But simply speeding them up won't solve anything.
One proposal that's been echoed a lot is to make enemies drop PA disks like in PSP2.
To highlight issues with that:
- PA disks would fatten up the drop charts potentially, spreading other drops thinner (increasing useless drops as you find more disks!)
- Many players object to RNG determining skill progression.
- Implementing it in PSU would be awkward as far as I know
There are of course issues with the practice-makes-perfect system as well. So to get to my proposal:
Photon Art levelling should be treated under a "fast to learn, slower to master" approach. My main objection to a lot of photon-art levelling is that many of them are either completely useless at low levels or are so much less useful than other Photon Arts the character has that they're forced to gimp themselves in order to level them. Therefore, make getting photon arts combat ready (1-21) a much quicker process. Beyond that the levelling speed can drop.
To go along with this, character level should be taken into account when calculating PA exp. It should take longer for lower level characters to raise PAs than higher level characters. Reasons for this are lowbies can get away with underlevelled PAs and higher level characters are hindered more severely by taking on new PAs. The only potential downside to this is that players could use higher level characters to grind PAs to then pass on to lowbie alts, but personally I have no issue with this as it requires a player to have gotten a character to a high level in the first place.
Note that this proposal only covers offensive abilities. I have no idea how to handly support abilities..