I would kill for some Glintstone Sorcery-style Sorcerous Initiations/Spells. Like, why shouldn't a prospective sorcerer capture starlight in a gemstone and place their soul inside with it to initiate into sorcery? Why not go find a chunk of starmetal from a newly fallen star and use it to call upon the strange gravitational forces that ties together Fate through the constellations? There's so much design space to play with.
While I would rather play a game of Essence to a game of 3e (if for no reason other than 3e's design is confusing to me to the point of incomprehensibility), I agree that 3e has a ton of legs up over Essence. The removal of my Supernatural Merits, the removal of Introduce Fact, the removal of Defining Intimacies to make room for a virtue system... I was so happy to finally get a simplified version of Exalted, and then I went in to look at it and they had removed a ton of the design decisions about 3e which I had liked.
Introduce Fact is still present; on the small scale it's dramatic editing, and on the large scale it can be done through Sagacity ventures.
I wonder how long until they just go 'fuck it' and create an errata.
Unfortunately, I believe that the license terms require Paradox's approval. Apparently, they have asked for permission to do a mechanical errata and been denied.
You can just...write Evocations for Silken Armor, though? You don't need to up it, it's artifact armor, the core thing is that it doesn't count as armor for MA, meaning it's 4-dot by default, but nothing states it can't support Evocations. My Endings uses the Black Pearl, which spins clothing for her on her whims, and matches to her destinies automatically, with an Evocation giving her artifact traits on unarmed attacks.
My gathering is no one is willing to do that shit for free and asking for the funds to pay for it is a big ask/kind of hard to jusitfy. Errata be weird like that.
Introduce Fact's limited presence in Essence is good, but can hardly compare to the flexible, powerful tool that 3e gives for players to use freely in nearly any context.
Which rule set? In 3e, you want to force the sorcerer to stop shaping by getting up in their face and making them fight you, knocking them prone, etc. If they can't shape sorcery or use a shaping ritual, they begin to lose 3 motes per round. Sorcery is designed to hit very hard, for the trade-off of making a character work a few rounds to fire it off, so (like many RPGs), you want to base your strategy around protecting your sorcerer or, on the other side of things, getting rid of or otherwise occupying the sorcerer first.
