I can understand why ethereal creatures spawning automatically in the Etherwilde/Etherglom might be undesirable ... as both those areas are more internal, contained, and connected to their corresponding organization than Water and Earth are. I just wish there'd be a more neutral place with the potential for bits of essence (aetherspace? ) when it's needed. As it is, essence can be gotten from killing elemental creatures (starsuckers, dream leeches, grubs, something else on Earth (never been there)?), killing angels/demons on Cosmic and putting them in the Well of Souls, killing ethereal creatures (only available after fae are brought to an Avatar of Moon/Night and leave the Etherwilde/glom).

Power is just a number. Having millions of power won't mean anything if an organization can't get essence to use when they need it to revive its Avatars or Cosmic Lords, or for whatever other reason they need essence. Maybe if there was a way that power could be distilled back out of a nexus into essence, on a delay in a process that could only be started by certain people of the organization, and costing more, perhaps, than the essence would be or had been worth when added to the nexus (essence, with all Aspects or Water/Earth Lords empowered, can be worth up to 5p each ... so make getting one bit of essence out drain 5-10p?). That way it'd still be much preferable to get essence in other ways, but it'd still be an option to help if essence was needed.

It's a good idea, but I doubt it would happen, simply because then your Avatar or Lord or Supernal will get killed, you raise it nearly instantly, and then it's invicible. If they weren't invicible, then I could possibly see it going into effect.

Good post, I think it summarizes the current state of opinions. Except for one minor point...

Commune aspects are still much harder to kill than cities' lords. The mere existance of a cubix entrance to water and earth, water's entrance being very conveniently placed just above the entrance to the water lords room, makes quick solo raids of these entities very very easy, and very frequent.

There have been times where I've killed the earth lords 3-4 times in a single day, with little or no danger. Cubix in, scale up to avoid rockslides, run to the thrones, distort their rift, and kill. Defenders take a while in getting there, they need to 1. transverse to earth. 2. Find the cavern to the mountains. 3. Navigate through the rockslides and confusing terrain. Same issue for water because of waves and the secret exit to lords.

Aspects can really only be killed with a sizable raiding party, since it's so easy for commune defenders to intercede. Also, one would need spores/aethership/hermits to get there.

EDIT: Meh, was appending in comment to Tsuki's post, 'cause mine was just added and still the bottom post at the time, but then I got ninja'd. Gonna just add as an actual post. SEE BELOW!!

That's why I mentioned the process being on a delay of some sort, so you couldn't revive them instantly. Maybe needing something else to help the process along, as well. Serenwilde as an example, I could see a use for moonhart nuts again ... bring in pixies to get a nut, give it to the proper person who can give it to Miakoda with the request for her to distill essence out, wait maybe a quarter or full day in-game (15 minutes to an hour RL), and she'll have that one bit of essence out of the ... 150 or so? needed to restore one of the Avatars, at the cost of 5-10p after the Avatar's death already drained 1000p.

Fair enough.

Power distillation into essence is a bad idea. You said yourself, power is just a number after all...but you do realize that using essence in the first place is costing the nexus 5p that would've been added? So your suggestion is basically just skipping all the work...

But hey, since no one likes, you know, doing things to help your organization, great idea! I mean, conflict quests -> neutered. Off-prime conflict -> neutered. Prime conflict -> beyond neutered, practically a sex change. Why not go ahead and remove any sense of 'loss' from, you know, losing, and make this game all about snuggles and mudseks??

I'm really torn on the cubix issue. It's very tempting to say, "Don't balance around a $600 artifact," but if you don't, you get massive abuse. If you do, people bitch (altough personally, I'd still buy a cubix if it was totally non-combat utility only, had I the money) and it starts to screw people without cubices. I have two options for getting to Celestia/Nil: Borrow a cubix, or tesseract to someone who isn't enemied. Astral is harder.

If an Avatar or Cosmic Lord needs to be revived, any essence gotten during that time isn't likely to be placed in the nexus for an additional +1-5p rather than being added to help revive the Avatar/Lord. It's also not skipping the work to distill essence, it's just distancing the result from the effort in time ... the work had to be done in the past for the power to be there, and it'll have to be done again in the future to restore what's lost. Yes, power is just a number, that largely keeps building, with little "use" of it, but it is also viewed as an organization's "score" at times.

If it cost 5-10p to distill 1 bit of essence out of a nexus to raise an Avatar, that'd be an additional 750-1500p drained from the nexus (if the organization would use that method as a sole means of gathering essence for the restoration) that already lost 1000p from the Avatar's death. That would then mean the attackers had more of a numerical impact on the organization. With a delay of 15 minutes for each bit of essence, it would take 2250 minutes, or 37.5 hrs, to fully restore one Avatar by the "distillation" if it was done constantly (which it probably wouldn't be). For three Avatars restored solely by that method, that's a minimum of 112.5 hrs (4 and 2/3rds days) if done constantly, and an additional drain of 2250-4500p on top of the 3000p initial loss. That means it would largely be an aide to getting essence, not a replacement for other ways.

I have doubts that cities, having better access to their Elemental planes, would have much use for such distillation. I could, however, see communes using it to raise, or help raise, the first of their Avatars so they could start working to try bringing in Fae to get a trickle of essence-dropping ethereal creatures.

I just like more options available.

That number is entierly proportional to the amount of coffe I can get my hands on. xD

About the Power:

I've been playing Lusternia for abour 5-6 RL months now, on a variety of characters. However, I have had at least one character in every Commune/City. Both communes had 1,000,000 WELL before either cities did. Celest broke 1,000,000 power about 3/4 of a month ago, and I think Mag was more recent.

Totems are offering power 24/7. Essence from elemental is offering power as long as someone is there and killing stuff. Villages are offering power but that's again based on the political structures of the respective owner, and how many are owned.

Villages aside, Communes can clearly make better power the Cities.

Also, Celest has had a Religious strucuture for a LOOOOONG time, I've flipped through the politic news sections and I have really only seen Celest under the "Religious" structure. So therefore, they've been getting good power from their villages.

Power isn't just a number! Come on folks, let's bring in more essence or we'll never get out of negative numbers!

/flashback

We'll never get vernal gods if we can't even keep motivated to get 2 million power

You reach out and touch the Megalith of Doom.
The power of the nexus is at 887294.

Orly?

Magnagora and Glomdoring will have just recently lost a bunch of power, each Nexus has reached 1mil before this time. Yet, look at the past few months, there has been a war between Celest and Serenwilde which will have drained each of their power supplies. Magnagora lost their Necromantite a few times, the Star fell. Avatars were slain a bunch. Give people time to recover more, and theyll exceed such.

Pretty sure Mag never broke 1 mil.

So passive totem power is now balancing both elemental essence and influencing angels/demons. So what does that leave balancing darkcall/starcall link? That's what passive totem power was always supposed to be balancing back in the day. Did everyone forget that one?

Wiccans have cone.. which pales in comparison, so obviously its good enough

Wiccans can cone... it's inferior, but it's still something isn't it?

It is something, but back in my day, every time it was pointed out how completely unusably imbalanced it was compared to the city versions, everyone said, "but you have passive totem power, so it's even". Fine. If it's even, it's even... and all this other stuff isn't even. They can't all be balanced by totems -- at most two of them could be.

Without actual numbers, I'm hard pressed to say if something is or isn't balanced by totems. Celest is noticing a big power boost and they only were given 50% of the power generation potential of totems extra, and that's assuming a rather unrealistic scenario. My first instinct isn't to say it's too much. I'm more inclined to believe that I underestimated the imbalance.

Not really wanting to get into the whole city vs commune argument.

But remember the inverse of empowering, killing demons/angels costs essence, and nor is it particularly rare.