That's a lot of argument flaws for a post with only six sentences.

For one, Mages rituals and girdlings don't hit upon entry or exit. Two, the complaint was with pushing through staves, and with the amount of staves it is possible to emply--your argument did not adress either of these.

Don't fight Loremasters, you say? Then stop trying to summon people to your stave towers. Luckily, I'm quite certain I can kill you at will, however, the stronger members of your profession, such as Kodiak, prove the overpowered nature of staves combined with push, where you cannot.

The next issue, that of the simple openended power of having unlimited staves, is pretty easy to see. Sure, it takes commodities, but no other profession has such a weapon that can exist while they are not even around, that will not dissapear of their own accord, and that can be targetted. Thieves have traps, sure, but only a very lonesome thief would litter the land with slayers.

His friends would quickly leave his side as they died to his traps.

Really, lowering the amount of time it takes to fell a stave OR making it significantly harder to unfix a stave, would solve a lot of these problems. As it stands, the LM can rush in and take the stave, having eaten a pill seconds earlier, and vanish before the eyes of those trying to fell the stave. He can then, just as easily, fix it again, having already eaten a pill.

It's fairly easy to accumulate vast numbers of staves to put around when it's so hard to get rid of them. Such a potent attack should certainly take much more vigilance to keep in being, to renew--or perhaps commoditieis would actually have to be reapplied to keep the stave's vitality high--making the commoditiy price to have 40 staves up around the land around the clock prohibitive!

What about making every stave that is out at a given time drain a certain amount of mana from the Loremaster? 5 staves perhaps would be indiscernable, but 20 would be a constant drain. This nudges the mind towards a creative soultion using staves, rather than littering the lands with them.

Kodiak, I'd love to hear your take on this.

Battlemage Fistandantilus

Written by my hand on the 29th of Hindyear, in the year 1130.