Shattered Kingdoms

I can see taking HoL off of the spec list, if it's that big of a problem - no other cabal's skills actually merge with the abilities of classes anyway, so it can therefore be scrapped. That should solve the problem of "Wah, I want to be a ****up!"

Also, I don't know what game you're playing, where Specialize takes a long time to master, but it certainly isn't SK. By the time you have four attacks, if you unlearned specialize to relearn it again - it'd take an hour to learn spec, not days.

Even at an hour or two that still more than prevents the spec swapping on the spur of the moment for whatever you need.

The biggest perk I see with this, and the point I'm trying to make, is it would encourage specialization diversity, because people would be willing to try out previously rarely used weapons since they won't be completely screwed if the weapon turns out to be a bust.

As it is just about everyone sticks with the safe weapons, and the majority of the subtypes out there are left completely unused.

I still say that if you want to respec, it takes a full IC year. That would prevent wpn swapping, and would allow newbs to retrain to better wpn subtypes.

Even that would be fine. It would the so called "abuse" that people suggested. While still giving mercs plenty of leway to try out different weapons.