[PvK]

That's exactly right, Edi. I only hit the ones I knew that gave several new levels of other paths in combos. The focus of this mod is mainly on making boosting more expensive and slow, so nations are stuck in their niches for longer, and take longer and more effort to get out of them.

In unmodded, anyone with D2 can crawl in time to D7 via summons and magic items. In this mod, it will take considerably more effort. But notice that this suddenly makes taking higher levels of pretender magic (in all paths) much more valuable, because it's much less common for national mages to be able to get booster items, but once you get even one booster item, it's a valuable leap...

I'm starting to think I should probably have just removed Arcane Nexus altogether.

Edit: Again, the point is that it is harder to get high-level magic unless you are actually a nation whose mages have appropriate levels for it, or you have a pretender designed to help them to get it (at this mods new required levels) or to cast it himself. If you are the right nation with the right pretender for what you want to do, then it's only somewhat more expensive to do those things in unmodded. Suddenly mage-pretenders are much more strategically interesting.