Rods and Wands (revisited)
I'm sure you've all noticed the discussion on mage guild specialization and it made me think for a bit about why, as mages, we choose to go fire/water. Omega pretty much hit it dead on as far as i'm concerned. To paraphrase, he said that the reason people choose them is there isn't enough benefit to choosing those spells over fire/water.
When i played as a mage i found it easiest to train fire/water to level, then grab just a few points in the others as i needed to use the plethora of spells available. Anything i couldn't afford to train in i would just find a rod to cover for.
I didn't like the idea that the wizards had put in place to have to train the element to use the spell, but it really is one of the only ways to entice people to use other elements.
The only other way i can think of to achieve this would be to remove rods completely. This would make me think twice about using the utility elements as a secondary. Perhaps as another idea, to allow spirit users the ability to recharge wands up to a cap of 5 perhaps without risk of exploding. This would allow you to use such wands to hunt (although very slowly) but with all the versatility that they can think of. The downside being they would definitely not have the damage output without elements trained.
I guess what i'm trying to say in all this is i think rods are being used as crutches to allow characters (not just mages) to do things they would normally have to use skillpoints for. Just my two cents.
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