What I'm curious about with this is whether they're just removing the dot cost on those three spells (plus whatever else is in that line in OOW), or whether it applies to the whole "symbol" line of spells.
What you have to remember is that the temp/aego/virt line of spells isn't really a separate line. It's three lines of cleric spells in one buff. Clerics start out with three primary buff lines. A "courage" line, a "shield" line, and a "symbol" line. The courage line buffs HPs and a small amount of AC. The shield line buffs a larger amount of AC, and the symbol line buffs a large amount of HP but costs a component.
The whole point and advantage of the aego line is that it combines all three in one. You get to save 2 buff slots. You get to save the extra time casting spells. You get to save mana overall (less mana then casting the three equivalent spells). The component cost comes from the fact that you get a symbol in the spell. If you remove that cost from just the aego line, then what does that do to the relative balance/cost for plain symbols?
The line only seems really expensive because you're comparing it to single line spells from other classes. When you look at spells like Fo7 and Po9 and KEI, you see that they do have aspects of multiple earlier spell lines in them, but since none of those had a component cost the result doesn't either. I'm not sure if it will help balance if you remove the component cost on the aego line but keep it on the normal symbols.
I think part of this is player expectation of buffs as well. It used to be that people expected to get a courage line and an armor line buff from the cleric. If they were tanking something really tough and the HPs were needed, the cleric would then hit the tank(s) and only the tank(s) with a symbol. Today, we just expect them to hit us with virt and be done with it, meaning that we end up with a heck of a lot of dots being spent by clerics. On many occasions, I've seen threads here where clerics complain about the dot cost and how casters and others insist on them buffing them but not paying for the dot. It's always amazed me how often those same clerics don't even consider just hitting them with the single shot spells of the courage and shield lines, giving them buffs, but not costing the component.
IMO, the real problem is that those lines dont really extend past like 50th level. I think that HB is the highest level courage line buff available (don't quote me on that though, I don't play a cleric). There is a higher level shield buff, but most clerics seem to forget that it exists (I have *never* recieved this when a raid takes the po9/symbol mgb route without me asking for it specifically).
I think if they just extended the courage line so that clerics would have a viable alternative HP buff that didn't cost them a dot to cast, things would work out just fine. Drop the high end courage buff on casters that are whining about needing a buff, but shouldn't be getting hit anyway, and save the dots for giving the extra hps on your tanks where it's needed.
Just a thought.
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