[quote=@Lucius Cypher]
[@Tangletail]

Nah it's fine, it's not as if 2nd level casters are "rare" per say. I imagine they're much like doctors of the modern era; there are a lot of them, but becoming one is difficult and requires a lot of training and patience. Some take it to more easily than others. This is especially true since most casters tend to be clerics since healing magic is seen as much more important than say, combat or illusions.

In a world perspective, the average level of humanoid people is 1. A military person might be level 2 or 3, as many of you are. Characters from heroic tales or legends are generally around level 5, possibly 10 depending on the person telling the story. Magic is considered too niche and poorly understood to see mass employment in high risk sectors such as warfare, but have much more prominence in areas such as medicine or science. That's not to say a sufficiently powerful and wealthy nation won't have wizards and such for battle, but those types tend to be super old since magic isn't something casually picked up. Now sorcerers on the other hand, those born with magic, could be expected to be younger, but have a worse stigma; these types of spellcasters tend to be taken away from their family as soon as their magic manifests precisely because they could easily tune into magic compared to wizards who need years of study and attunement.

Bards as somewhat akin to clerics in that they receive their powers from another source, albeit the sources are more "primal" in a sense. For example a cleric would pray to their god for healing magic or to throw out a guiding bolt, and sufficiently enlighten clerics would easily gain their god's approval and the spell happens. In other words, the gods can sense their cleric's wisdom (which manifests as a sort of willpower via their faith) and will assist them accordingly. But a bardic magic need to appeal to these same forces, or at least the manifestation of those forces, in order to use magic. Hence why they use charisma; they need to fast talk magic into serving them. 
[/quote]

With in that mind what is the power source of Eldritch Knights, and how do people feel about them?