Camelot Grab Bag Q&A
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Q: I am confused about how the full respec will work with autotraining. Can you clarify?
A: Let's start with some background. Autotraining is a feature of the game for some classes, but not all of them. One class that has autotrain is the paladin they have slash and chants as skills that autotrain up (extremely slowly) IF they do not choose to train those skills of their own accord. If a paladin never puts a single point into slash, by the time he is level 28, he will have a spec of 7 in slash. Those seven levels of points are "free" and don't come from any specializing or leveling. If he gets to 48 without ever training in slash, he will have autotrained up to a spec level of 12. Again, those seventy plus points just magically appear. This feature went into the game a long time ago, and was intended to prevent a player from entirely gimping himself.
Whether the feature serves its intended function, or has become instead a tool used primarily by players known as "min/maxers" or "kind of scary" is not the point of this wee essay, and an entirely separate discussion. Certainly the discussion coming from my badly worded and, well, WRONG note the other day has been carefully observed and passed up the chain.
When we first introduced autotrain, the game would use your spec points FOR you, to make sure you never fell below a certain level. The public outcry was great, and to cut to the chase, we fixed autotrain so that it did not take your points. Instead, if autotrain kicks in, it creates the points and adds them to your total.
This is why some people have a few more points than others of the same class.
The free points thing sounds like a much bigger deal than it actually is. For instance, going back to our paladin example, a pally has two lines with the autotrain option chants and slash. I do not think there is a single paladin that would try and level to fifty without putting any points at all into chants, do you?
A player who autotrained, and accepted the fact that he was going to be gimped just to get that handful of extra points, has more points total than a player who did not autotrain. It's a severe tradeoff for very little reward, but the reward does exist.
Now, on to the respec thing. When you activate your respec, the game will check your character to see if you have any autotrain lines that have a minimum attached to them. If our paladin is level 50, the game will automatically assign points to the autotrain lines until they are both at 12, before our paladin does anything else. (The game calculates what the minimum level should be depending on your level.)
Why? Well, if a player autotrained, the points he had were (free) and to prevent abuse of the system, those free points must be assigned to the line from which they came. However, code is an if/then, either/or kind of thing, and the game cannot tell if the training you did at level whatever was the result of an autotrain or a choice on your part. So the points are automatically deducted.
NOW we're getting to the whole "lost" thing. If you try to spec out of a line that you autotrained into a line you did not autotrain, you will not be able to spec it as high. That's because when you train, autotrain lines AUTOMATICALLY take however many points that would have been gathered via autotraining. You can thus get lines with autotrain back to the same level they were before you respec'ed, but lines without cannot go that high.
Points are not technically lost. But they can, in some specific circumstances, be lost to YOU and customer service is COMPLETELY UNABLE to remove the points from the autotrained line and give them to you to use.
