We have been thoroughly discussing the new update betweeen our kingdom members and some other players. The general feeling about the update as a whole is mixed: some like it, some don’t. However, regarding the spell page issue each and every one of us agrees that evolving spell rarity after the update is disheartenedly difficult. This feeling is even harder for newer players with very few upgraded spells. I believe this sentiment is perfectly explained by the words of one of our members:
I mostly feel a little bit like I was making progress, but it’s turned Sisyphean. I wasn’t at the top of the hill by any means, but I was getting somewhere! Except that now not only did the boulder I was pushing roll back down onto me, getting any further up is going to be MILES harder than it was…
The spell rework blog says there were 4 problems that wanted to be addressed with the update:
Points 3 and 4 have been clearly well addressed, as well as the “Upgrade” part of point 1. However, in my opinion the “Evolve” part of point 1 and therefore point 2 have been made even worse.
I see 3 issues regarding this:
First one is the low drop rate of spells. As @00h00m has said, the spell drops were tuned to be low since duplicates weren’t really valuable. Current drop rates of spells are clearly too low for the amount of pages needed to evolve spells. Or, put in a different way, current amount of spell pages needed to evolve spells are too high for the drop rates of spells.
Second is spell pages being specific for each spell. Before 2.5 we got all the resources needed for upgrading spells from general gameplay, so even if we couldn’t evolve every spell it was relatively easy to evolve those that we wanted. Now, general gameplay will give you mostly random spell pages, so to be able to evolve 1 spell you will need to farm only the corresponding dungeon all the time. This can be seen as kind of going back to the “bad” early days of the game where all the relics where dungeon specific, making upgrading anything much more difficult. Thematically, finding spell pages of your spell to evolve it may make sense and even feel nice, but mechanically it is making the whole process worse. Not only do we need to play a lot to get some spell pages, but we also need to play only one specific dungeon so that the spell pages are the ones we want. Having to do that for all spells you want to use makes the process of growing stronger much less enjoyable.
The third one has been perfectly explained by @00h00m. The additional help for getting spell pages, Xione, only gives a minor boost to the process. Additionally, once you reach ancient mythic the rate of pages to dust conversion (1 page → 5 spell dust) is nearly 5 times lower than compared to the maximum rate of dust to spell conversion (4000 dust → 100-200 which is around 25 spell dust → 1 page). I understand not using the same conversion factor, but I would have expected to have something at least more similar (like 1 page → 20 spell dust).
I am glad that you also share this sentiment with us, Jeto, since I believe this is a serious issue with a high risk of making new players quickly lose their interest and stop playing the game, which would be a disaster. So the faster it is addressed and improved the better for all.
As always, thank you for hearing us out and working hard on improving the game so that we can enjoy it to the fullest!