Why does a lower Essence only effect healing spells?, Just a thought... Options

[psychophipps]

It's pretty well known that jamming foreign gizmos and doo-dads into your body lowers your Essence score in SR. It's often described as "breaking" the link of a character's soul from the manasphere or some such. You jam too much goodies into yourself and you die as your soul is severed too far from your body, barring some serious (and expensive) magical intervention by specialists.

If it effects healing spells as a dice pool modifier, why the heck doesn't it effect all non-physical magic cast on that character? If there is less "soul" and manasphere connection in there, there should be less for a mage/spirit/whatever to latch onto and manipulate, right? It might even give you a penalty to assensing-only perception checks as you'll be seeing a chopped up image of someone with heavy enhancements rather than the whole outline of their aura like normal.

I propose that the dice penalties should apply to all non-physical spells. Things like Fireball, Lightning Bolt, etc are completely unaffected, of course. If you want to run around skullfucking someone with serious headware using Mind Probe and the like, you're in for a bad day at the office with the heavily enhanced.

Thoughts? Opinions?