I've read that respecs come from a potion that can only be purchased to 1,000 gold and, at the rate I've been making money about 10 hours in, that seems like a huge amount. Not allowing or having restrictive respecs is probably my least favorite design aspect an RPG can have, and I'm hoping there's some loophole here. I've read of the Novigrad pearl exploit but also that it was fixed, and I don't feel like messing around with mods to get into the console commands. Is there any other way in the current game to get cheaper respecs?

Basically, I'm in crows peak now and beginning to regret my alchemy specialization. While it still seems potentially the most interesting/dynamic tree, early on it's all passive star bonuses that don't help me. I'm playing on death march and by this point the increased poison chance has been lackluster as the damage from poison's dot seems very low. I have a high toxicity limit but so far have never really needed to use potions/decoctions besides for healing. Alchemy is seeming more like a tree to respec into at a higher level when I can get more impactful talents such as more bombs, cluster bombs, etc.

That said, I've yet to struggle with the difficulty so I could just stick with it as I don't feel impeded by my skill choice. Like I said, the restrictive respec thing is more just a pet peeve for me.

Thanks!

I found that by the time i wanted to respec, i had enough gold that the cost of the potion wasn't that great of a burden. I'm not sure if playing on deathmarch changes that. But the potion is the only way to do it.

Ye, if you just keep looting and selling you'll build up quite a fortune after a while (as in tens of thousands). Tbh, if you only just reached Crow's Perch and you're unhappy with your choices you could probably restart and be back where you are in a few hours, even if you managed to spend 10 hours to get there. Skipping through conversations will alone cut down a huge amount of the time you spent.

Just do a few monster contracts. You can get a few hundred gold as reward pretty easily, and the monsters usually drop loot you can sell as well. It sounds like you're early on in the game, so 1,000 may sound like a huge amount. It's really not though. Later on you'll get a ton of relics that will be worse than your witcher gear, and you can sell those for large amounts of gold. You only ever really need to spend large amounts of money on crafting witcher set gear. The rest will just build up in your inventory forever. I bought like 3 respecs on a whim when I wanted to try out alchemy and heavy attack builds.

As others have said, gold can be cheap to come by if you are careful about collecting and selling stuff.

That said, I think you might find that a lot of the other skill trees are the same way in that they don't have a lot to offer at first. The signs tree doesn't unlock the alt-spells until like 10 points in, and everything before that is sign intensity, which you don't really notice unless you really crank it. The combat tree is mostly the same - a lot of % bonuses that don't make a big difference initially.

That's part of the reason I specced into Signs. The initial upgrades are kinda meh, but once you unlock the alt-versions of the spells, you at least get to use something. Plus, every upgrade gives you + stamina regen, which you actually will start to notice fairly early.

Thanks for the reassurance everyone. I'd gotten further in the PS4 version back by launch until I fell off after the Novigrad quest line when I couldn't afford the boat ride to Skellige but maybe that was just due to poor choices on my end.

Something that just occurred to me though: price aside now, does the vendor selling the respec potion have an unlimited amount or are they limited as every other vendor item I've seen so far has been?

On a side note, after switching to my new beastly PC and death match I'm now enjoying the game far more than I had on PS4 last year!

Do the gwent tournament quest in Novigrad; you get 4500 gold even if you lose in the first round.

There is a fist fight against a level 20-something guy though; so if you're low level you may need to knock the difficulty down to the easiest setting for that.