I realize we are playing in a non complete state but it has always bothered me that the state of fire magic is basically one of two choices.

1. Farm runestones using a geared lvl 70 character (while not using fire magic).
2. Pay about 10k each when you need about 45 ERs.

If nothing else this can serve as a warning to people who are thinking about fire magic. You will likely do what I did.... get to 50 fire not having too much trouble getting the materials and then decide to change to not play fire anymore.

Since the plateau changes I see fewer permanent farmers up on the ledge and this makes me happy. For one thing the content up there is essentially fodder and I can fight 5-6 at a time with no problem. But more relevant I see fewer people trying to make a living by making noobs pay for things they need - that drives me crazy. I suspect this will make the people who really want to fire go up there and farm no matter what and those who thought fire was a passing interest will just keep walking past to a different class.

With that in mind I would like to offer a few suggestions:

A. Have some of the mobs who can drop 55 gear occasionally drop a runestone (last boss in wolfcave/Kur tower/ flame puck in WN) strike me as good options as they can drop up to lvl 55 gear). Im not sure that you can do this but maybe you could weight this so that people killing the boss with fire magic have a 1% better chance at getting a runestone (which may in fact bump the drop rate up to 2%)?

B. Offer level 55 fire mages a quest or two so that they can get a few of their spells. I can imagine one of these being something like: kill 10 fireworms in the Ilmari desert with the finishing blow being a fire spell or burn tick (pennoc can make you get a finishing blow on a pig with a kick so this should be a thing that can be done). Another example I can come up with quickly is burn enemies while fire magic is equipped to the tune of 25,000 fire burning damage. If I were designing things I would make both quests be available at 55 with the reality being that the player will likely not finish them until they are actually almost done with fire (and hence reward with 2 runestones each).

C. There should be something in the sewers that allows a player to earn a runestone? I'm thinking one of the goblins in the goblin area can maybe offer a quest for 10-20 Xendrite (Which I have seen selling for 1k each recently) and he rewards you with a runestone.

Closing thoughts:

Essentially I would like to see some small slight change so that fire isn't pay out 450k or gtfo. But with that in mind I don't want people to be able to easily pretend to be devoted fire mages to reap a nice 20k bounty from some easy quests either. I know there are many things that need to get fixed and with this post I'm just adding a +1 to the list.