We can rebuild her

A terrible sense of foreboding hangs over the process of respec'ing in Dungeons & Dragons Online. After deciding to do it I read through several pop-up screens of warnings before being asked to type in my character's name to confirm that I really actually definitely wanted to go ahead. It's eerily reminiscent of the act of deleting a character.

The game then told me that I would now be able to access the respec via the character selection screen – another echo of the deletion process – and when I did so I found myself in a pocket dimension with spooky music that recalled the Far Realm, and in a conversation that I didn't immediately grasp was how I reselected the class choices I've made as I levelled.

In DDO it's called reincarnation rather than respec'ing, and maybe the intention was to convey that reincarnating is a strange and unsettling experience, because I really couldn't shake the feeling that I could all too easily accidentally destroy my character.

The sense of doom being only a careless keystroke away was further exacerbated by the fact that a respec requires the complete recreation of a character's appearance from scratch. That seems unnecessary, or at least it should be. Surely changes of appearance can be something separate from changes of everything.

I didn't get an exact match on the skin tone.

All this to change a couple of feats. It's perhaps a waste of the respec item I started the game with, but given the potential for complex character building in DDO I'd sooner get my first experience of redoing it in one go at level 6 than at level 20. Or 30.