Or they just go Devil-Tiger, but those charms aren't even remotely thematically balanced.
Yes. The secret about the Devil Tiger path is that it is for suckers.
Oh, it promises you the world. It promises you getting lots of shiny things uniquely shaped around your personality and style and blah blah blah.
Yeah, you know what? You are an
Essence 6 Infernal. Unless you power-levelled Essence and bought no extra charms, you already
have a style which you've made your own by mixing and remixing your personal blend of Yozi Charms. And if you RPed and bought Charms as appropriate for your own personality, then you
have Charms based around your personality. Yozi Charms will have incentivised your actions and you
will be somewhat twisted by them, but unless you've surrendered entirely to what your Charmset "wants" you to do you'll still be you. And if you did surrender to it... well, duh, no wonder you don't act like yourself any more. You gave into a demonic force which wanted you to do something in return for power, and didn't try to hold onto yourself. Of course you lose yourself.
And what do you get out of the Devil Tiger path? Oh, yay, you, an Essence 6 Infernal, get to start buying Charms again from E1. Yay. So you get to spend your XP on E1 and E2 Charms when your compatriots who didn't take the sucker's path are buying E6 Charms. Well-designed Devil Tiger Charms are still chaining you with precisely the same chains as Yozi Charms, and as you're an E6 Infernal you have
long since internalised your own Yozi root charm chains. So you're buying into new limitations.
And what do you get out of that? Well, you're having to write a whole new Charmset, so that means that homebrew is in play. And - and this is the kicker - if homebrew is in play
you could just have written new effects for the Yozis you actually use. Like a Malfeas Charm tree which actually respects that he's the devil tyrant and really should have had the Zenith Exaltations, not the Dawn ones.
...
Also, the thing I find
hilarious is how if you just take a more sensible approach to design, not only do you not have the stupid-high Essence of Devil Tiger things with their poor designs, but you can get more balanced versions of Devil Tiger Charms at playable essence levels.
For example, a moment's thought should reveal that it's
perfectly valid Charm tech for Infernals to be making First Circle demons at E3, if they have to do a dramatic action lasting four hours and can only do it once a day. Why? Because it's
mechanically basically a reskinned Summon Elemental/Dot1C. Likewise, Infernals totally can spawn their own souls at E4, externalising them from their own mind on the night of the new moon, and these souls will be about as powerful as a Second Circle Demon and if they're hit by Sapphire Circle Banishment, they'll vanish back into the Infernal's mind. Why? Because the opportunity cost of using that effect is not using Dot2C. Now, of course, some might say it's unfair that the Infernal gets some friendly 2nd Circles around while the Solar has to bind them, but... well, you know, the Solar can get friendly 2nd Circles around too.
They just have to go make friends with them. You know, with their superlative social charms and effects which let them know people's heart's desires and the like. And then they, too, can have friendly 2nd Circles running around with them without having to bind them. The Solar doesn't
have to bind the Second Circles, in fact, at all. They just usually do it because it's easier than treating the Second Circle like a person. Meanwhile, the Infernal
has to negotiate with their own souls, and even though they'll usually be well-inclined to them by default, they're still demons based around one of their Principles. The demon who's a very cheerful wind who scourges people with hate or fear in their heart and who's an expression of the Infernal's "Be Free" isn't going to want to go and sit down and help run a city. Or to stop scourging people with hate and fear in their hearts.
