The fact is that the sleek system works, to a degree. The problems with it are largely recent. For example, not being able to regen almost at all with any combination of damage reduction up. This is a huge problem because it forces each mage to use a charge for every fight. If the fight starts to go bad, they have to flee, wait out the rest of the duration of their current redux, and THEN they'll start regenning. Having it affect healing, and regen bonuses in forms etc I see as fine, but ####ing the already piss poor base HP regen of a mage makes them into all or nothing fighters.

Next, I think some math needs to be added to the sleek locations so that their difficulty is a little less arbitrary in comparison to each other. I'll explain what I mean with a bit of an example: Sienna X is in a container location. This by default makes it fairly easy, unless there are no-pass doors and an area of aggro mobs between you and said container. Now, amber Y is also in a container location, however there is only a single aggro magetype mob guarding the container.

While Sienna X isn't specifically guarded, its veritably impossible for a mage to get into the room with the wand. This essentially goes for a bunch of the non area-explore locations, and all of the area explore locations. Is X still easier to obtain than Y? I don't think so.

I'm not a programmer, and in fact I'm pretty bad at math. So, I'll just state the idea: Assign each character a maximum difficulty value for their wands at creation (maybe this is constant, maybe its class/race/align dependant), and assign every location a difficulty value. The idea of this part of the system is to ensure that values for barrier > aura > sienna, and still not have a "set" as it was.

My last gripe? Keep aura and shield sleeks out of explore areas period. These are the dam redux staples for mages, and to my mind should always be obtainable solo (I'm also not against it taking some work solo). The other part of this is that it is easier to track and figure out a mages locations against him if they aren't hidden in obscure explore areas that only a handful of players have ever really been in.

Thanks guys. Keep up the awesome work.