How do I respec my character in Diablo 3?

Question

In Diablo 2 there is a way to respec your character skills and attributes.

I have not see anything yet as the game is being released tomorrow, but how/is it possible to respec your characters if you don't like the build that you've selected?

The skill calculator shows what you can pick and what runes you can select, but I have not been able to find any news on the ability to change/respec these features of your character.

Do you simply get all the abilities and just swap them in/out like you did with Spec/Glyphs in World of Warcraft?

Answer 1

You can change skills whenever you want, but there are currently two penalties:

There's a small cool-down in which you won't be able to use the new skill, which makes swapping skills frequently in combat disadvantageous...

...And swapping skills will cause you to lose the "Nephalem Valor" buff that characters over level 60 get from killing elite monsters, which increases your magic find, causes boss monsters to drop additional items, and, since paragon levels were added in patch 1.0.4, also gives bonus experience.

See also the question on Nephalem Valor

Answer 2

You can change any skill, rune, or passive at any time through the character interface, as many times as you like.

Doing so does initiate a short cooldown on any skills changed, however, effectively preventing you from swapping in combat.

Answer 3

You can change your skills and glyphs whenever you want, just observing a small cooldown between changes (of seconds to minutes), there is no concept of "respeccing".

Answer 4

In case it is of interest for historical value, during the beta there was a period where you could only "respec" at a certain altar. There was an altar in town (near where the banners/portals appear), and at the start of at least one dungeon I remember.

I think the motivation was to preserve the idea of making you stick with a build and not be able to respec at will, without making it as laborious as in say WoW. However, the devs decided that in a game like D3, ultimately the flexibility to play however you want whenever you want contributed more to fun gameplay.