Oh, these "skill trees"! :( I've expressed my opinion about them in another thread before. To put it briefly: in my opinion, the way it's implemented in "Heroes 3" is one of the most UNsuccessful things imaginable. More precisely, for beginner players, it doesn't matter; they naturally "take what they get" and don't worry about it. But those who have been playing for a long time and think critically know how awful it is!:smile29:
But the main thing is the different degree of importance and the result for online and offline play.
In offline mode, each player who knows about the properties of "skill trees" and the utilities that allow them to "extract" skills can use them. As far as I know, this is not prohibited and is not considered cheating. Thus, everyone is on equal footing here.
It's a different story online. If one player can see which branches he should develop his heroes in, and another cannot, it's obviously unfair and should be stopped (but how?)!
The most radical solution to this problem (as well as the problem of cheating) would be a complete redesign of the principle of random distribution into two options:
a) the skills offered when leveling up are chosen randomly not when the map is generated, but directly at the moment of leveling up;
b) when leveling up, the player is offered to choose the desired skill from the entire list (this is exactly how it is done in the Phoenix mod: I haven't played it, but I saw it in a screenshot: see below).
But, firstly, no one will do this to avoid being burned at the stake for heresy;), and secondly, even if someone does, no one will play such a mod, because it will no longer be "Heroes," but another game! :( It's enough to remember the epic srach "Sod vs WT"... ;)

Addition: here, I just found it in "Vestnik Geroev" No. 5 (April 2011) in the article about the Phoenix mod:

Learning secondary hero skills.
The main difference from the old dialogue is a single window for all skills. Moreover, learning skills happens immediately, without closing the dialogue window. In addition, the player can choose whether to confirm the selection of a skill to learn or to perform the learning automatically.

In my opinion, this is an excellent solution!:smile20: