these adjustments, so you can try out skills as they are gained.
I’m all for having a cost involved, but say for example like the OP wants if you remove 5 early you have to spend those 5 or it won’t let you close and continue on until you do. That way the gold your spending is only for 5 and not pulling out the whole damn tree.
I found the same I wanted to redo that base spender/earner often and was annoyed with pulling out the whole tree to do so.
Often a fun aspect was based off that first tree, so it made doing so tedious, the gold spending didn’t bother me at all just the re-spending all the points in the right places again.
if you are low lev there’s no reason why allocating even all points would be a problem: you are low lev, it’s few clicks and little to no gold.
conversely if you are high lev you know the ins and outs of your build, you have planned it through, you are not needing to change anything frequently let alone low lev skills, and even if for some reason you really wanted to you know clicking around those skill points is a thing you’d do in a breeze (and it’s going to cost you more or less nothing impacting your wealth since whatever the cost, high lev you’ll be full of gold).