Agreeing with the concerns voiced by @Lyrian, @HigureTheStillWind, and others.
I am very concerned for how the spell update is going to treat new players. I don’t even think the above proposed solution of making spell pages just elemental goes far enough.
The primary problem is that the game was tuned for ‘getting the spell’ to be a very small part of the process of leveling and evolving your spell. Now, ‘getting’ the spell needs to be done 10s, 100s, or thousands of times to upgrade rarity to previously attainable levels. Last week, 1 spell in every 20 chests was more than enough. This week, it is too few by a long margin.
When the new season comes out next week, we will see that it is extremely difficult for even the whale players to level spells to Epic and Legendary. This was previously done routinely on day one of the new season because the resources from previous years of effort were available to do so.
Example:
Just last week leading up to the update I gathered about 20 class spells that were missing from my secondary account. They were usually common or uncommon, but I had leveling resources to get them all to Epic level 35. Had I waited until this week it would take me about 120+ days to farm enough dust to convert to pages for those spells. Or alternatively, I could try running those same dungeons endlessly hoping to get Rare, Epic, or better versions of those spells.
The above example is what every new player will encounter. Spells will progress at a rate I suspect to be less than 10% of what was possible last week in 2.4
Let’s let some data do the storytelling.
This chart assumes you are perfect at collecting dust at least every 8 hours, have a level 50 Xione, and an endless supply of Xione crystals to convert your dust into a chosen spell.
Some key points to look at:
- A single upgrade from Mythic to Ancient Mythic will take over 155 days of dust collecting
- Finding an Epic spell will shave about 5 days off this total
- Epic spells are very rare with the current drop rates.
- Finding a Legendary version of your target spell will shave about 25 days off this.
- Legendary spells from chests are exceedingly rare with the current drop rates.
- New players will have to rely primarily on spell drops of the rarity they want as their only option for dust without a level 50 Xione is random spell pages.
- Previously a new player could reliably get a desired spell to epic through targeted effort.