I am having hard time to imagine 1) for the following reasons:
I had all spells collected prior to 2.5, so I don’t know how it is now. The closest I know are the new season spells from the shop. I haven’t got any from the chests yet, and I haven’t bought any seasonal caches yet.
If we imagine that the spell pages are per color, in my mind, the spell and the pages are two completely different items. Imagine the following - you run a dungeon for the first time. You get a purple spell - it has the spell image, color, description etc. You run the dungeon second time, but now you get purple pages - different and more generic image, different item, and you can spend them on any spell. Going back to the first point - I don’t know how it is now, but I feel it makes more sense because the spell pages use the image of the spell.
Additionally - if they are per color, then they will have to appear as resources in the wallet.
What are the drop quantities going to be? - In 2.4 you get a spell drop with a rarity. Today the rarity is converted to number of pages for the spell and that’s it. However, if the pages are per color - as explained above, the spell and the pages become different items - the first one has the rarity while the second is just a resource.
What about the offers in the shop? - Today you have random spell of a specific rarity in different offers = specific number of pages for a random spell. With the per color pages do you get a random spell or do you get pages of random color?
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Now let me share my experience for the past week.
I am a casual player with 8-13 hours a week.
Since 2.5 I started playing events again, and I started playing hunts.
I do that with my lvl 50 Warlock and I am opening the chests with it.
I spent 5000 gems on the weekly offer for 50 pages of a random spell per offer.
I spent some spell dust - once the 2500 option, once the 1500, and few times the 350.
In summary - for about 15 hours of playing I got around 2000 spell pages of various spells. Half of them from the weekly offer, the other half from hunts, events and Xione. With these 2000 spell pages I managed to increase the rarity of two spells from rare to rare+. For my main spell Tentacle slap at legendary I have 271 out of 1000 pages. More than 1/4 collected and I am not even trying to target it.
Edit: reduced the hours from 20 to 15 because I realized I counted this Monday and Tuesday twice.
5 k gems and over 5 k spelldust, a week playtime … ok, if you think thats worth getting 2 spells (you obviously dont use) from rare to rare+ … why not.
And you seemed to have been lucky, cause random means 152 posibilities actually …
But ok, as said … why not.
Ok, I know why not for me … but everybody has his own priorities …
Since everyone up above was calculating and eh thang, I figured I would run a few calculations of my own. I have 4 spells that are level 50 Mythic. I ride those four spells like Secretariat at the Kentucky Derby. Each spell requires 4000 pages to make it to Ancient Mythic. I extrapolated my current rate of page production on those spells, multiplied by the number of hours I play every week, divided by Pi, and then added that to Avogadro’s number.
In the year 2093, my brain, floating in a vat over at the Tesla headquarters, will order the final “craft” for Xione to produce the remaining spell pages to get the last of my four mythic spells to Ancient. In 2094, my Shaman will be lit, y’all.
Most of the issues here involve how much more work it is going to be to get spells advanced any further, which is true for everyone. My bigger issue is how much worse my spells are now, immediately after the update, and the fact that it will take me months just to get back to where I was.
I generally only focus my time and resources on the spells I plan on using. I have four red spells and five purple spells I use all the time, across all three of the characters I use on a regular basis. I also have three green spells I occasionally use on the merc I’m toying around with. Of those spells, seven of them are both important enough and improve enough with higher level that it was worth spending real time and resources to get them to level 45. I spend most of my time focused on what makes a more immediate difference to my characters: upgrading armor and accessories.
When the update hit, my highest spell book was 38. Nobody else was even at 35. I was given 17 spell glyphs to make up the difference, which will not get a single character back to 45. Keep in mind that every spell I wanted at 45 was already there, on three characters. Now I’m months away from being able to get one character back there.
You’re not encouraging experimentation. I used to move between characters and try out different builds. Now my secondary characters are too weak to use in high-level play. I used to bump up any spell that looked interesting to epic to test it out; now, that’s weeks of work and I’ll never try another ‘interesting-looking’ spell again.
It doesn’t feel right to suddenly have a weaker character. Not weaker in relation to new, more powerful enemies: weaker, period. My spells were nerfed. It’s infuriating.
You said it was a week of your playtime, so maybe you want to take a poket calculator and do the maths what that means for you (not me or others) regarding your legendary spells … and your progress regarding everything else, when alone this did cost you 5 k gems … but maybe you have enough income to buy unlimeted amounts of them with real money.
(edit: If so, you are exactly the type of player the Dev wants … go for it!)
Well, I ran an analysis of rarity versus number of pages needed, and well… to a point, Jeto was right. It is easier to evolve spells in 2.5 (with a big giant asterisk).
They made evolving spells significantly easier at the low-end of the rarity spectrum (presuming a player has sufficient evolution materials). In contrast, on the very high end, they made evolving spells significantly harder than in 2.4.
Rare rarity takes less than half a percent of the total number pages to Ancient Mythic, Epic is just over 2% and Legendary 11%.
So, in contrast 89% of the pages needed come after reaching Legendary rarity. Mythic rarity is just over one-third of the number of pages needed to reach Ancient Mythic.
I think the devs did make it easier for the newbies to raise their spells, up to the point where they hit the Epic Scroll paywall (which is surely intentional). After Legendary rarity, the grind is very ugly, long-term, and inefficient overall. The situation may very well be similar to Kingdoms in Gems of War, where it is possible to achieve a Power 30 / Level 20 maxed out Kingdom, but the grind and spend needed to get there is meant to take years to achieve that goal.
This makes me significantly doubtful that there will be major tweaks made to the new spell system.
It also means that in terms of maximizing spell power, chasing spells to Ancient Mythic is not the best course of action. Similar to the conclusion reached in the OP by @HigureTheStillWind, most player chasing Ancient Mythic rarity spells are pursuing goals that are so far into diminishing returns (such as the last 5 levels of the spellbook) that issues posted by many here are expected to occur by design. Better returns on investment for time and resources spent are found elsewhere.
I could be ok with the high difficulty to get a spell to ancient mythic. They give us an extra rarity but you need to work for it. Well, it makes one of the supposedly nice points of the update pretty disappointing: “Behold! We have an exciting new rarity for you, Ancient Mythic! But just forget about reaching it because we will make it to be impossible unless you are ready to pay hundreds (literally) for it”. But ok, we veterans already have spells where we want them.
What I don’t like at all is that I am pretty sure that upgrading low level spells isn’t easier at all. It can seem so just looking at the numbers. 50 pages to get a spell to rare, 250 pages to epic… Well, they seem doable, no? Until you realize that the pages aren’t universal but specific. So you don’t need to get 50 spell pages, you need to get 50 spell pages of that specific spell! And if we didn’t know it before the update, our farming efforts after it has shown us that that is not easy at all due to low spell drops, specially when you are a beginner with hardly chest space, minions and keys to open chests. It would be much easier seen just by comparing how much time it takes to get the spell shards needed for upgrading before the update with the time needed now to get the spell pages, playing normally of course. If we have to farm specifically for spell pages we want, then that is an additional layer of difficulty there.
So I am afraid I cannot agree with you there, I firmly believe that they have made evolving spells significantly more difficult even at the low-end rarity, while high end evolving has become just insane.
Well, we aren’t asking to a major overhaul of the system. The system itself can work well… As long as they adjust the numbers (many more spell pages per drop, less spell pages to evolve, more spell pages crafted by Xione…) so that the goal of making evolving spells easier and allow players to experiment more with them isn’t just empty words but a reality.
I believe there will be changes. The devs were very clear, they wanted to make evolving spells easier. We have been very clear, the update has made evolving spells more difficult. I completely trust them to accept that something was clearly missed during the execution of the Spell rework and to work towards setting it right. I just hope it doesn’t take until next update.
Sometimes there is a big diffrence between what ppl name as their reasons … and their reasons.
Not everything sells good, but a good story does always … modern life … stories matter.
Truth does not.
The problem with the math in this analysis is that you are using Ancient Mythic as the measuring stick. The insane number of pages it takes to get to AM is part of the problem being argued in the math above. So saying that Epic is 2.22% of AM only shows how ridiculous AM is, not how easy it is to get to Epic.
Do this for me, sort your spellbook by level (low to high). Grab the lowest spell you have…
Here is mine: (I will work on Cockatrice Juju since it is the only farmable spell in the list)
Now go farm 300 pages of that spell and come back to the forum when you are done. For extra credit, keep track of the number of chests, coins, dust it takes to complete the task. If you get extremely lucky you may get it today, but it could take weeks and hundreds of keys/coins for a player that plays 1-2 hours a day.
There are at least two real problems in the way this change was implemented.
The change back to making spell upgrading specific to the spell, requiring multiple copies of the same spell to evolve.
a. You need to take all of the probabilities in your chart and divide by 152 to get the true chance of upgrading a specific spell.
The removal of the ability to bank resources for future upgrades.
a. They clearly have set seasonal goals with the expectation that getting a spell (or 3) to mythic is a possibility, but that is no longer possible.
b. Prior to the update you could save all of the resources to get 4 new spells to Legendary if you desired. Now there is absolutely no path to that achievement within the timeframe of the season.
This is essentially all it took in previous seasons after you bought the spell for 200 coins or looted from a chest.
They have removed the ability to Choose what spell you are working on completely. At best you can limit it to a dungeon that offers 2-4 spells that will drop.
Only players with a level 50 Xione can choose which spell pages to craft, and even that skill is inefficient and locked to rare (crystals) and time-locked (dust) resources.
The reality is that I, and likely every other player, want to spend our resources on upgrading very few of the 152 spells.
Resources take Time to gather. By making stored resources less valuable this update they have stolen that time from us.
I think we will send up seeing some tweaks, but I don’t believe that the end result will move the needle that much. I would love to be fantastically wrong on this though. Any positive move would be appreciated though.
Ok, I can accept that, but then you posted a screenshot snip of your spellbook…
…where you have the two new droppable spells at Rare+ already, one step away from Epic only halfway through the first week of the Season?
I only have those two at Rare, so you are ahead of me on those spells. Still, I think it would be a safe assertion to present that those two spells will be at least Epic rarity by the end of the Season. Granted, it is not as fast as in 2.4, where you looted a single copy of the spell and used stockpiled spell shards and Epic scrolls to insta-Epic those spells, but it looks those spells will reach Epic fairly easily.
Agreed. IMO, it’s because the devs want to sell you specific spell pages (which is broken currently), with inefficient Xione being the “free” way to obtain specific pages.
And therefore you become frustrated enough over the devaluation of your valuable personal resources that you may decide to purchase spell pages to avoid that outcome/frustration.
The devs would not have designed such a overhaul of a system if one of the primary goals was not to sell you spell pages and Glyphs, with all the sales tactics and pressures that come along with that.
I’m personally waiting for the “Here is an offer for some additional spell pages for the ones you just looted!” flash offers to start.
It is 101 and 180 pages respectively. I am surprised that it seems impressive to be at Rare+. Every previous season these would be epic or legendary (if desired) on day 1 or 2. I am only 8% and 15% of the way to legendary on those spells, 40% and 64% to epic, and that is throwing everything I have at it. Being a slave to their unpublished RNG is not a rewarding way to play the game.
I have opened 9 (36 so far?) level 100 chests a day and 11 Ultimate caches already. I am 47% done with the goals.
I am also an edge case. I buy annual VIP, I buy every platinum season pass, I play this game a lot. And this is as far as that devotion can get you. It is a huge change from previous seasons.
I think you are probably right that it is a money grab. There really is no other logical explanation. It’s shameful that they are trying to sheer the same sheep over and over instead of broadening the player base with solid mechanics that reward targeted effort.
They did had a general flash offer just a couple of days after the update. 250 spell pages for 10$. Meaning that the value of an ancient mythic spell is 450$. I won’t say anything else about this because I prefer to keep my feedback constructive.
I can see 2 logical explanations:
They did a serious mistake in the execution of the Spell rework, believing the numbers would be good enough without enough testing/experimenting. This would mean that even if there are no big mechanical changes we will still be having a big improvement in the number of spell pages number per drop, a big decrease in the number of spell pages required per rarity and/or an improvement of Xione’s abilities. I believe that going back to needing “duplicates” of spells to evolve them is a huge mistake, but if the rest is correspondingly improved I can see evolving spells becoming easier as it was supposed to happen.
The changes were 100% intented to make evolving spells more difficult as a money grab. This would mean that at best we will see a very small and unsatisfactory improvement on the lines of “make things insanely difficult and then change them to be a bit better so that the players are calmed down but we still manage to get away with having made everything difficult enough to our purposes”. Needless to say I don’t even want to believe in this possibility, because that would mean the devs are ready to outright lie to us and think we are stupid enough not to see the difference between what they claim and what they do.
We just need to wait and see the decisions the devs take to discover which of those 2 explanations is the correct one.
I want to give some more numbers to keep proving my point. The best way to compare the “difficulty” of evolving spells would be directly comparing the resources needed to upgrade spells before and after the update, which would be mainly spell shards, glyphs and relics against spell pages.
Since the update I have gotten around 20k spell shards and 4 spell glyphs, with enough mythic relics to get 4 for a spell I like. That means in this time I could fully upgrade 1 spell to mythic (around 10k spell shards) and 2 other spells fully to epic (around 4k spell shards each). All those evolutions are targeted, so I would evolve the ones I need.
In the same time, I have gotten enough spell pages to evolve 2 epic spells I never use to epic + and that is all.
So sorry but as time passes every time we do the calculations the answer just becomes more and more evident. The update has made evolving spells much more difficult, something that should have been easily spotted with just a simple comparison between spell shard drops and spell page drops. I hope that when planning the fix for this huge mistake you run the numbers to make sure that we are finally getting what we were told: an easier time evolving spells.
So picked up my 1st spell from the new season and sigh i doubt even by the end of the season i will lvl it up enough to even bother trialling it in a loadout. Maybe we can offer all 4 season spells in the shop and for enough pages to get it up to rare (possibly useful) for 200-400 s.currency or ancient coins
We see a big loss on playerbase again now, we see less and less new players arrive.
If the goal of Dev was to earn more money with that downgrade, he just failed it as much as every goal he did tell us he had with inventing the new mechanics.
So, in every case … a total fail.
As usual.
I doubt that they will ever learn the most basic things that are necessarry for developing a successful and good game.
The fish stinks from the head.
I will leave the crunching of the numbers to others, although I have done a little bit of tracking on my own account and found that the drop right for targeted spells has been so execrable as to feel, and be, unproductive.
But all right, let’s assume that’s just my poor luck and other players are having better luck with spell pages. I don’t believe that’s the case, but we can certainly posit it as a hypothesis.
The trouble is that even for those who may be, most players are clearly feeling as if they cannot make progress in a reasonable timeframe. Like it or not, the perceived difficulty of improving our heroes has gone up. If the goal was to try to get us to answer that increased difficulty with increased spending, I think that is going to fail. Why?
Because already the game is ‘quieter’ than it was. Less chat on the global system. People reporting reduced interest in farming dungeons. I know that whereas I had been keeping the game going on my phone enough to need to charge it at least once a day over and above my prior use, my play time has dropped significantly. Why farm if I feel I can’t make progress? If the game feels like work, and work that I have to pay for the luxury of progressing as opposed to getting paid…
I would like the game to succeed, but I believe the devs have not taken into account the degree to which this update is already negatively affecting that success. When people reduce their playtime out of frustration, the chances of attracting new players reduces as well, in the same way that an empty restaurant is less attractive to the psyche than one which shows at least a decent sign of traffic.
Hmmm, yeah … Dev maybe not aware of the following … but I have more then 150 friends on Steam and not few of them ask me about games that I am playing if they are worth a try. The more, the more I play the game.
But what shall you tell your friends about this game?
I tell them, well idea of the game is genius, the rest and the Dev is much more frustrating then fun. Few players stay longer then some weeks and its a game that is designed to be played for years.
But if you have a lot of money to spent or a real big frustration tolerance as I have, try it, cause it as said has a genius basic design, but thats sadly all. Rest is work of a real amateurish Dev.
They know me … none till now did even start the game.
Player feedback and word of mouth propaganda matters.
Guess not only for me and my friends.
Your whole post hit a lot of my feeling. My 10 pages of Divine Stead since patch release tells me that your luck may be on par with mine. You’d think an early game class spell would be dropping pages on a really regular basis.
I went from felling like, OK if I do X → Y → Z it will pay off. Now I farm and can’t even get spell pages for a spell where I need thousands of pages.
I was so happy with the refund of the relics (from my Holy Avenger and Divine Stead) that I made a crowns purchase to be able to take my Savior Neck and Guard Shield to Mythic a bit faster. When I originally had to choose the spells, neck, or shield to mythic, it was a tough choice, so that refund felt great. If I had known how painful it would be to try and progress what spells I would like to advance, I would not have bothered.
I think I will stop farming dungeons to try to get spell pages, go more casual, and stop spending until they fix this. Then if this is how they really want the spell upgrade system to work, I will play what I have until bored and move on to other games.
