[Cainehill]

Amen. Not to mention that "nerfing what people do a lot, and buffing what they don't use" is ... stupid. People do what works, so, let's break what works. Next month, break something else that works. Oh, we've nerfed the VQ so much noone uses it? Time to beef it up a little."

Say - people build 1-11 PD a lot. Time to nerf it. People research things a lot - better half everyone's research points. Are we having fun yet?

And the clamming / fetishing? As I mentioned, there's no consensus on whether or not it's broken; there's a lot of people who claim that clams and clam hoarding is broken, sure. I haven't seen near as many people saying the same thing about fetishes, and none at all about blood stones.

I suspect that part of the reason is that generally speaking, people have a lot of other good ways to use fire and nature gems. Great forgings; solid summonings; good battlefield spells and global attack spells, Gift of Reason, etc, etc.

Which goes back to ... The theory that there just isn't enough to use water gems on. Very few of the summonings are particularly useful. Very few artifacts use water gems. Very few of the combat spells are useful / worthwhile, especially since almost all are either castable only in the water, or only out of the water, to the point where other areas of magic are more useful in an underwater battle (air) or close to it (fire, earth).

Instead of following computer gamings' ever-downward spiral of nerfing things for balance, just maybe water should be improved instead.

But I don't think that's something Zen can do in a mod, and while I'm dubious about some of the things proposed in his second big mod, I think his tweaks to the pretenders were great - largely because most were improved, with only a very few getting nerfs.

Thanks Zen!