No, you cannot 'Respec'.
Spent points stay spent. However, this matters less than your equipped abilities, which (once learned), can be changed at any time.
New Skills and Abilities are Cheap.
Getting to a basic level of proficiency at which you can comfortably adventure with a new weapon takes a fairly minimal investment. You don't need to max things out to be able to comfortably use that shiny new Blade you just decided to switch to, and you can always go back and repeat some easier quests (All quests can be repeated periodically) if you need some easy and quick XP. Which brings me to...
Skill and Ability points are plentiful.
Seriously, you will be swimming in points early on. More than enough to get a feel for everything that's going on, and easily enough to 'fix' any early bad decisions you might make. And besides, by the end of the game...
Yes, you can get enough skill points to max out everything.
Character growth in The Secret World has been pitched as 'Horizontal, not Vertical'. Which is to say that, if you focus on only two weapons, you can max yourself out rather quickly, yes, but there are enough skill points in the game to eventually max out every Skill and every Ability. After a point, character growth stops being about becoming more powerful, and instead becomes about having more choices. And the best part is that that point is wherever you want it to be. If you're not having fun with a given weapon anymore, you can change it. Anytime you want. You might need to duck back to some easier content for a little while, but that isn't a big deal anyway.
Out of the box, the interface is not very configurable at all. What you can do without custom UI modifications (mods) is:
- Move some windows around by dragging on the edges (not the party window though)
- Add chat tabs/windows and customize them by clicking the small gearwheel icon
- Scale the UI in Interface Options (this causes problems with floating combat text though)
- Create, rename and resize inventory windows
- Make inventory windows sticky (lock icon) so they can be used as hotbar for consumables
Anything more than this requires custom UI addons. You can find them at 3rd party sites such as:
There aren't very many of these yet, since the game is new and Flash based addon development is not as open and accessible as for example World of Warcraft's LUA based addon technology.
The addons themselves are written in Adobe Flash using a game UI middleware called Scaleform GFx.
Best Answer
This is another of those quests that many assume is bugged, when in fact it's just not very obvious.
Piercing actually has nothing to do with it. After looking around for a lot longer than expected we found it - at the base of the Windmill there is a door leading inside, on the door frame there are two spaces to place the runes which will open up a secret instance for further investigation.
Screenshot: