We have gear for PVP, PVE, Fishing, Pet training, and gardening, but we have no gear specifically for Monstrology. There should be gear that caters to those with mastery (give damage boost to 2 schools) and those without (giving damage boost to one school only).
Making the gear a minimum character level would be fine, say level 70. Have some slots for jewels and make some Monstrology jewels as well. You can put out new sets in packs, but the first, baseline set should be available to everybody.
While the gear is equipped, it would give you 1 item card aura spell that would allow you to use that instead of the individual spells. This way, we can use Sun School Enchantments while farming and make the farming easier, especially after the Spell Change update.
The gear should also yield us 1 extra Animus per monster on all schools except Myth. Myth should get double Animus. If that's too much, then perhaps an extra 2 per monster. This way, the school who specializes in minions has an advantage, as it should.
Something else that would go nicely with this, would be a tower instance of some kind, with progressively harder monsters, with 4 monsters per level. This way, we can maximize our farming. Right now, I believe there's only a few places that we can farm decent monsters 4 at a time. Perhaps this location would be in WC across from the Myth School.
I think part of the charm of collecting animus is traveling the spiral to find creatures to collect animus from. So I do disagree with the tower suggestion.
I think to improve your aura-spell suggestion: Instead of having an aura spell, you would instead have upgradeable monstrology spells you can learn for increasing amounts of gold. Similar to how you learn increasingly powerful damage enchants via training points.
So, given that Monstrology spells typically cost 100,000 gold, maybe have it so each extract spell has added damage alongside it. For example:
+75 Damage and Extract (insert classification here) animus spell trained for 150,000 gold. +115 Damage and Extract (insert classification here) animus spell trained for 200,000 gold. +150 Damage and Extract (insert classification here) animus spell trained for 250,000 gold.
Going above 150 doesn't seem necessary. It wouldn't make sense to make them on par with Epic at +300. If that was the case there would be no point in using anything other than monstrology spells and Epic would be useless.
Maybe the gear will yield extra animus depending on the type of enemy you're facing?
It would be rather easy to farm up Renegade druid/Devourer/Neberyx etc. summons if you were able to get a large increase in animus via gear. Perhaps a larger increase for minions and a smaller increase for bosses? This way you would be able to amass a large number of less powerful, but still useful, minions while still getting a bonus when collecting animus for very powerful summons.
While I think the school that has a specialization in minions should be able to do more with minions I think the process of collecting animus should remain equal across all schools. After all, a myth specialty is in minions, not monstrology.
Imagine if Life wizards got extra rewards from gardening compared to all other schools--It wouldn't be efficient to garden on any other school if that were the case.
I like the overall idea of gear and more convenient animus gathering, but I disagree with some particular things.
The reason why I made the comment about more animus from myth wizards, is because while they come from Monstrology, they are minions. They're a subschool of myth, which is why all the Extract spells are Myth. I'll let KI decide if Monstrology is the same as minions and go with whatever they say. The tower idea was simply to give us another place where we could more easily farm for various creatures. Like, have a Monstrology Tower in each world that would have monsters from that world, on each level. I'm not saying it has to have every single monster and boss, but for something a little different, like the Halloween Towers.
I like your idea about an enchant that does both the extract and adds extra damage, however, what's really the difference between your idea and mine other than the damage output? They still need to create a new spell. I figured an aura because that would stack with the other things.
The problem with your gardening analogy is that gardening is NOT a subschool of Life.
