I hope we never see a system of essences or lost abilities again

[Packetdancer]

I actually love the Lost Action/Essence system in concept; swapping in different actions and essences means that one healer might be playing a very different style of job within the Bozja content than another healer is.

However, yeah, the consumable nature of it does disincline more casual players from participating fully. (And note I don't mean "casual" in any bad sense here, I just mean "people not used to burning through raid consumables"; folks who raid more seriously are used to content having an inherent expense, be it an expense measured in time for crafting your own raid food/pots, or measured in gil if you just buy what you need off the motherboard.)

Worse still, I'd argue that for efficiency's sake there are only a handful of essences that are considered "correct" to use on various jobs. It's really cool that a melee DPS can -- with the right essences and lost actions -- be a healer, or a healer can be a tank, etc. But now that we're at a point where people want to speed-run the content... like, the only reason a healer is going to have an Ordained essence up is for the higher chance of Lost Death working during CLL, and most healers I know will start with Aetherweaver, swap to Ordained just for the prisoners, and then swap back to Aetherweaver (or even Profane). In DR or Dalriada, you don't even really have reason for that, so healers will almost always be on Aetherweaver or Profane.

This means that a lot of drops end up feeling 'useless', because while they might be really neat for some stuff in theory, they aren't the most purely efficient (and so are not really the 'desired' drops). Lost Bubble is a great spell -- who doesn't want more health? -- but so much of what will kill you in Bozja are mechanics where either you do the mechanic correctly or you die, so "more health" isn't really priority number one in a lot of cases.

I do think it's a neat system, and when I was running DR savage pre-Zadnor, the fact that we needed to plan out holsters pretty carefully (and switch to specific actions during specific parts of the run) was actually a significant part of the experience, and I think is what the system is intended to function like. But I don't think it functions like that in most of the Bozja content—and arguably, now that we have rays and new/more powerful stuff from Zadnor, I don't even think it necessarily functions like that in DR Savage any longer either.

So I'd almost rather see it used in the next Deep Dungeon (assuming we get one). Deep Dungeons do have the pomander system, yes, but I think the Lost Actions system would be a good fit for a procedurally-generated roguelike. Imagine if you could take in a tank and, if you found the right things inside, also function as a healer. Or a DPS could be a tank. That would make for fascinating party composition on serious deep dungeon runs, and would make solo runs a lot more interesting as well.

(If we just get another Exploratory Mission zone with a Logos/Lost Actions system, mind you, I'll still enjoy it; I do actually like Bozja, and I like Eureka. But I also get why in Bozja in particular people are not engaging with the Lost Actions/Essences system as much as they might.)