You know how demesnes have timers on them, so effects wear out in 1200 seconds or something? Why is this? I don't really see a point to it. I was just speaking to a demesne user about why his skills were frustrating, and this came up, and I hadn't thought about it before. So what's it about?

I'm not sure. In other games, I assume it was to force people to use more devotion/crystals/etc to keep their effects up. Here, since it just costs mana, that's not really a problem at all.

I suppose so that the mage/druid has to be actively defending their demesne to make use of it.

They can't just set one up and leave it to hinder anyone that tries to get near while they go and bash on Astral. Maybe?

Requires you to be in the area, though.

it also puts an upper limit on the fight length before the mage has to 'renew', and that can take a while. If you catch a mage with non-fresh demesne effects (admittedly not in the arena, but it'll happen in normal combat) they may be forced to choose between renewing em or mounting an offence.

It may not sound so bad, but losing your demense at the wrong time can really suck.

Yeah, I know, but planning combat around it is so inviable that it seems a pointless hindrance. The long range thing sounds right, actually, although now it's not really relevant.

I just had to empathise and think how much it would annoy me to have to def up every 20 minutes.

If we really need effects in a hurry we have Regrowth. While not timed, we can then use those to keep our offense mounted while we find a location to safely (re)time our demesne the way we wish it.

Not all druids have regrowth, though, as it is a fairly high-up skill, so those of us who don't have the money or the credits to train to get it still are suffering.

However, despite the suckage of demesne timers, getting rid of them would be like getting rid of the timers on vibrations in other IRE games. It wouldn't make sense. Vibrations wear out over time... they stop vibrating. If you aren't keeping a close watch on your bond with nature/whatever element you focus on, the effects of your bond will fade and you will have to in a sense renew the strength of your bond by bringing back the demesne effects after they fade.

No, but you can always keep an eye on the timer and re-cast them when they're getting low before they wear out to renew them without it, thats what I always did even when I had the geomancer equivalent to regrowth, as I preferred timing them myself and not wasting power

Agreed. You can and should be watching the timers yourself, because that's just like checking with your bond to nature/whichever element which I talked about in my second paragraph.

I simply mentioned the regrowth bit in response to Gregori's "Well, we have regrowth so it isn't so bad" bit.