This is a really rough change. I'm not normally a shocked Empath, but I used to regularly help my Brothers and Sisters with shock when they would shock themselves by accident (or not), just lessen their shock time.

A small hit to healing and so on seemed like an acceptable loss to cutting their shock time in half, I've had "tiny deadened speck" of shock for 5-6 RL days at a time of 4-5 hours of game time a day, it's not fun when you can't cast or join a CoS.

If a young Empath accidentally shocks themselves they are cut off from CoS, if an Elder Empath helps them to lessen it, they are also cut off from CoS, casting it, benefiting from it, and possibly all their peers and young Empaths that might have benefited from that Elder Empath casting CoS.

Shock was a Silo that you had to deal with on your own, then it was turned into something that could be fixed and shared and mitigated with time and effort and now it seems like we are making it a silo again where we are taking things away if we want to help people with shock we lose access to helping people with CoS or ourselves with CoS.

I could be wrong, but it seems like it's aimed at people that use it in conjunction with IZ and combat casting and so on, why not just make CoS incompatible with IZ like GoL does not work with Absolution? Or make CoS not work with Absolution as well? Perhaps disallow CoS from the third tier down (though it shows more than the occasional deadened area) maybe?

This change is really frustrating, I used to semi-regularly heal other Empaths, to lessen shock yes, but now I can't at all, unless I want to give up CoS casting completely.