[Q]

The last time I poked a rule that directly affected me I was kinda met with scornful comments, even though the rule suggestion i made last time actually hurt me in the long run. This suggestion has the possibility to affect me in a more positive way, but I do want to preface this with the fact that I don't currently plan on taking any of the sage enhancements as part of my sage mode at the moment. Let me just cover this as best as I can. There are a lot of numbers to consider and the system itself is robust enough that it makes the explanations difficult to completely boil down into something that is simple to follow. I've done my best to simplify, if you have any questions just reach out to me.

These are the current numbers for sage mode:

	Initial Sage Mode	Experienced Sage Mode	Perfect Sage Mode	Enhancement
1-Round Still Meditation	20	30	40	+5
1-Round Moving Meditation with Amphibian Technique	10	15	20	+2
Cost to Maintain Sage Mode	6	5	4	-1
Cost to use Active Abilities	5	4	4	-1
Cost to use Passive Abilities	1	1	1	-
Threat Cap	50	80	130	+10
Stone Ceiling	200	300	400	+50

I originally thought the biggest issue with this system lied in the enhancement side of things. These enhancements are maybe kinda helpful in the earliest sage mode but become much less useful for Experienced Sage Mode and Perfect sage mode. I think the best way to capture this is taking a look at the percentages of how effective an individual enhancement is based on which stage we're looking at, that chart looks like this.

enhancement Efficiency %	Initial Sage Mode	Experienced Sage Mode	Perfect Sage Mode
1-Round Still Meditation	+25%	+16.667%	+12.5%
1-Round Moving Meditation with Amphibian Technique	+20%	+13.333%	+10%
Cost to Maintain Sage Mode	-16.667%	-20%	-25%
Cost to use Active Abilities	-20%	-25%	-25%
Cost to use Passive Abilities	-	-	-
Threat Cap	+20%	+12.5%	+7.692%
Stone Ceiling	+25%	+16.667%	+12.5%

To read the above chart, basically anything that is positive is worse if it's lower and anything that's negative is worse if it's higher or closer to 0. Essentially what this chart demonstrates is that as your mastery increases the value of these enhancements decreases to the point that when you are a perfect sage any enhancement is half as valuable or much less valuable to you. The only abilities that don't reflect that is the cost for active abilities and the cost to maintain sage mode enhancements, which gets slightly better only because the cost reduction is a flat number and the cost of these features decreases as your mastery increases. To me at least, i don't particularly like the idea that an individual ability from a Perfect sage is percentage-wise worse than an initial sage who has the same option.

An initial thought that might come up is, sure Q, so how does this translate into a combat thread? That is much much more difficult to capture; the simple conclusion is that these enhancements have no noticeable affect in 90% of situations, and the 10% of situations they do have an impact on is because you were really close or on the cusp of maintaining sage mode for another round. This is a really crude way to measure things, but i think it highlights another larger issue.

The secondary conclusion that I came to after gathering the numbers is that not only did the enhancements not scale well, but due to the ramp up in cost from medium->high->very high techniques this system is insanely difficult to balance in its current state. A perfect sage needs at least 4 rotations of meditation with the amphibian technique to have the potential to utilize 1 very high cost non-senjutsu technique and still have sage mode up and 5 rotations for a senjutsu technique. The amount of time that takes is crazy long in a normal thread. In an A rank mission with 2 people and an npc mod for example, this would take 40% of the mission for a Perfect Sage and would assume that you started gathering natural energy from the first post in the mission and used no other jutsu. I do think sage mode needed some touching up from where it used to be, but I think that where it is now especially considering the state of jinchuuriki is kinda silly. Jinchuuriki, unless the rper goes out of their way, face relatively low risk of going berserk: they face a much higher risk of going inactive. There are bad things that can happen if stuff goes south, sure, but i can maybe count on one hand when there was any realistic danger to a jinchuuriki and they still have silly levels of power. I am by no way saying we need to nerf that, because it takes a crazy amount of work and activity to unlock all of that strength, I'm just saying that with that in mind i think this system goes way too far in the other direction for sages and kinda makes their sage mode laughably weak.

I originally did have a suggestion for what proper enhancement bonuses would look like, but the more i looked at the numbers i think that even these suggested changes kinda fall way short with the jutsu costs at higher levels, cause a +4 to amphibian meditation numbers for perfect sage isn't going to fix this when you are trying to get to 60 or 80 points to use a single jutsu. With that in mind, these are what the percentage adjusted sage mode enhancement numbers come out to and this is the simplest change to make things slightly better but doesn't fix the whole problem.

	Initial Sage Mode	Experienced Sage Mode	Perfect Sage Mode	Enhancement %
1-Round Still Meditation	+5	+8	+10	+25%
1-Round Moving Meditation with Amphibian Technique	+2	+3	+4	+20%(This could be changed to +2,+4,+5 so that it's half the value of the above.)
Cost to Maintain Sage Mode	-1	-1	-1	-25%
Cost to use Active Abilities	-1	-1	-1	-25%
Cost to use Passive Abilities	-	-	-	-
Threat Cap	+10	+20	+30	+20%
Stone Ceiling	+50	+70	+100	+25%

In order to fully balance the system I think you'll have to take a closer look at all the sage mode numbers in my opinion as well as the costs of high/very high jutsu to make sure a sage isn't spending 40-60% of a thread gathering chakra for a single jutsu. I understand the intent is to make it so sages aren't just flat spamming high and very high jutsu, but at the current moment they're lucky if a thread or combat even lasts long enough for them to use 1 big jutsu. I think there's a potential bandaid fix that involves updating the enhancements to the above numbers and reducing the cost of high/very high jutsu by half or something like that. That still requires 2 rotations with amphibian to gather a very high cost jutsu, but that's much more feasible. The reason i call this a bandaid fix is because it is a simple solution that doesn't require updating characters, but i don't think it's 100% balanced.

Summons are a huge boon, don't get me wrong, but i think that sages in general just feel worse to play when sage mode doesn't feel good. I know this kinda comes on the back of a big list of summons where i tried to address this problem at a personal level, but i feel like that was a bit selfish on my part and it wasn't even guaranteed to be approved.

[Toff E]

Hey Q, bit awkward timing actually. I had planned to put this very suggestion up in the staff board this evening, so don't think this has been left unnoticed! I've been crunching the numbers since the update to make sure we did a fairly decent job, and I do think you did a decent job in breaking down my own concerns with it as well - I'll be pushing this one up as I had intended already and I appreciate you making the tables easier to push out at least I despise making code tables on proboards its a punishment I swear.

With that said you did miss one numerical issue I found myself, but I will bring that up on the higher level so its fully made aware to staff as a whole.