Like I said, I think that sub-level 10 respecs should be free. But how would you know anything in this game? It explains very very little. The only way you'd know anything is via forums -- and the MAG forums have the sort of MMO obsessiveness in which players start to completely deconstruct the game mechanics.
In essence, if you want easy XP early on and suck at shooting, go medic. You'll easily top your squad on defense levels. If you want to be shooty, go MG. Get the stability upgrades, don't bother with MG upgrade. If you want sniper, look at the cheapest path to get the heaviest gun, since the others aren't really worth it. As for commando, I don't know if AR is the best gun for that. There are other suppressed weapons, and there's a ton of stealth and gear you can buy anyway. But commando is pretty advanced play.
And you should invest 13 points into the extra health, no matter what. This is just the first 30 levels... the other 30 I guess you can experiment with. By then, the few thousand that you need to respec aren't a huge deal, and even if you dislike some choice you have enough other points to be effective no matter what.
Guild wars also went through dramatic single-player design changes as the expansions came out. In Prophecies you had to work to level up, and gained skills only slowly, and you actually had to play through all 20 of the games' levels. Later on, you'd get to level 20 and get the points upgrades while you were still in the newbie island, and the game understood much more that the core of the game is what happens at level 20, when you can have a full build. Not to mention that GW limited what skills you had access to anyway via vendors, and made each one increasingly expensive. So you'd have to grind cash somehow to actually experience all the skills (or pay real-world money and have everything open in pvp).
That's not the case with MAG. A respec can give you distinct advantages over someone who hasn't respecced -- going back to my main example, the improved res + improved medic kit cost 10 points, all told. Which means that it'd only be open by level 10, during which you would be without one of the easiest ways to get xp. Instead, you can spend 4 points and have a res by level 4 (as a lame medic), use it to level quickly, then respec into improved res as soon as you have the 3k xp necessary. Now you're equipped to be a top-notch medic.
