Power is added to the PoS/Megalith

Cherub/Imp = 1 power
Diva/Fiend = 2 power
Angel/Demon = 3 power
ArchAngel/Demon = 4 power

Archangels/demons are four power each.

And as for theoretical amounts of power gained from Earth/Water ... it's unreliable, primarily due to dream sands.

Assuming you can gather a full round of essence every hour (not sure if it's slightly shorter), where each round is 36 essence (from a single plane, as if you count from both planes one city is getting the short end of the stick) you can get 864 essence per day (36*24).

Reports from commune power aides tend to put their totem power gain at around 3000 per weave.

For essence gain to match this, assuming you're emptying that plane every hour on the hour, you would need to get 3.47 power per essence. Rounding up (as if we get less, we're getting the short end of the stick again), you need 4p per essence. That means 3/4 elemental lords empowered, or 3/9 manifestations. This requires work for an unreliable amount of result (even if you scour every plane, you're not necessarily going to get even one mani) within a highly limited time frame (these days, first few days of Vestian) and work over a much longer time frame (emptying Elemental every hour) to match the passive power gain from totems.

So being able to cut down trees doesn't make totems unreliable?

And communes being able to hunt elemental planes and get manifestations makes the elemental planes much more reliable.

Not sure which city is letting us hunt their elemental plane but okay.

Neither, but I get the same amount of permission to cut down your trees and that never really stopped me.

So its unfair that both spots can add power just we protect ours?

Yours also provides more power and you can also hunt it. For maintaining the totems regularly, you get 3000 power a weave. For much more maintaining, we get much less... that you can take from us... and can be unreliable to get in larger numbers... and is much easier to stop us from getting.

Lol you think getting a tree is lol easy? for a nut it takes probably about 3 hours and we need 5 of them during that time you can take away a single tree from that and we get nothing from that hard work. Its two different angles you get nice exp and a nice hunting ground. We get hard work and the need to actually defend an easily chopable tree.

I doubt it takes three hours to get a nut, given that Novices are expected to do it to complete the Collegium.

They're not that easily chopped. If anyone in the forest walks by or scents while you're searching for or chopping an elder, you're screwed. Raising a new one is easy, it just takes awhile for it to mature all the way.


A bit under an hour per nut, I'd say, with everyone scouring the forest for shadows.

A nut drops roughly every 10-12 shadow crows found, shouldn't be any different for the pixies. And there are that many crows/pixies every pop, so if you're vigilant about it, can get one every repop, would my guess would be 45 minutes if its like Celest's sands repop.

As was said before scent, melds, mindsense, scan. It's prime so you actually have Avenger on your side. I remember trees getting chopped in Seren and they would almost immediately be replanted. In fact, they rarely needed nuts. Go hunt out the Mountains of Madness as a non-Geomancer. That's so damn frustrating...

You're off by around 1000 power, in Glom's case. We usually get around 2100 from our Totems. Which significantly changes your calculations. Also, isn't the respawn time on these things 45 minutes? It seems like it's faster than an hour, whenever I've had to deal with them. Still, I'll use your number of an hour: 36*24*2 == 1728. 36*24*3 == 2592. At 45 minutes: 36*32 (32 respawns in a 24-hour period if the respawn is 3/4 of an hour) * 2 == 2304. Which, at ONE sand (and the previous flat-rate of essence) is better than Glomdoring's totems.

Further, the totems requires a huge amount of work and tending whenever someone gets an itch to go destroy totems. Especially if a lot are killed at once. Sigh. Once they're down, they stay down until the raider gets tired of killing off the saplings. If someone takes a few of your starsuckers, well, no big deal really. :/ I have no idea what Casilu is on about, but it generally takes about 5 hours to get the nuts to plant a room, and then 3 RL days of making sure the things don't get destroyed again as they grow. In every room a totem falls.

I rarely saw more than one or two trees cut down in Seren. First one was replaced almost immediately.

respawn on earth is much quicker than an hour. I was once able to do two trips on earth in 1.5 hours. (meaning, its 8am, I log in, do earth, wait, do earth again, its now 9:30, and I log out)

Plus, you hear when trees drop. Not like leeches/grubs call out when slain.

Then you weren't paying attention, because that is mechanically impossible. You need 5 nuts to grow 5 saplings, and 5 saplings are required to even start growing the Totem. Which takes RL days.

Are you sure you didn't see, "Oh, one sapling planted, all is good!" ?

Grove of saplings, someone comes in and cuts one down, pretty sure you only need one to replace it. I remember Tynghall doing that a few times.