Picked up SOUL and Improvised Rituals. Grabbed this staff (You glance down to see a blue-grey steel staff acid-etched with geometric runes) and tried casting SOUL, and got this message;

>Your staff steadily brightens, until it burns like a vivid and fiery torch!
You find it too difficult to direct the flow of power you've conjured up, resulting in your ritual doing nothing more than jangling the mana streams.

Never seen that on any of my characters. My bards magics are

Elemental Magic: 293 88% clear (0/34) Attunement: 206 75% clear (0/34)
Arcana: 176 70% clear (0/34) Targeted Magic: 203 68% clear (0/34)
Augmentation: 263 29% clear (0/34) Debilitation: 234 52% clear (0/34)
Utility: 235 21% clear (0/34) Warding: 243 97% clear (0/34)
Sorcery: 20 16% clear (0/34)

So, I presume Arcana is too low? Is the requirement 200 or something?

Arcana requirement will in practice always be a touch higher than the min prep requirement, but yeah, it should be in the same ballpark.

-Armifer
"In our days truth is taken to result from the effacing of the living man behind the mathematical structures that think themselves out in him, rather than he be thinking them." - Emmanuel Levinas