Massively

Hot on the heels of the announcement that City of Heroes will now be providing character respecs for a fee, the Test Server has been tweaked so that purchaseable respecs for characters there will be free of charge. Previously, the only way to test out a new build was to copy a character with a stored respec over, burn the respec, and repeat each time you wanted to test something.

But now, you can retcon your character on Test as often as you like! Comic book writers do it often enough, so why not City of Heroes players? This blogger never quite got over the wholesale resurrection of Jean Grey, and that was years ago, but after respeccing a beloved blaster several times over, we can see the appeal of flexibility.

The player base has welcomed the news. Previously, the only ways to get respecs were through veteran rewards, occasional unpredictable developer awards, trials, or crafting them through found Invention recipes. This is big news for those who like to test out alternative builds for a character before committing. It's also useful to those who use the Test Server primarily for PvP, as many CoX players do. Now that characters on Test can effectively be respecced as many times as the player wants, a CoX PvP toon can take full advantage of the regular tweaks and alterations to how powers work.