Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-50.189.187.12-20140921160114/@comment-24891101-20150201221655

I'm opposed to people having Semblances which are mere elemental manipulation. That's the province of Dust. It seems cheap, from a perspective of artistic unity, for someone to have their own special power, which only a relative handful of people have, which can be completely replicated by someone with enough Aura control and the appropriate Dust, in addition to their own special power. It seems silly. No matter; opinion will differ.

A shockwave is definitionally spherically-propagating; it's already an AoE. Lightning, meanwhile, is much more directional. Consider swapping the two. And I'd like to point out that lightning cannot actually shear anything. It can give rise to processes which could, though. The tree example is due to the heat generated by the current flow causing the water in the tree to boil. What you'd be doing is melting through things.