I have entirely ignored the spell system since it was revamped. I haven’t spent any spell dust, nor have a done any targeted farming to get certain pages.
My impression is that the devs completely blundered the numbers. It’s already been proven by the helpful players here that it’s essentially futile to bother getting a single spell to the highest levels without literally decades of farming, or hundreds of dollars spent.
I’m ignoring it because it’s completely broken.
The players here have had to act as their QA team (with some brilliant posts, I might add), which is not very professional. I hope in the future they will put more care into balancing.
Anyway, I do believe they didn’t intend the spell system to be as it is now. I’m just hoping for a quick response from them because I really don’t think it’s worth putting any effort or time into upgrading spells now, and instead just to focus on weapons, armor, levels for now until a fix is made. Cheers.
I am in a similar situation. 3 years of VIP, due to re-up again in early April. I’m personally glad that there is something new to chase finally, but that’s more a function of playing for 3 years than anything else. So, I expected the grind to be fairly miserable, on the grounds that the grind to the previous max gear score of 3300 was just as long and miserable. Still, expecting a small positive tweak to help matters a bit. The grind is still going to be long though.
I’m still at Rare on both Season shop spells currently, but that’s because of bad RNG dropping mostly iron chests yesterday from the nine Season energy.
On that note, I’m anecdotally observing that the universal spells seem to be dropping at significantly higher rates than than class spells.
As of the time of this post, I am farming Bridge of Morath, which drops 3 spells, 1 of which is a class spell.
Page drops in total for each spell:
Class spell:
Other spells:
Have not used Xione yet, to keep the results relatively clean. Have pulled Epic spell drops from both universal spells, while the class spell very rarely shows up at all.
Is everyone else experiencing similar spell page drop outcomes?
Like Drago said, I too have completely ignored spells since the launch. I did some Shaman-specific crafting with Xione right at the beginning, saw the numbers, and gave up. I was tinkering in the past with other green spells, slowly moving them up to experiment with them in the rotation. Forget that. Done trying on that. And I sure as heck ain’t farming any dungeons for pages.
While I didn’t actually make the calculations in my post above (was it so obvious?) I’m starting to believe that post, in the long run, won’t end up being satire. LOL.
I’ve been trying to formulate something useful before for a while but have been struggling. I don’t feel as strongly as many others but I still have issues.
Ancient mythic. People are talking about how very difficult this is to achieve and I wholly agree, It is a huge investment in time and resources. But then I remind myself that this is a completely new rarity to keep older players busy. (and in reality makes very little difference to most spells). So It needs to be determined how difficult is actually reasonable?
Evolving spells 2.4 vs 2.5. Legendary and below. IMO the number of spell pages is actually pretty reasonable. Even Mythic isn’t that bad. I had 7 spells at mythic after 2 years of playing and lots at legendary. I think I possibly could do that again under the new system (not sure). But:
Problem 1. Is the spell pages require farming a particular dungeon. People are already farming dungeons for Gear, T4 Relics, Crystals and Spells (Just to get the spell) or stories for XP. Adding another reason to farm a particular dungeon repeatedly means you can’t be farming for the other things you want and it just slows everything down even further and there is a good chance the spell pages you get aren’t even for the spell you want. Also for class specific spells you have to open the chest with that class. That adds even more complexity!
Problem 2. In the past if I decided I wanted to add a new spell to a loadout I could just upgrade it’s rarity with a couple of clicks. Now I need to farm it for weeks/months? Not good. If I’ve been playing for a while it’s possibly I have randomly got it to Epic already but if not, or if I want it at legendary or above? How to achieve that?
I tried a Buccaneer piece in a loadout the other day. I was soooo glad to be able to increase it to a useful rarity with a couple of clicks.
Problem 3. Xione. Given how rare spelldust is and how random Xione’s abilities are why would I use spelldust on randomly upgrading a spell? (other followers use ore and gold which are both common) For Xione something like 1 in 11 or 1 in 20 or 1 in 100 of getting a few pages for the spell I want? The only ability of hers that makes any sense to me is spelldust + crystal for a specific spell. Oh, and then I have to farm Xione crystals too.
Possible Solution: I’m hoping Xione can craft spell pages for a specific spell before level 50 at an appropriate exchange rate without needing crystals. This could also solve problem 2 as you can save spell pages for when you need them.
Spell Shards are now a dead currency. Has been mentioned elsewhere. This is just plain bizarre. As also suggested elsewhere, Spell shards to spell pages perhaps?
1 x Spell Page for an uncommon spell. I understand the conversion logic from 2.4 to 2.5 but 1 x Spell Page? It’s just a kick in the teeth. 5 x spell shards perhaps? Easy change to make us feel better
Most of this has been covered before but my 2 cents in hopefully a concise post.
Has anyone noticed that Channel Poison fails to inflict poison WAY more often that it did pre-update? And be fore you ask; my %chance is the same as before.
The fact that it was a week of my playtime is irrelevant. What matters are the actual hours invested, because I can always increase or decrease them, if I want to. Of course, it also matters what you invest them in. If it’s mostly PvP and events, you obviously won’t get many chests and many spell page drops. That’s why I shared everything relevant for this week of playtime.
It was 5K gems, just because the weekly offer resets on a different day than the day the update was released.
Regarding the second part - I consider myself as free to play player. I have been playing since EA, and I have bought not more than 5 offers so far. So, as such, I appreciate everything that has been done in the recent updates about making different resources more available and affordable.
Another thing that’s important - I have accepted that for a free to play game without any ads, you either pay with time, money or both. Since I rarely pay, I try not to make demands about reducing the time.
Has there been any definitive explanation as to the reasoning behind this Spell “rework”? As far as I can see nobody asked for it, so exactly what purpose does it serve as regards to benefitting us, the end user?
If there isn’t any real justification for it then can’t we just have the option to revert to how it was?
Maybe take a poll on here and ask the community what they think.
I feel the same: if we like the game we play it, if we don’t like it we stop playing. However, as long as I love the game and would like to keep playing and enjoying it together with our amazing community I do believe that giving our feedback on what we don’t like and ideas on what we would like to have is not only acceptable but also healthy for the game itself, as long as we remember that we should only suggest and accept that the final decision is in the devs hands, like it or not.
I usually try to avoid complaining, but I have found the spell rework to tough to remain silent. Interestingly, personally it has changed nothing much for me. I already have all the spells I use where I wanted them, so nothing has changed there as compared to before the update. However, there are a couple of reasons why I am so worried about the spell rework and adamant on asking for improvements:
The rework seems to be tougher for newer players, something that has been confirmed by some members of our kingdom and other players. If the new players find the game too difficult and not rewarding enough they won’t keep playing and that could lead to the dwindling of the player base.
The devs raised our hopes high on the possibility of having an easier time evolving spells and therefore more chances of playing around with different spells and builds. However, the rework has done the opposite, which has been a huge blow. I wouldn’t have mind if everything remained the same, but getting my hopes high to then completely break them has decreased a lot my motivation for the game.
So this time I keep pressing the matter, not really making demands but reminding the devs that if they promise something (making upgrading and evolving easier) they should deliver it. Otherwise, if we cannot trust what they say and that they are really trying to improve the game instead of making it more difficult as it seems with the spell rework… As I said before, if we like the game we play it, and if we don’t…
I believe our feelings have been clearly conveyed, together with plenty of suggestions and ideas on how to improve the issue. So now it is up to the devs to decide how much of an issue they think this is and what they will do to answer all our concerns.
I am afraid reverting it is not going to be an option. But it would be interesting to have a poll about the player’s feelings on the Spell Rework, indeed. I will take the liberty of doing it:
@HigureTheStillWind before too many votes get cast, would it not be better to create a new thread for the Poll otherwise I fear it may get lost and buried in amongst all these posts.
Sorry it’s been a while. As some of you guessed, we’re a little short at the moment.
We also didn’t want to jump in repeatedly saying “we hear you and we’re working on it” because even if that is the case, it gets hollow (and annoying) quickly. I wanted to come back to you with something, which is what I’m here to do now!
That said, I apologise if our (or my) silence on the issue since my last comment has come across like we have not been taking you seriously.
Okay, so-
There was a few separate pain points raised here and in other posts throughout the forum, but to us, it seems that several of them stem from a couple of overarching issues (which are not news to anyone here and that you folks have correctly identified):
It’s too difficult to get and upgrade Spells in the early game
There’s not enough Spell Pages in circulation to support you Evolving your Spells
As I mentioned, there’s a few other points, but for short term, these would be the two biggest things to address.
We will be making some changes soon™ that should help alleviate these two major points while we continue to work on medium to longer term things.
We will be doing an across the board increase in the rates of Spell Page drops in Chests and Season Caches
We will reduce the random element in Spell Offers
The exception to the above is that we will be introducing a Random Spell Pages for Gold offer into the Offers in the Shop (which might also help with some of those Gold balances)
We will let you know specifically when we expect these changes to be going out, but watch this space. It won’t be another 2 weeks between updates on this one.
Lastly, thank you to everyone who did write up feedback and send it in. You’re all very understandably frustrated, but myself, Kafka, and the rest of the CX team have appreciated that you’ve all been fair as well as eloquent, and, honestly, very calm considering.
