Yes on the respecs. You have 3 achievement trees (Class, Archetype, and Class II) each with different abilities and routes you can take. Depending on your class and guild/raid needs you'll spec based on need. You can respec at any time you want (sometimes for a fee). You can even get a house item for your in-game home that lets you store skill profiles so you can easily flip between a couple sets if you like.
Pros:
- Medium range difficulty as far as MMO's go (not nearly as intensive as EQ1, but also not "Fisher Price: My First MMO" like WoW)
- Involved combat (no "set it and forget it")
- More robust tradeskilling & crafting involvement and mechanisms
- More frequent expansions/content releases to keep things fresh.
- More content than you can conceivably do on a single character. Thousands and thousands of quests. Huge world. Tons of stuff to see and do.
- A largely more mature, adult and helpful community. That's not to say that you still won't run into your "l337 d00dz lol omg wtf bbq yo", but they are pretty rare. EQ2 doesn't seem to attract the kiddies like WoW does.
Cons:
- Early game largely trivial. You can solo to the cap fairly swiftly if you are a more than moderate player.
- Light on PVP. Only a couple PVP servers of varying ruleset. A con if you are into that.
- Low live GM involvement. Special events are rare anymore.
- Poor customer service interface and response times to in-game issue. Weak AUP enforcement.
My opinion, FWIW. :)
*PUSH*
Edited, Nov 24th 2008 6:50pm by Stugein