Hang on…am I missing something here or is this how it works?
In order to increase the amount of Spell Pages or the probability of spawning pages in a chest, you “have” to dial back probabilities or amounts of other resources appearing. i.e food?
I think the idea is, the devs are trying to maintain a certain economy level in the game. In other words they want the player base to make constant progression, but at a certain pace that they’re comfortable with, in this case 45 days to ancient mythic a spell.
The reduction of food and ore act as inhibitors to your progress. Whether the numbers they’ve chosen or not is healthy for the game however, remains to be seen. I’ll say its definitely much better than it was before though.
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The Spell Page drops are definitely better now but, if the reduction in food inhibits progression to such a degree that players are struggling once again, then it makes the whole recent “chest numbers juggling” not truly as helpful to us, the consumer, as it first appeared.
Food as a resource is an integral part of the ability to open chests at a fair rate, just as keys and Minion Missions are.
It might be helpful to know if those calculations made that would allegedly allow us to evolve a spell from Common to Ancient Mythic in 45 days, as opposed to 250 days, were based on the old food drop rates or the current ones?
As it stands, this feels like “one hand giveth and the other taketh away”.
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I believe that the value of a spell drop is clearly higher than the value of a food/ore drop. If I have to decide between getting 50 spell pages or 140 food, I know what I prefer. So increasing spell drops at the expense of food/ore is clearly giving us more value in chests, as long as we still keep getting food and ore at a reasonable rate (which I believe it still is). True, our ability to farm for other resources than spell pages has been slightly reduced now, but I don’t think the impact is so bad.
My experience these days with farming has been really positive. Even with the less food drops I haven’t seen much difference in farming speed and sustainability (how long I can keep at that before running out of keys) compared to previously, so I truly believe that the change has been for the best.
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Short answer:
Yes, because that’s how probability works.
Longer answer:
The sum of all drop rates of things in a treasure chest is always 100%.
For example (for illustrative purposes only and very oversimplistic), let’s presume that drop rates pre-revamp pre-spell page changes are 40% food/ore, 30% gear, 20% minions, 10% spell pages.
With the spell page changes, spell pages drop rates were increased to 20%. Well, now the drop rates are 40% + 30% + 20% + 20% = 110%. There’s no such thing as a 110% drop rate, as drop rates always must add up to 100%. So, the devs had to take 10% away from somewhere to balance the probability equation, which they chose to lower the food/ore drop rate to do so.
So, the revised drop rates in this case, after changes, would be 30% food/ore, 30% gear, 20% minions, and 20% spell pages.
In reality, the drop rate tables are much more complex. Take a look through the drop rate tables that are public for Season Caches, for a good idea of this. Though, as shown in the Season Cache drop rate tables, no matter how complex they are, the sum of all probabilities in a drop rate table must always equal 100%, no matter what adjustments are made. So, if one drop rate probability goes up, an equal amount of drop rate probabilities must be lowered to keep the 100% drop rate probability equation in balance.
IMO, the situation is account and encounter-level dependent. At the low end of the scale, for newer accounts, farming is not even close to sustainable because of the low drop amounts of food and pages (see Event chests for a perfect example of this; they are atrocious because of their low chest levels). Conversely, on the very high end of the scale, I’d generally agree with you. The amount of spell pages and food are high enough that while it is still not possible to achieve limitless farming, the resource burn rate with sound food->minion-> key management is slow enough that most veteran accounts should eventually achieve their spell farming goals without much issue, unless the player does something like burn many hundreds of dungeon tickets at once and opens every single chest instantly.
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@Lyrian so if the item/resouce appearance probability rates must remain the same to satisfy the rule of “the sum of chest content probability drops must equal 100%”, couldn’t the amount of resources be adjusted to compensate?
i.e if the probability that food will appear in a chest has been reduced by 10%, can’t they just increase the average food amount given out per drop?
There must be a minimum and maximum limit set for the RNG to work between, so simply raising those thresholds for food would work surely?
At the very least it’ll keep @Taf420 happy. 
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For those with excess of keys this food issue will not have a instant toll on them, but for those that run dungeons all day im sure they would of noticed they are having to use keys alot more than before,
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The devs absolutely could do that, if they wanted to do so. You are entirely correct with your line of logic.
Would they, though? That’s their call to make or not as an economic balancing decision.
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I like this. If the previous food and ore drop amounts were considered good, why not increase the amount of food/ore quantity inside chests so that it compensates the lower drop rate and on average we get the same amounts as before? Great idea, I am 100% for it.
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This is not necessarily correct. The developers can have independent rates for each of the items. Consider your example of probabilities: 40% food/ore, 30% gear, 20% minions, 10% spell pages. If each of these is calculated independently, then there is a chance that a single chest could contain food, ore, gear, minion, AND spell pages.
In other words, right now maybe the calculation is that for a certain chest, there are 3 picking events, where each picking event has 40% food/ore, 30% gear, 20% minions, 10% spell pages. In this case, you could end up with at most 3 of these items, e.g., 2x ore plus 1x food, 3x ore, 3x minions, 2x spell pages plus 1x ore, 3x gear, 1x gear plus 2x minion, etc.
Alternatively, there could be a different setup where for a certain chest, there are independent probabilities with a 40% food/ore, 30% gear, 20% minions, 10% spell pages. In this case, you could end up with all the items, but only one of each. Or you could end up with no items at all.
Lol … and in the end it is and have to be in all cases 100% overall loot probability or giving percentages will not make any sense …
Does anyone run dungeons all day though?
Not all day as per 24 hours a day, but i would say 85% of my game time is spent playing dungeons, thats about 4/6 hours a day i use to play dungeons but thats reduced now untill i build my keys up
Thank you very much for this recent improvement to the Spell rework, now Xione feels more useful. I am grateful that you keep hearing us out and working towards making the Spell rework even better 
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