[Neus]

People were not really suggesting detailed changes to the seeds, which is why I went with SWA.

[FatherCrixius]

The issue is with the seeds. Dynamic tomes are by in large used as a one round cycling autohit with 325% Elemental and 100% Swa scaling, with some DR / M.Armour penetration. The swa loss will be negligible / completely irrelevant, and they will continue to be the optimal tome for 99% of mages.

To spitball some numbers, my SS Priest has between 114 and 130 light attack, and outputs around 530 raw on a 3m 25fp line spell, and is by far the most momentum efficient damage any mage has to offer.

[Autumn]

Instead of nerfing the seeds out right, why not put a limit on how many of each sub-type of seed you can slap onto a weapon, making it so you can only put 1 Lord-line and 1 Wild-Line damaging seed on the tome, perhaps even bumping up individual numbers in the process to make sure that slot is worth it.

For reference, a custom spell with 1 large damaging seed on it should sit at roughly 125/175% Elemental ATK 100% SWA, and a lot of the status seeds are terribly under powered (Looking at you poison hex seeds) so these could use some bumping up as well.

This also makes it so you don't need to bump down the scaling of the tomes, and perhaps readjust the defensive ones to being 80%/40%

So here's what I think:

Noble-Line seeds should sit at 125/100/75% of your Elemental ATK (Not ignoring protection or armor)
Wild-Line seeds should sit at 175/150/125% of your elemental ATK (Not ignoring Protection or armor)
Poison-Line Curse seeds should be LV 30/20/10 Poison, currently sits at 10/6/4
Acidity-Line curse seeds should sit at 15/10/5 Acidity, currently sitting at 10/6/4

This would make it so the maximum elemental scaling you can put onto a spell is 275% Elemental ATK, but doing so makes you eat the Wild-Line's akashic damage, otherwise your elemental spell will generally be upwards to 125% Elemental ATK + additional effects like poison/acidity/charm/knockdown etc.

[FatherCrixius]

Depends on what niche you want Dynamics to fill. If damage tomes become unviable, as in less damaging than any ordinary spell, then the only niche they could fill is stat inflictions with the current seed list or vaguely usable special seed tomes. I'd like to see new or alternative types of seeds introduced if this becomes the case, if for nothing else just to preserve some form of identity for dynamic tomes.

Current tank mage meta would make Amber's one wild one noble idea widely ignored, as the self akashic damage is often too high for trade off as of right now, but limiting those seeds seems like a good call to me. Damage tome mages feel all to samey.

[Senna]

The problem with the tomes is not their scaling. They don't reach that high in SWA unless you put a lot of effort into it. As far as it goes, someone with +52 will and +60 another element could barely push it over 110 SWA.

The custom tomes themselves can range from not that powerful to completely cancerous.

This is due to the fact it's not hard for someone to dump their efforts into the elemental attack and super stack the damage the custom spell would do.

This creates Monotype tomes. While one element, they can do a crazy amount of damage.

No one indeed bothers with Wild Dragon seeds due to the recoil. You'd find yourself taking more damage than the enemy with that seed. You're hit with this recoil PER an enemy so you can kill your character unintentionally, hence why people gravitate towards Lord, Noble, and Baron.

In the case of the wild seeds, It's less about the elemental attack, but they would not need to worry about self-inflicting great amounts of damage on themselves.

The problem people have with the spells is how often they can be used. So someone that builds a mono tome with a high attack in that element consistently using their custom spell every turn. That's where the problem lies.

Not the SWA, not exactly the type of seeds but the abuse of the custom spells.

A good way to look at it, each turn, no matter how much you wish to flee, the person will walk towards you and use their custom spell. Now you find yourself taking +150 to 200 damage from that spell alone. This would be followed by something else if the mage had no reason to move.

Due to the options the seeds often as well as Traits like Luminary Element, which allows people to dump their problems into a will to get their high Elemental attack, and use a different custom tome to fit their new scaling.

In a sense, as we'll say 'Creating cancer'.

Due to how easy it is for mages and even non-mages to abuse the versatility they offer, they come across as overpowered/ALMOST go to tomes.

This is how we have 'very strong tank' mages and so on.

Hopefully, this explains the situation better.

Nerfing the SWA won't exactly fix the problem but more likely give others a reason to run it only for its custom spell and main hand their true damage dealer. (Which is what's happening at the moment)

[Autumn]

I think the draw of the custom tomes is meant to be that you can build a spell rather than pile all the damaging seeds into one tome and then nuke someone with arguably the highest scaling elemental ATK spell that partially ignores Magic Armor/Protection, there's just clearly a winning combination at the moment which appears to be all the Noble-line seeds piled together, this is textbook abuse of the system and rather than being creative with how you can create and fluff a spell with all the options available, it is far far far more efficient just to have damaging seeds in there, and it almost always will be that way unless you limit just how many seeds you can pile into there.

The base spell being 100% Elemental ATK + 100% SWA is relatively low, add on any of the current damaging seeds and the number becomes higher than current spells, in my previous post I stated some damage variations that I would probably like to rescind at this point because I simply forgot that the base spell also does 100% Elemental ATK, so even a lord seed makes your custom spell do 200% Elem ATK + 100% SWA which is pretty high compared to most spells.

Though I do feel like at least if the seeds were limited right now, we would see more variation in seed combinations, and be able to work out which ones would be a problem, that said the poison and acidity curse seeds could easily see buffs too if we were limited to 1 slot, just to see them added into the pool of seeds people would use.

[Shujin]

Limiting is probably the way to go.
I wouldn't mind a huge super damage skill honestly, if it had a lengthy CD, I think. But right now its just super spamable with a very high damage output that partly puts invocations to shame. But I am not sure how to exactly balance that.
Probably the not self damaging ones with a higher CD per seed, and the trade of for damaging yourself is slightly more spam? I could see that being considered then. Cause at the end of the day, dealing 530 raw damage every other turn is just too much. If it were like every 6 turns It wouldn't be all that bad.
Another idea is increasing momentum costs +1 per damaging seed, but that might be ew.
Just spitballing ideas how the different lines of seeds could distinguish themselves a little more outside of just a bit more damage and how self damage would become a valid choice.

I think Autumn has the right of it at the end, that it probably needs to be limited one way or another. Its for certain the easiest solution.