EDIT: I will acknowledge that I am probably far too conservative in my use of Source skills. That's likely because on my first playthrough, I wasn't sure what to expect. That also ties into "Gamer's Hoarding Syndrome", where games refuse to use items which could help, in case they need them later.
Those cooldowns designed to force scroll-using.
I don't understand. I don't understand what scrolls a long cooldown on Tornado is supposed to force, I don't understand why ONLY Tornado has a long cooldown to force scroll usage, and I don't understand why it's desirable to force scroll usage (especially for only this one spell).
Bless is super hard to balance. A lot of issues is that players forget that it can also be casted on a character, so works well for support characters to use. Casting it on a duel wielder for example adds another 10% to dodge, as if you had ten ranks in it. Add on leadership (20%), Parry Master (10%), and 10 ranks in dual wielding, and half of the attacks on you will miss, not even adding weapon bonuses, and this boosts resistances even more. Bless is also used if utilized -before- enemies curse surfaces (I.E.), your character is in a fire surface, bless it rather than waiting around for the enemies to curse it. I believe blessed surfaces are as difficult to stop as cursed ones, so why not utilize it? Most favor quick defeat of high damage over slower strats, but bless definitely helps a single character survive a difficult fight, and I think the 1 AP, 1 Source Point is probably where it has to be.
The dodge might be nice, but you can get up to 50% dodge even without Bless, and dodge doesn't work against magic attacks. In terms of resistances, scrolls of Armor are just as effective without the SP cost.
Pre-emptive use of Bless is ineffective. Bless lasts for 2 turns at most and ENEMIES CURSE FOR FREE. Hitting something twice turns your blessed surface into a curse one. It's a waste of an SP.
Blessed surfaces are NOT anywhere close to as as difficult to stop as a cursed surface, because ENEMIES CURSE FOR FREE. That's the biggest problem with the Source point cost of Bless.
The source point for Bless kills it, and kills the counterplay to cursed surfaces, which enemies create FOR FREE, and NO other buffs will make it useful in my opinion. Fine as it is? I do not agree at all.
I disagree on buffing the Sebille one. It has no AP cost and works exceptionally well against slow, which you suffer a lot. You can use the pyramids to practically teleport to recharge source if you need to from Siv's in Act 2 (And I believe every act following has a place), so ideally, there's no reason to be saving source.
None of this is a reply to what I wrote or why I wrote it.
I was talking about how this skill does not remove Silence. Silence is a complete shutdown skill for a mage, and having Sebille's big unique skill be utterly useless for a mage is a tremendous oversight. I don't care about the AP cost. It's not relevant at all to what I was talking about.
In practical terms, you can't use the teleporter pyramids in battle, and even if you could, it would kill the flow.
There also isn't any Source fountain in Act 3 (the one at the very end of the act is not meaningfully useful during Act 3) and the one in Act 4 is hidden and requires several puzzles and a lot of exploration to access, and even on subsequent playthroughs, it is right next to a tough boss fight.
Encourage I think is fine as is. It does scale slightly as the game goes on and I use it all the time, every fight, personally.
It really doesn't scale very well or very quickly. Might as well grab Pyrokinetic 1 and Peace of Mind, which has the additional bonus of preventing or removing some status effects. It's not as if I'm asking for a huge boost, just +1 every 5 levels.
I used petrification a lot in the beginning, and use when other CC options are out.
Eh, maybe I'd use it more if I had a magic-focused dwarf instead of physical, so this might be my bias for that character. Still they could probably lose the damage component regardless.
