Ok, it may be a bit late by a number of years to be asking this question, but I will try it anyway.
Does anyone have insight into the reason why Sight was dropped as a Target from ArM4 to ArM5?
I don't personally recall it being overpowered or breaking anything.
Did others find it overpowered? Did some find it breaking things? What?
Good question. It does seem to be pretty powerful as targets go. Having had a quick look, T: Sight seems to have been replaced by a R: Sight, T: Group combination. There is even one spell there (Vision of Heat's Light, ArM4, page 136) that now uses T: Vision, i.e. it alters the target's sense of vision. To my mind, this describes the spell intent far better than the 4th edition version.
Sight is a target for sensory Magic. For other magics, group + X to represent numbers of people seems a better way to go to judge the spell level.
10 targets spread over an area should not be harder to effect than 10 targets in a tiny area if you can use same range. 100 people in the same area though should be harder than affecting 10.
As it is, you do still have room, structure and boundary for these ever increasing areas.
House Bjornær has a mystery that lets you effect everyone to perceive you, its level depends on which sense you need to be noticed by. Makes the idea of a skunk Bjornær interesting.
The idea of a peacock bejornaer can also work well enough. Or a mosquito bjornaer using sensory magic for night assassinations
Sight adds +4 magnitudes while scent is only +2. Much easier to effect large numbers of people that way.
The skunk mage would have to be french though, and lecherous.
No skunks in Mythic Europe (New World only). The closest would be a polecat, also called a foulmart due to its stench. I've smelt both -- while my pet ferrets (both male) can be stinky at times, they in no way compare to a skunk at full volume...
Mark
The ArM5 magical senses target of Vision is not the same thing as the ArM4 target of Sight.
ArM5: Vision: The information comes through the sense of sight. (Based on: Intellego spells can grant magical senses to a person.)
ArM4: Sight: The spell affects everything within sight of the caster. (This still isn't quite what I personally wanted when I was thinking about this, which was a "target" that affected those who happened to see the caster, maybe I just need a new target.)
I'll have to go over HoH:MC again.
That's called spectacle.
Okay, first, to be clear to anyone new reading this, the 4th ed Target:Sight had nothing in common with the current 5th ed Target:Vision. 5th ed T:Vision affects a sense, while 4th ed T:Sight affected everything the caster could see. Huge diff. Huge.
Now, getting back to the OP...
To answer the OP... for a mage to be able to fly up and nuke everything within sight - say a 30 mile/50 km radius, almost 3000 sq miles or 8000 sq. kilometers (and MUCH more on a good day) - yeah, that's could be seen as pretty overpowered by some.
All the RDT's got reworked in 5th, plus new considerations for "volume/numbers created" (which was not addressed in 4th), wards, Target:Sense, and other quirks to make all the spells "make sense" under one single umbrella system. Gone also are Target:Small, and many of the "special" RDT's that plagued 4th - and gone (or largely changed) are a few spells that simply did not make sense w/ the new system (or perhaps even in the old, ahem).
David Chart comments on the process here:
atlas-games.com/pdf_storage/Dsgn4Spells.pdf