"mages should feel more like people first"

if that was the case ... perhaps elves should feel more like people first?

I was actually being serious.  Nevermind.

I only spam cast in public.

It's just a catchphrase.  A lame T-shirt or bumpersticker slogan that sounds good in broad terms.  Who could argue with PCs "feeling more like people"?  Like all such banal feelgood statements, it doesn't mean a goddamn thing.

Similarly, this whole "lightning, shadow, and void elements aren't on theme" nonsense is another unsupported piece of drivel that's been circulating on staff for years, actually.  As if fire elementalists with detect/dispel magick and tongues are somehow thematic -- sure, I can imagine lore to support that connection easily, because I have an imagination.  Lightning and shadow don't even require imagination to see their coherent themes, and void is awesome and coherent in its theme except possibly for the undead spells, but some of those are incredible plot drivers.

Any decent roleplayer can make a character feel like a person regardless of its skillset. The reason so many mages didn't feel like people was because they were played by shitty roleplayers who just wanted coded power. Mages - gemmed mages in particular - have always paradoxically had a worse average standard of roleplay than the mundane population does.

This change does nothing about this, and in fact makes it worse, because mages are now much better equipped to wreak havoc by being indistinguishable from mundanes and by having mindblowingly broken things like mul strength or nigh-invulnerability paired with combat skills, without any balancing weaknesses. Compared to a pre-change Rukkian, a warrior with Rukkian protection buffs will be better both defensively and offensively.

The Rukkian and Vivaduan elementalists have become much more powerful than they were before. A ranger, warrior or assassin with whatever magick subguild best suits them is stronger than the original magick guilds. Krathi power was mostly split between nukes and the ability to make rangz, and an assassin or ranger doesn't much need the nukes whereas he'll benefit hugely from empowered items and perhaps detect magic.

The Whiran mage's usefulness was comprised mostly of invis and fly, and I don't think anyone can now get both, but this class was never really about power so much as the ability to play the game like it was Minecraft in Creative mode. Aside from using questionable mechanics to drop people off mountains, this wasn't really a powerful mage class so much as an easymode one.

So what does this change do? It makes elementalists less appealing to people who liked playing the role of a mage as a distinctive type of character, the ones who simply enjoyed being the Arm equivalent of a D&D wizard as opposed to paladins and spellswords; and it makes them more appealing to people who just liked maximum coded power for the purpose of being able to kill other PCs most effectively. Mages are now PK gods, and most of the roleplaying value is lost.

In short, the people you want playing mages are now less likely to, and the people you don't want playing mages are now so much more likely to do so that they might simply never play mundanes again. No PKer is going to play a mundane after this change. There's absolutely no reason to do so unless there's a specific desire to play a mundane character for roleplay reasons, which most of us have had a decade or more to do ad nauseum. 

Who's gonna be excited about spending three months training up a mundane warrior now? Who's gonna go through the extreme difficulties to skill up an assassin and then risk its life every time you attempt to assassinate somebody, without opting into the +50% power boost of a magick subguild to make failure so much less probable? Unless you specifically want to play a soldier or suchlike where being an elementalist isn't really feasible, it's hard to justify not taking a magick subguild.

the fact of the matter is that there's zero risk to choosing a magick subguild. you can ignore it indefinitely under the guise of not having discovered your element/power yet. for guilds like ranger or assassin that are already very well-rounded, subguilds really have very little to offer and it's a better trade-off to take a mage subguild and hold off on using it/hedge against never having to use it rather than take a subguild to either get one or two new skills to mediocre levels or some worthless crafting skills.

now that lirathans are gone, who's going to even be able to tell if you have latent power?

3-28-16
Sorcerer subguilds updated with additional spells
--Adhira


Hummm... Hopefully maybe the ones removed.

So combine that with doubling their spells previously, they may be viable again but not nearly as scary I wouldn't think.