Banishing and Counterspelling Foci, Prime use – ornament Options

[Aerospider]

Does anyone else think that banishing and counterspelling foci being category-specific makes them rather unattractive?

It's different for all the others because the user can make them useful, but these two are right-implement-right-time affairs.

Let's take the banishing focus, costing 5k and 3 karma per force. So 15,000 (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nuyen.gif) and 9 karma gets you a tasty F3 fire-banishing focus. And how oftem will you use it?

Let's assume all spirit types are equally prevalent and that summoners don't have a bias towards lots of different or lots of the same spirit. Then, if you come up against one spirit there's a 10% chance you get a banishing bonus. If you come up against two from the same summoner there's an 18% chance you get a bonus against at least one of them and if it's three spirits it's still less than 25% that one of them will be a fire spirit.

That's pretty damn poor for the outlay, and the prepared-for-anything guy needs 10 foci with a karma cost well into the double, maybe triple digits and a cash expenditure of (probably) over 100k. All for a just few extra dice.

Consequently, I envisage that in the Sixth World most banishing and counterspelling foci earn their keep more in the role of mantlepiece-conversation-starter than in the role they were enchanted for.

Does anyone see any major unbalancing by removing the category limitation? Should the price and/or karma cost increase?