Kelemvors Gavel raises a good point about respeccing to hit a particular DC. You don't have to respec to do that. Reloading the save and rerolling over and over again will be a more effective and time-efficient way of achieving it. If you need to roll a 20, and you have a +0 with no bonuses, you have a 5% chance. If you respec to get a +5 to the roll, you have a 25% chance of success. If you just reload and redo the roll, you only have to reload 5 or 6 times to have the same probability of succeeding the check once:
1-(.95)^6=26.5% chance of success on one roll eventually.
Just replying for fun since it is math, I don't think it actually matters.
But our analysis doesn't consider the consequence of failing after those first 6 @5% chance rolls vs the consequence of failing the first roll @25%. Because in one case you have to reroll another 6 times to get an equally high chance again vs just one. I think the more important metric is expected rolls to succeed @5% vs expected rolls to succeed @25% which is 20 rolls vs 4 rolls. So on average you need 16 more rolls without respec. What is faster might depend on your pc
It's even worse if you look at the 'bad luck' scenarios. Needing more than 50 rolls is entirely possible with a 5% success rate, and no one wants to reload 50 times in a row.
Also, +5 bonus would be at level 1. If you do it later in the game you can easily get a much higher bonus, especially if you can expertise via bard or thief class.
Still, personally I am not a fan of respec since I think your class choices should have as much consequence as the narrative choices you make in game. There is no option to have character X join your party in Act 2 if you killed her in Act 1 after all, and you can't just switch between Act I choices. It just seems weird to me that you would change your class in the middle of the game, but again, it doesn't really hurt me much except that it limits game design in some other parts a bit.
Your assessment is true and fair, but I think the point that what can be achieved with respec can be achieved with "savescumming" still stands vis-a-vis DC checks, and it is just a matter of convenience. If respec is "cheating," then so is "savescumming." I maintain that neither are cheating, and it is just a way you choose to play the game. I played the whole game as a sorcerer. I chose sorcerer tags, roleplayed as a sorcerer, and never respec'd. Like you, I felt that being a sorcerer was a major decision in how I chose to play the game. However, I understand there are many people who play the game differently than me.
While I am playing this game for a singleplayer, story rich, character driven, party-based RPG experience, others are playing it as a multiplayer immersive sim quasi-sandbox because that's also something that it is. In the immersive sim, finding new and creative ways to solve problems or progress through the story is the name of the game. Part of that is fucking around with builds to see what can and cannot be accomplished in the game.
I am not playing this game for build experimentation, but I know many people who are. I had friends at uni who would spend hours looking up rules, mechanics, and build ideas just to see if one character concept would work. Meanwhile, I made a generic bard who was a former god that got Karsus'd and sent back to level one. These guys had a stock of 10 different build concepts EACH, and readily died for fun just so they could try out a new concept.
