[DrPraetorious]

You greatly overestimate the importance of the nature - you can summon that off of a Naiad at conjuration 5, not exactly science fiction level stuff. Those combat spells (of which you forgot arrow fend) can be cast pretty easily through a communion (except gaia's blessing) - one of the few things MA T'ien Ch'i actually can do well is build communion matrices.

Yeah, he enables MA T'ien Ch'i to cast somecool stuff which it can't otherwise do. The real question is: why can't MA T'ien Ch'i do any cool stuff?

Is it because it's a MA nation that only gets one 3, and that's in water which is easy to boost? All you've done is drive home the point that MA T'ien Ch'i can get a really good hero without unbalancing anything.

If you were concerned about his total points cost or total number of picks, you could pull off an air, drop the water entirely and he'd be much cheaper, no less powerful, but less thematic. He's a master of the way, he has to have water magic even though you don't even want it. Likewise the nature; that's more useful than the water but still hardly where you'd invest points if you were designing a T'ien Ch'i pretender. It's a small research bonus mainly included for thematic purposes, which is also why he's immortal.