[Ironhawk]

The more common forms of boosting your magic paths are as described above. For in-battle, you can use booster spells, gems, and communions (if you are capable). For out of battle your only recourse are booster items.

Generally speaking, due to its high cost, empowerment is only used when you have no other options. For example you might not even have a mage with the magic path you want and thus you would need to empower one so that it could in turn buff or boost itself to higher levels. Perhaps the most common empowerment is blood 0 -> blood 1 so that you can bootstrap a blood economy. Another reason to use a mage might be to get over a "booster-hump" like getting from Air-3 to Air-4.