ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Right now, you can unlearn individual talents, but not the whole tree. This would allow greater flexibility in building characters and saving wasted category points.

For example, archers start with knowing both the bow and sling trees, but one of them would go to waste since it's silly to invest points in both at the same time.

No, definitely not. I really cannot support this idea.

Archmage was not designed with people unlearning four+ categories and becoming a death god with 1.5 on every notable category and five starting infusions, in exchange for becoming boring as mud.

This would trainwreck class balance relative to each other (classes with more low impact categories would become far stronger, something that wasn't intended in their design, I'm sure.), and make more boring and linear builds far better than versatile and interesting ones.

It's also a potentially huge trap for those that don't know what they're doing-unlearning a tree because abilities in it have heavier impacts at higher levels is a major danger, as is attempting to focus down to two or three skill trees that sound good, only to die horribly due to lack of versatility skills.

It would end up encouraging people to read a build off a forum, to use optimally.

Archers are balanced around having both of them, but only investing in one, and I assume every other class too. Unlocked trees aren't 'budget' of class, more like a freebie. Imagine Wyrmic, that's good 3 or more Category points in game where they keep quite vital role, having so much more of them makes ones earned by leveling up quite unimportant. It also makes Cornacs worthless race.

It also makes Cornacs worthless race.

Heh, yeah, I didn't think of that.

You'd have to make them grant two or three Category Points or something to keep up. I think that sentence sums up how massively balance shifting this is.