After playing it, I love every single aspect of this expansion, except the way new specs are unlocked. Everything is seriously amazing except for that single, pretty glaring bummer. Despite how great everything else is, the one issue with the spec unlocking is a serious drawback and a disappointment to many, myself included.
This is my suggestion: Keeping the points required to unlock the same as right now, let people choose which skills they unlock as they progress linearly left to right through the new spec tree.
For example, it costs 60 to open up the new spec. From then on players can choose to unlock any utilities or their heal, or traits from the trait line, but not the elite skill. Players progress linearly through the trait tree left to right. If they choose to spend 15 pts to learn the first (farthest left) static trait in their line, they unlock the ability to learn the first three choosable traits (next to the right). Once they learn one of those traits for 15 pts the next static trait unlocks and the can choose to learn that next, or learn another choosable trait at the current tier they have unlocked. Whenever they want to bank up the 25 pts for a utility or heal, they can learn those in any order. Once they have everything in the line learned, they can learn the elite skill (elite skill is still learned last).
This keeps the current progression to unlocking the elite specs for those that find that important, but also let’s people “play how they want” by allowing them to learn the exact traits and abilities they want as they progress. This way for players who already have a basic build they are aiming for, it will take them 60 pts to unlock, plus 15*6=90 pts, for a total of 150 pts to have a basic build without any heals, elite skill or utilities unlocked. This is far from being handed everything up front, and to get the spec completely unlocked still requires 400 pts. However this way players can much more quickly get to the point where they have a working build they are comfortable with, and still get a sense of progress by planning out what skill/trait to learn next as they worth through HoT.
This would be easy to implement: Just refund all hero points spent on elite traits to the player, then let them spend those points according to the above system.
I’m fairly certain this would alleviate much of the frustration of a lot of players, and it’s still a compromise.
If you like this suggestion leave a reply and click the +1 to the right of the post, and please don’t derail