Bio III, can I has it.

[Byrth]

Scroll hunting? It'd be so easy for them to add almost every hard-to-find scroll as is to gold pyxides in abyssea. If they redid the merits that's most likely what they're going to do. I would hope they would, too, because in all honesty it doesn't make sense for tier 3s to cost 5-20k but tier 4 is 400-600k depending for each spell and then tier 5 is el-cheapo, probably even less than tier 3 because they're so common.

And it wouldn't be the same system, because the "effect/potency/duration" would apply to ALL tiers of Protect & Shell. ALL tiers of Blind, Paralyze, Slow, Dia, and Bio. Even Phalanx if they decided to go that route. Hell, the same could be done for BLM too.

It'd make more sense.

No, actually you're just adding an unnecessary level of complexity. Base potency/duration is arbitrary, so your assumption that 5/5 potency would change isn't necessarily correct. Also, you're assuming they would add it to something easy to get (like a pyxis drop or NPC) instead of something harder (like an ENM, KC50, etc.)

Unless you're using a scroll system to generalize the spell to multiple jobs and just letting certain jobs use merits to enhance the potency of those spells (which you've specifically said isn't a necessary part of your plan), it doesn't make any sense to do it. You're basically just asking them to put scrolls into the game so you can have level "0" of all the Tier 2 merit spells, which is an issue that could be more easily (and completely) be rectified by increasing the merit cap on the Tier 2 category.

Adding scrolls is an unnecessary step that wastes developer resources and offers no benefit to the playerbase.