There currently exist numerous areas which can use improvement with the end-game system created for use of essence in Lusternia, as a means to give Demigods / Ascendants something to continue working on.

To begin with, there are a very large number of abilities that will never be bought. They were just created to be fluff and filler. This includes abilities such as Gift and FortunateWindfalls, along with most of the pet abilities, and more. This is due to multiple factors:
1) These abilities have very hefty weighting. FortunateWindfalls takes 20 supernumerary points!
- Re-examine the weighting on these abilities. Especially the little fluff abilities should have very low weighting, sub-10. The ones that don't add anything should be able to be selected as 'filler'.

2) They have insane costs for what they do. Every single Ascendant ability costs far too much. Edit: Except BeauteousThought, as stated below!
The essence costs (and weighting) were first designed anticipating a much more rapid and constant ability to gain essence than actually exists. This is already known. The Demigod powers were already re-examined and had their costs adjusted appropriately. Unfortunately, the Ascendant powers were not.
This most especially ensures the 'flavour fluff' abilities as things that will never be selected.
- As per above, re-examine the essence costs, again especially for the fluff abilities.

3) The system was designed to be able to 'overload' abilities, by buying powers temporarily in order to become 'very powerful'. However, the abilities in general aren't that powerful. Again, when combined with their massive essence cost just to get an ability for 12 RL days means that this part of the system, too, is not really feasible to use.
- There are two solutions to this.
A ) The first is to scrap this entire concept. Instead, change it to the following: You can buy as many abilities that you want, but you can only have up to your weight active at once. Then you are able to inactivate / activate abilities. The first ability you activate in a month would cost 100,000, the second 200,000, the third 400,000, etc. This means that constantly trying to swap them out to min-max combat benefits will get prohibitive quickly, but changing some here and there is not very painful.
This also helps with people who buy abilities which then get nerfed into the ground, with no refund given (as was done with both Breath of Life and Purity of Soul), without the essence having been an absolute complete waste causing massive amounts of frustration.
B ) The second is to make buying skills temporarily cost a fraction of the essence (which is theoretically easier, but I prefer A personally; I don't really like the whole concept of being able to have a whole bunch of extra abilities active at a time, it is more balanced in general terms to have an actual cap)

4) The ability to select these skills is extremely limited. This leaves most of the Demigods out of the bulk of the system. They don't even have the option to spend their extra essence once they've used up their DemiPoints, and have nothing further to go for.
- Some options (things to think about, not necessarily implementing all of them)
A ) Rethink the RP concept. Let Demigods be able to purchase at least some select few of the Domoth powers. Could have an event to explain it if necessary, tying Demigods to the Domoths in a limited manner. Demigods can buy 1 by default, Vernal Demigods 2. Bump up their weighting to 75/120 for these two.
B ) Revamp how the Medallions work with the Essence system. A TA gets all three absolutely free and weightless. RP-wise, the Medallions are tied to their respective Domoths). Let this circumvent the RP-constraint of Demigods not being able to buy Ascendant abilities; if a Demigod owns the Seal, they should be able to buy the abilities related to that Domoth. This will help let more people use these abilities that were created and should be enjoyed. Since it would be tied to Seals, it will also encourage variety (not everyone has the same Seals!)
C ) Same reasoning as above. Alternatively, make it so that some of (or all, depending on desire) have no weight cost when purchased (though they will still consume essence on purchase). This will encourage people to pick up the little fluff abilities with excess essence, just because they won't take up valuable points that would be better spent on other abilities.

These are my basic general thoughts / concerns of the overall system.
In particular, I would like to see things such as the following:
1) Aegis re-examined and dropped to 35 Weight, 15,000,000 essence.
2) Most other abilities with essence cost at least halved. Weight on most of them should be lowered a little bit.
3) Leave Fearaura as it is in terms of weighting. Reduce the essence cost to 20,000,000.
4) Leave the third Tradeskill (BeauteousThought) as it is. That's the only one that's worth its current cost, really.
5) Some of the above changes and overhauls; I'd particularly like to see the ability to activate and deactivate abilities, as described above.

Other thoughts / ideas are welcome!

Since I see many of you going through the first post (and an edit will just get lost in it), I'm going to throw this here.

Another idea:
Demigods can buy 1 power from each non-opposing Domoth realm, but can only have one of them active at a time. So, they could have one skill from Chaos but not Harmony, and one skill from Death but not Life. They would only be able to activate one at a time, the rest would need to be inactive.

Vernal Demigods would be able to buy 1 from each Domoth (opposing or not), and have up to 2 active at any given time.

Ascendants can still have as many active at any time as they want.

Again, letting people have more access to the abilities == better, especially as they are not really game-changing almost entirely.

Edit: You could make the small handful that are (FearAura, Aegis, Destruction, BeauteousThought) Ascendant-VD only if you really had to, to keep them more limited.

I'd like to note that one of the stronger arguments for the 150/100/50 weighting system is because the ascendant powers have large weights. With point 1 addressing the issue of ascendant powers having such large weights, something along the lines of point 4A would also need to be implemented so the gap between demigods and ascendants isn't further enlarged.

I still don't understand how demigods were too exclusive because there were over 100 of them but now the softcap of 12 VAs and 5 TAs after this ascension isn't a problem.

But I like being a special little snowflake _{even if my one ability was nerfed into the ground}.

That said, I like this idea. Well, sort of. Demigod-heavy organizations will start lapping up the Winning Org Momentum as they coordinate Judicious Presences/Havoc Cries/etc atop one another. A lot of the Ascendant abilities are useless, but at the same time a lot of them are really damn powerful. I'm not sure how it would be like to run up against enemy melders that will last twice as long as you by default because they have access to some secondary power reserves via Deathaura.

Ascendant-heavy organizations can already do this with the JP / HavocCries, letting more people have access to them is more of a balancing thing to give other organizations a chance in my opinion. As per my edit in the above post I'm not against considering flagging a couple of the abilities as Restricted if necessary, but on the whole... I think it really is better for the game (in terms of enjoyment especially) if people are able to actually utilize and be involved in the system.

I wish they would expand the list of skills demigods could use. We do feel so limited. Nothing groundbreaking, I have been dying to have the Destruction skill to hunt faster. Squishy aqua bashing is no fun.

But yes, looking at a lot of the ascendant skills make you ponder who would spend essence/weight on some of the abilities. I mean, they aren't useless, but not practical in this combat intensive little world...

I would love to have Destruction to look forward too, just for bashing.

I wouldn't like to see every Demigod have some of those Ascendent abilities. I shudder to think of what might become of it.

But what about the rest? The bulk of them?

I'd be totally happy if I could use my remaining supernumerary points to buy Gift as a demi and just pepper the the basin with replanting whenever I feel like my essence is getting too high and not doing much for me.

Demi powers are lacking, and we made a lot of suggestions that seem to have fallen by the wayside. I'm assuming a bunch were saved and will eventually be all released at once, together, but I'd be just as happy if the admin decided we could access select domoth powers on whatever basis is preferable.

The problem is that the demi powers are lacking...

... and if they add in more, then the essence that you've spent becomes 100% wasted if you end up wanting something else, since you're only 50 weight points total.

The whole thing (essence just gone, poof, and nothing to show for it if you end up having something better you want later / the thing you purchased getting nerfed to heck) is frustrating, and I imagine it will be the same for Demigods as well.

Can we change the experience:essence ration, too, please?

For starters, I'd be very very happy if they'd make the custom shout and entrance a weight of 0.

I still don't understand why the nerfed something that was not broke and the overhaul that everyone wanted was only given to 15 or so players.

For better or worse I think this is the framework we've got now, so we have to try to work with it. Weightless seems like a bad precedent in terms of this (because then we'll want everything weightless). This is why I'd like to see it be able to activate / inactivate things. Then you can still buy the stuff you'd like, and determine which you want to use in general. Switch to the others here and there (just don't do it too much in a month or it will start to cost millions).

If this was done I'd probably even buy the custom shout and entrance; I can't make myself at the moment because they're a waste of point-space that I might better use for something else. Just like all the other fluff-stuff.

Charging to swap among stuff you've bought sounds like a hell of a lot better idea than renting them temporarily.

The whole end game of Lusternia is weird. Only a dozen or so people really get to do it. Just seems odd to me that so much work was put into domoths/ascendent powers for so few people. I guess everyone can help out with domoths, but I still don't understand why demi's can't do them just as well as the other type of mortal-gods. Does there really need to be such a huge disparity between the two?

Yes, apparently. Ascendants were slowly expanding, then it was decided from on high they needed to be special and it was massively restricted again.

The restriction on number of VAs raised is a good thing. Exponential cost increase for raising a VA is the only way to limit winning org momentum.

I agree that the weights and essence costs could use revision, lowering in several cases, and that the swapping idea is much more preferable to the ephemeral costs.

With or without any sort of hard-coded limit on frequency, ala skillflexing?

The way it's turned out is a pile of eh, but it's not changing, so probably aiming for changes that affect the entire demi body would be better at this point.