You lose 50k for dieing.

You lose another 150k for pheonixing.

I don't mind Ascendants being raised for combat- even if combatants are raised, they're usually hardworking people who contribute to their organization. In fact, the purpose of raising the Vernal Gods was originally to fight the Soulless.

What I would like to see is a little more roleplay to the concept of an Ascendant, instead of just 'we're better at Domoths than Demis and have Cults, but they aren't used much anyway'. The purpose of Cults seems to be to separate Ascendants from the normal player, and expanding them to non-Order-only and giving them more neat flavour/utility abilities might help. I'd like to see Cult rituals. Also, Domoth backstory as others said!

Hopefully my suggestions are some tiny bit helpful.

I'm not sure what your point is. You tried to claim that it costs Ascendants more to reform when they have the option to replace essence with 15 minutes for zero loss. I think that's exceptionally shady. You try very hard to make Ascendant sound worse than it is, and I'm calling you out on it.

vote shiri! oh wait, wrong thread

There is no zero loss. There's always a minimum of 50k for both Ascendants and Demigods. Both can be instantly rezzed via other skills (lich / rebirth / resurrect) for no further loss. Demigod can then phoenix for 150k, or Ascendant can choose to either wait 9 minutes (which, if raiding and they don't need to reform quickly is easy enough), or spend 250k to reincarnate (needed for getting back to a defense quickly, or a domoth battle). Which is more costly depends entirely on what you're doing and how easy it is to get the corpse revived.

I thought Ascendants lose more than Demigods for phoenixing.

The problem I see with Ascendants is that in the current form (the concept, not actual mechanics), it is impossible to really make them less combat orientated and more "RP" orientated. What can you really give a mortal (if not full, in part) that will make them stand out from the rest? Already, we have demigods wanting to gain more RP things such as custom exits. Even if we were going to give that to Ascendants, how can you really justify the cost of having one if you take away all the combat stuff?

Originally, we were told that Ascendants could form cults and have followers. When they were finally released, we were told they are linked to an Order and are basically just a subset of an Order. Gregori made a thread about this, but in short, what can you really do with cults if you must follow the Order guideline, besides, once again, for the combat stuff.

It seems to me that the concept of mortals being raised as Ascendants (read: demigod v2) is simply flawed when you put them into the Lusternian context.

Ascendants don't Phoenix, we Reincarnate. The numbers are different (and explained above).