My beef is more with ranking than skill improvements.

I agree that, if heroing is made easy, we are going to have
the mid-20s duergar axe spec syndrome get bumped up to level
51.  Not something I would care for.  On the other hand, I do
think it takes too long to hero.  I’ve not had one in less
than 350 hours due to a number of factors.  Inability to find
a group, finding a group and then having it dissolve
immediately, aversion to repetitive mob-killing, etc.  My
current character is at level 30 in 70 hours and I’m
actually impressed that I’ve gone up so fast – this is
breakneck speed for me.  At this rate, I may hit hero in 150
hours (holy ####, no sarcasm that would be great, and at 8
hours per week we’re looking at the end of August.

All told, that’s about 4 months to hero playing one
character, which leads to my issue with the whole mess:

There are all these awesome skills and spells that the high
level characters get, and deservedly so.  My example will be
the warrior class.  When legacies came in, that was an awesome
addition to the game.  Out of the 26 cool new skills for the
warrior class, I’ve had three.  The IMMs put all this great
stuff in the game that I would love to try out, but my
schedule as a casual player prohibits that.  Why?  Because it
takes me, on average, 4 months to get those skills.  That’s
too long, in my book.

Abilities I’ve always wanted to try, but have not had the
time include at least four of the legacies (being reasonable
here), frightful fiend, shadow drag, PWK, a major shifter
form, among others.  That list right there represents a good 2
years of playing time IF I stuck with each character to
hero-range.  During which time, you guys will implement even
more cool abilities that will be queued up in a never-ending
line.

No these abilities shouldn’t be gained for nothing – doing
so vastly decreases their value.  As others have mentioned,
though, the casual player cannot hope to try even a fraction
of what CF has to offer at the higher levels due to the fact
that they can’t reach them in a reasonable amount of time.

Great job in making such a diverse game, but I’d really like
to try out a little bit more of it.