Acashic records vs. separate spells

[Agema]

Manually site searching depends on the mage. As a general rule, I'd suggest any mage with 6 magic levels total (not including blood or holy) would make a decent manual site searcher. Ideally those six or more would concentrate in two paths (e.g. x3+y3+) as you only risk missing extremely rare level 4 sites in those two paths, they should take about the same amount of mage time, and save plenty of gems. A bigger spread like w2x2y1z1 will miss quite a few sites so that you'll need to go back and check with spells later anyway, but generally will quickly get incomes flowing if you want them early. Quite often, you might want to send out mages with just 1 in a path just because you can't cast some site search spells.