Random thoughts and comments

The next indie hunter you meet in Luir's could be Shalooonsh circumventing his ban. You'll know it's him if he OOCs asking if he can add you on instagram.

I can't recall a time I ever felt ill reading a GDB post, but this one came pretty close

Whoever spec apps a gemmed elementalist, idek what to say. I'll pray for you.

Personally, I think they are ignoring the things they have to do to actually right the ship in favor of trying the same shtick with a tiny few flashes.

I feel that there are some "right now" things that should have come out already. Full gemmed spec apps wasn't one of them.

They also used to require that players' first magicker was gemmed. Don't know if that's still a thing, but it was before the elementalist subclasses. I remember spec-apping a mage and it was declined because I hadn't intended it to be gemmed. They told me since it would be my first mage, it had to be gemmed.

It's really just a way to ensure that the character can't accomplish much. Since there's no longer any such thing as CAM or anything like that, gemmed PCs are severely limited in what they can do because they have no support network. At best they might have the ear of some Oash noble, which counts for practically nothing in today's Armageddon where nobles are largely pointless and have no influence on the Text Skyrim meta where everyone's off playing in tribes or roaming the world as lone rangers. Meanwhile, being gemmed restricts you from joining practically any clan, makes you completely unwelcome in large segments of the gameworld, and ensures that almost nobody will work with you in any capacity.

Basically, requiring that entire categories of PCs be gemmed is them saying "we're willing to give you what you asked for, but we're going to make sure you can do as little as possible with it because we didn't really want you to have it in the first place. Ideally it'll be so unenjoyable that people stop playing it. That's our goal, but we have to put up the pretense of listening to players." It's almost like malicious compliance. The gemmed role is practically incompatible with today's Armageddon.

It's certainly not a question of carefully managing their power. With very few exceptions, mundanes with elementalist subclasses are much stronger than the old full-fledged magickers were. Most of those had only a handful of spells that were actually powerful, and the elementalist subs generally cover those. For instance, the bulk of a full Rukkian's power came from the Strength, Armor and Stoneskin/Godspeed spells, and the Rukkian Empowerment sub gives all of those. The omegapwn instakill spells (Demonfire, Paralyze, etc.) have been removed from the game entirely, so a full elementalist won't really have more offensive power than a mundane of the right class since they're now limited to mediocre spells like Lightning Bolt which generally aren't much more powerful than backstab, high-strength melee, or master archery. Often less so, in fact, especially given the mana cost of any mon spell.

People asked for full magickers to return not just because they missed that playstyle but also because the game was way more balanced in those days. Mages had weaknesses and limitations. While they could be very powerful, they weren't completely broken the way they became with the subclasses. A maxed-out Krathi might be scary, but he didn't also have master parry and weapon skills or master stealth and scan, and if you caught him when he was out of mana or didn't have his buffs up, he'd be very vulnerable. It meant that if you ended up in conflict with a mage, you had options. I think that when people started asking for full mages back, a lot of the time they were really asking for the game to return to the way it was in those days. Adding full mages on top of the subclasses doesn't accomplish that, and I don't think it'll have much of an impact on anything. People will try those characters and find that they're way worse than mundane classes with elementalist subs, and then they'll just go back to playing those.

The meta has shifted to one where being fully self-sufficient is important because you're usually on your own and most gameplay takes place in the wilderness. A gemmed full elementalist made more sense back when the game revolved around the cities and when characters were either pure mundanes or full mages, not some overpowered mix.