Universal costs for spells

[Ashclout]

Spells costing 15 RPP forces you to take a certain path. Take Energy for example. 80% of users will buy the shield (15 RPP), ebeam (15 RPP), and another spell to get access to intermediate. But what if you want to be different? What if you want the beam, but not the shield or vice versa. You are stuck with an uneven number.

If you're not taking eshield and ebeam with Energy you're making a huge mistake, given that Force Wave and Energy Burst are both absolute dumpster fire spells. If you want the aura, just take it with ebeam/eshield, it's not that expensive

I was always under the impression that ebeam and eshield were 15 RPP specifically so that you could skip the rest of the tree if you wanted to get to intermediates due to the other basic spells (aside from constrict) being bad.

Of course

But that sucks. Because since E beam & shield cost 15, those spells were never be used or even CONSIDERED. But if everything was ten, they would take ebeam, shield... and one of those lesser known spells (for the same cost, you get an extra spell). And maybe they'll be used, maybe not. But you have an extra spell you can use / experiment with.

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Can you explain to me how lowering the costs would make the tree worse? You said you would have an extra spell to buy, but... how is that bad? 

Instead of doing 15 + 15, you would do 10 + 10 + 10 and thus have an extra spell. An extra spell you could choose to keep or not on your bar, an extra spell you could slot in specific situations... so you would have more flexibility? Something, I know it isn't your forte but anyway.

the math on this is simple... in the case of armed, as jumpy said, you're spending another 5 rpp for an armed stance. that in addition to the 20 rpp cost of dash strike means you'll need another 25 rpp spent in addition to reach armed's intermediates. phantom strikes (15 rpp) + anything else you'd want (10 rpp) would then get you to 50.

if phantom strikes was 10 instead, you'd end up with 45 spent in that same scenario, and you'd need to buy another spell to reach the intermediates, costing a total of 55 rpp. you'd be spending 5 more in that example, not less

armed, is the only tree which is problematic because the styles are part of the tree... when every other is in Combat Styles? I don't understand the thought process behind that, I don't think it'd be shocking if one day we had garuda, fomorian & ifrit in combat styles.