I have an Ice – Water mage, and I’m considering swapping it to Water – Ice if they do something to make hecate essence hunting not suck
What happens if you try to set your first magic to something already taken by your second? Does it even let you?
water water mage indeed
it doesn’t let you
not possible
so you either need 3 essences or 1 stat reset 1 essence
seriously with mutations coming back why the hell arent we allowed to have the same magic anymore, wasnt the reason back then being vetex seeing theres no reason for the player to do so cause you can choose whatever lost/ancient you want? but know each magic is limtied to a selection of lost/ancient now, so why cant we have the same magic again?
(yes i know with a whole ass 23 magics most of them will probably have a bunch of overlap im just finding excuse to go double/triple same magic lol)
lore wise 
Probably to make mages slightly more fair, if you could have the same magic, the strongest mages would just be the sizemancers (currently although they are very strong, they can still be defeated).
And also to give weapon/spirit weapon users an exclusive mechanic to them.
Lore wise you’d be able to have as many spells as you can learn (there would be a limit based on knowledge), same for magics (for magics, it just becomes harder to learn more magics, 2nd magic would be easy, 3rd would take some time, 4th would be harder and so forth)