There are only a handful of skills that use percentage-based SP costs for casting, but this is seriously one of the worst ideas I’ve seen in this game. Making the cost of a spell scale with your maximum SP without making the skill itself stronger or weaker only encourages low-SPR builds and makes the SPR stat useless on most character. These spells should be changes to cost a set amount of SP per second based on the level of the skill, not your total SP.
Skills that have SP-percentage costs:
Summoning: The one you usually hear Sorcs complaining about… this is why SPR is an utterly useless stat on Sorc, because you want your summon out as much as possible and it’s a 1% drain on your SP every 1~2 seconds. It’s definitely possible to work with low SPR, but it makes it difficult to maintain buffs or other supporting skills as a Sorc without having to waste tons of silver buying potions all the time.
Melstis: An interesting skill that you never see because the percentage scaling makes it USELESS. It costs 5% of your total SP every second and you can’t use SP healing items while it’s active. Not only is it a massive waste of resources, its level scaling makes no sense. At level 1 you can channel for 15 seconds, and at level 2 you can channel for 20… 5% x 20 = 100%. Why does this even have skill levels beyond 2 if it’s impossible to use them? I’d love to see this skill get some love because it has really cool potential behind it (imagine extending the duration of a short buff like Ranger’s Steady Aim to triple their total buff time!). If the percentage-cost was changed it could actually be viable and maybe even turn Krivis C3 into an endgame staple.
Psychic Pressure: I don’t personally play Psychokino so I’m not sure how big of an issue this is for them, but it falls under the category so I’m including it anyway. Psychic Pressure costs 1% of your total SP per second to inflict constant damage. PP is a pretty strong skill, but the scaling cost of its use makes it difficult to use alongside other cost-heavy classes, and there are much better ways to limit the use of this skill than scaling it with max SP. A duration limit could be added instead, ie. you can only maintain a cast of PP for 20 seconds or whatever, and maybe the maximum duration could scale with the skill level. Something like that would be a MUCH more reasonable limiter on the skill than percentage costs.
If I’m missing any other skills please let me know and I’ll edit the post. I don’t play every class so I’m sure there are others I don’t know about.
Examples of skills that don’t use SP-percentage costs:
Energy Blast: Costs 30 SP per second. The cost does not increase from skill levels, no limit on the duration as long as you have SP (Monk players, feel free to correct me on this).
Blood Sucking: Costs 49 SP per 0.4 seconds at level 1, +7 SP per 0.4 seconds for each additional level. Also does not have any limit on the duration as long as you have SP (as far as ToSBase says, anyway, so again feel free to correct me).
This is how all of these spells should work. With SP-percentage costs, players are basically punished for putting points into SPR or having a large SP pool. This is bad design and defeats the entire point of increasing your SP pool—if you want to use more skills you should want a bigger SP pool, not a smaller one. The SPR stat already gets very little love since it doesn’t give damage and most players will just spam pots to continue using their skills, but any Wizard that picks Kino or Sorc would have to be crazy to even put 1 point into SPR. Meanwhile, a Krivis would have to be crazy to sacrifice their SPR stat just to use a mediocre skill like Melstis in its current state.
I sincerely hope IMC will consider updating these older skills to function in a more reasonable manner. We already have similar skills such as Blood Sucking and Energy Blast that don’t have percentage costs, so why not update the rest of them?