If you don't want to see some minor spoilers, close this thread.

I figured I'd make this thread as a public service announcement, since I didn't actually know about this until I went back to check.

The npc in the Homestead who offers to let you respec also offers three other services. One to increase reputation, one to increase attributes, and one to increase abilities. If you're like me, you ignored the first one and were puzzled by the second two when he said something about 'marks of ability' and 'marks of talent'. What are those. I don't remember finding those.

Long story short, what he actually offers is

-Lose 1 point from any Attribute to gain 1 Reputation
-Lose 5 unspent Ability points to gain 1 Attribute point
-Lose 1 unspent Talent point to gain 10 Ability points

I want to reiterate that last one. You can turn one talent into 10 ability points. Holy crap. By spending all of your talent points this way, you can get a total of 118 Ability points, by level 20. Enough to max out almost 8 Abilities, even before equipment bonuses, without abusing the Seller of Secrets at all. By sacrificing 3 talent points, you gain the ability to completely max out 2 new Abilities.

This is a huge game-changer.

FAIR WARNING
Once you make those trades, the effects are irreversible. Even if you then purchase a respec, you WILL NOT undo the transaction. You will still be down one talent point, and up 10 ability points (or whatever trade you made). The ONLY way to reverse this is to reload an older save.

(With 1 tome of Mortal Techniques)

Add these together and there is no reason to take All Skilled Up, Bigger and Better, Light Stepper, or Know-it-All ever again. And Politician and Scientist are very dubious investments indeed.

(Well I kind of knew that before, except for Light Stepper. That one was a little surprising.)

Also keep in mind you can trade for Attribute points. At that lvl you could have 40 attribute points if you went with a single school (such as witch). This means you could cap out intelligence, constitution, speed, and perception. A warrior could just go straight man at arms.

All skilled up is available at level 3 where 2 abilities point is really huge. For a third of the game it's a decent talent. After acquiring moloch of course, it should be respeced away and never be picked again.
That's a bit far fetched, but it can have its use early game. Still, maybe it would have been simpler if it just gave a straight 2 abilities point + 1 ability point every other odd level up?

Scientist may be worth as much as 6 ability point for henchman or 4 ability point for pragmatic main character. At least it scales better than the current all skilled up.

Argh, and yesterday my lone wolves got Light Stepper and Scientist as talents.

Thanks for the info, and now to decide whether to load an old save and save those talent points for the demon or not.

Wow... I did not know that... I picked a lot of 'filler' talents (including the stat and ability point) since they're just filled with useless stuff that it's not even an interesting trade-off, just get the few interesting ones and then... "well, what doesn't *totally* suck?"

If I knew this they would all be gone.
It does seem strange the demon voids even more talents under absolute useless, as if we didn't have enough of them already.
Needs tweaking IMO.

What, you can respect? I beat the game but never found this guy. Is he in that last portal I could never open? The one near the garden?