[Rendar]

A primer upon Tomes

While Tomes are inherently strong due to not requiring STR scaling, they are all around less useful than some other weapons that count as casting implements. Their most 'equal' alternative, the elemental staves, has equal scaling (if more WIL focused) whilst also providing a boon of bonus elemental attack, being classified as a polearm (staff), being able to be 2-handed, and having weapon parts.

As is currently, the only tome that sees any real major usage is the Zerotrain, a 3* tome due to it's strong scaling (70% SKI, 50% WIL) that basically everyone has stat wise for with the 70% SKI scaling. There are other tomes that are used, but are generally seen as edge cases due to something mechanical that they provide.

As an example, my character initially wanted the Light-based staff. It looked good, it had weapon parts.. and then I realized it scaled off of FAI, which while high.. was still lower than my 60 scaled SKI. While it had more hit, it wasn't enough to justify the 20ish SWA point difference, alongside the synergy that the tome provides with Tactician. So I swapped to the tome and did not ever really look back.

Spell Edge weapons, generally, are not used by pure mages, rather by hybrids that actually have an investment in STR (or explosion mages that want to run some other class that requires a sword)... Their main benefit is that they're able to be made of Remains and a wielder is able to be 2handed for the full power up (as opposed to Staves not being able to reach 20 weight, and tomes just not being able to be 2 handed)...

How I would see changes to tomes go underway is a few different ways.

Materials
We will be removing their paper typing, at the moment, shifting that to a type of weapon part and moving tomes to use wood. While this is a change, I still do not believe it to be too much of an adequate one, since metal category weapons are, in general, the best in the game due to their ability to utilize Remains (Looking at you Fireblood Remains and Dragon Remains). That, however, is a balance fu topic on the nature of Remains versus Metal options.

Allowing Tomes access to Wood for their making at least allows for a few key elements to get used and gain +X Atk, while also providing some level of customization.



Weapon Parts
These weapon parts are in three categories:
-Paper
-Binding
-Ink

The Paper category will be similar to what we have now, except it will also provide a small bonus on top of that.  Each elemental category will provide -2 to their respective element, and +3 elemental attack to it. On the flip side, it will also provide a -2 to the opposing element (as based purely upon Elemental Enchants and Light Vs Dark)

High Quality Ash Paper will provide a -1 to all spells.


The Binding category is, as always, a tad harder to think on. I, however, think that there should be five major types for this and would be willing to hear out suggestions.

-Binding 1: +5 hit, -2 Power
-Binding 2: +2 Power, -5 Hit
-Binding 3: +5 crit, -2 Power
-Binding 4: +5 Crit, -5 Hit
-Binding 5: +2 Hit, +2 Crit, +5 weight


The Ink category is where I am struggling to figure out what to do. I am half tempted to allow for these items to change the base-scaling on the item in different ways. A basic level 1 tome going from 100% WIL to gaining different WEAPON TAGS based upon what ink is used. Of course, this might be a bit much, but it would allow a level of tome customization that would make them stand out from the rest of the weapons.

The base ink types would likely be Fire, Ice, Wind, Lightning, Earth, Light, Dark, and Ghostly (or some such for Sanctity).

A lot of ink types, but I do also realize the inherent imbalance of this on certain tomes, (being able to make the Rose Whip Finesse, Electrical, and Cold would give it 10% WIL, 70% SKI, and 40% Luc scaling, for instance.)


I'm open to feedback, but it's just a general idea I had, in hopes that we might be able to see some more use out of tomes rather than everyone leaning hard onto spelledge weaponry.