The Spell Rework - Puzzle Quest 3

Spells

Each Spell is now unique, so there’s no longer an inventory limit!
Spells now only have a Rarity
- Each Spell Rarity has a base Rarity and a Rarity+
  - Base Rarity increases the Spell Effect
  - Rarity+ increases the Mastery
    - E.g. Smite
    - Deal X Damage as Light and Create 2-7 Yellow Gems.
      - Base Rarity increases Gem creation
      - Rarity+ increases the Damage dealt via Mastery

Ancient Mythic is a new Rarity that pushes the Effect of the Spell to an even higher limit!
Instead of individual copies of Spells, you now find Spell Pages, that allow you to Evolve your Spells to new Rarities
If you’ve collected enough Pages to get a Spell to Ancient Mythic, any additional Pages are converted to Spell Dust (1 Page = 5 Spell Dust)
- Spell Dust can be used to create more Spell Pages
Spells can now cause Critical Hits
- The chance to score a critical hit from a spell is separate to weapon attacks, and is currently a flat 5% chance.
- Critical Damage Bonus for Spells is also separate, explained below.

Spellbooks and Collection

Each Hero will now have a Spellbook

Their Spellbook can be upgraded to increase the Damage and Buff ranges, and Mastery of all their Equipped Spells
- Spellbook Level is capped at the Level of it’s Hero

Low level Hero Spellbook

Higher levelled Hero Spellbook

Collecting and Evolving Spells increases Elemental Mastery, as well as your Spell Critical Damage Bonus

Xione’s New Gig

Xione now produces Spell Dust

She also Creates Spell Pages in exchange for Spell Dust

Some Quality of Life

Spells now equipped in a much more natural way. Select the Spell, then select the slot you want it to go into. No fuss, no muss.
We’ve updated the Rewards flow to make it faster and more focused.
- More basic resources appear in quick succession together with Rarer resources appearing alongside items above
- There is also now always Equip and Salvage buttons embedded into the Rewards screen for Items and Minions
- Added a new Salvage All button to Salvage all Items and Minions received

There were a couple of (very connected) problems we were trying to solve with this Spell Rework:

It was too difficult to Upgrade and Evolve Spells.
Because it was too difficult to Upgrade and Evolve Spells, it stopped players from being able to be flexible with their Spell choices.
Getting Spells after you’d already found them was… Putting it politely…A bit pointless.
Everything Evolved and Upgraded in exactly the same way. Which doesn’t really make sense thematically.

It’s not fun to have a bunch of Spells, and then just have to pick a limited number of your favorites because that’s really all you can usefully Upgrade. What we wanted was for it to be feasible for you to shift your Spell Loadout around before heading into a battle if you wanted to!

So, how have we approached solving these problems?

Spell vs Spellbook

Thematically, it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to be collecting duplicates of spells that could both be Leveled and Evolved. Conceptually, Spells are something you learn and get better at or get more knowledge of. This is how it felt in Puzzle Quest 1 and it made a lot of sense to steer right back in that direction.

An obvious step was eliminating a generic Spell Inventory, and having your Spells live (at least spiritually) in a Spellbook. No more random extra copies of Spells lying around just to be hoarded or Salvaged.

This gives us a clear split. We now have Spells and Spellbook. So now we have some infrastructure to smooth out the Leveling and Evolution problem.

Breaking Down Spells

Spells themselves are generally split between a bit that gets better when it’s Leveled, and a bit that gets better when it’s Evolved.

Given that Evolution is the more exciting moment, it tends to be the Spell’s Effect (Convert Gems, percentage chance to do A Thing etc) that increases at these milestones, whereas power and buffs etc are changed incrementally level-by-level.

We’ve kept this structure more or less intact. Spell Evolution still increases the Effect. (You’ve reached a milestone in your knowledge after all.) We’ve also added Plus Rarities that continue to improve the Elemental Mastery.

The bigger change is moving the Level component of Spells to the Spellbook. The Spellbook itself represents your Hero’s own general proficiency. Proficiency is always something gained incrementally so it feels right here.

Splitting the Spell itself from a Hero’s proficiency, allows us to create a more flexible environment for the use of Spells. You’re no longer locked into little-by-little pouring time and resources into every Spell to level it up as a prerequisite for Evolving it to improve its effect.

Putting Together Spells

So, if the Spellbook would be proficient taking care of those incremental gains, what about the bigger, fancier Effect improvements?

We figured we could solve a couple of problems together here.

Thematically, it seemed completely natural that if you found more of a Spell that your knowledge of that Spell would increase. So, that’s pretty much where we went with it.

Each Spell Rarity represents a number of Pages for that Spell. Find enough Spells, consult the scrolls, and BAM! You can now command the Spell to a greater Effect.

Since these are Pages in Spellbooks, it made a lot of sense that your heroes can copy each other’s homework. No need for each Hero to have to go find their own Pages. The Heroes of Etheria are a very kind study group.

Spell Collection

We have our Spells and we have our Spellbook. Despite Spells being collectable though, they weren’t really feeling collectable. Some of them were definitely just things you have. That was especially acute with an upper limit on the number of Spells you could have hanging around.

What we did was integrate that collection into the system itself. Every new Spell you collect and Evolve contributes to both the Mastery for the matching Element of the Spell, but also overall to a Spell Critical Damage bonus.

Mastery increases 1 point per Spell and Spell Evolution
Spell Critical Damage increases at 0.1% per Spell and Spell Evolution

Xione & Spell Dust

In a Salvage-less system, it’s all very well and good up to the point that you get your Spells up to Ancient Mythic. So, what then?

Spell Dust, baby!

We wanted to make sure it was never not-valuable to find a Spell. Even if it’s already maxed out. So, once you have enough Pages to reach Ancient Mythic on a Spell, any further Pages will dissolve into Spell Dust at a rate of 5 Spell Dust for every 1 Page!

Which is great, but what do I do with it?

You give it to Xione!

We’ve been looking for additional things for Xione to do for a while. She was definitely feeling left out of the Crafting party. But, Spell Dust solves a lot of that problem for us.

Xione, spellweaver that she is, takes the Spell Dust to Create Spell Pages. Because Spells are pretty much always useful to gather now, this suited very well because we wanted to make sure we had some additional methods for acquiring them.

In addition, we also wanted a passive method for gaining Spell Dust. So, we also gave this to Xione.

Levelling up Xione increases her Spell Dust production:

At Level 1: 1 Spell Dust per hour
At Level 50: 50 Spell Dust per hour

Here’s how we will handle the transition to the new spell system for existing players. We want to make sure that anyone who has invested into spells previously is compensated fairly.

The highest Rarity copy of each of your Spells will be kept. Any duplicates will be Salvaged
For each of the remaining Spells not associated with a Hero Class:
- Any resources that would’ve been required to get it up to its Level will be refunded
For each of the remaining Hero Class Spells:
- For each unique Hero Class Spell, the resources that would’ve been required for the copy of the highest Level (ignoring duplicates and lower-Level versions) are applied directly to the Spellbook Level for that Class
  - The highest Rarity copy will still be the one that will be kept in your inventory
- This “Class” Spellbook will be Leveled up as high as it can go based on the resources available via this process
Each Hero of the same Class will then receive their individual Spellbook capped based on:
- That Class’s highest Level Hero Class Spell
  OR
- The individual Hero’s Level
You will receive Mail with any resources refunded (that were not applied directly to the Spellbook). We will also let you know the number of Spells that were Salvaged as part of this process

Northelm

As there is no longer a cap on the Spell Vault, we will also be sending out compensation related to Northelm’s crafting ability.

We will be fully refunding any Spell Vault increase crafted through Northelm (Northelm Crystals + Ore)
If any resources are refunded, you will receive this in a separate Mail to the Spell Compensation

Spell Evolution

Common	1 Page
Common+	+3 Pages	+15 Mastery
Uncommon	+6 Pages + 1 Uncommon Scroll	Effect Increases
Uncommon+	+10 Pages + 2 Uncommon Scrolls	+20 Mastery
Rare	+30 Pages + 2 Rare Scrolls	Effect Increases
Rare+	+50 Pages + 3 Rare Scrolls	+ 25 Mastery
Epic	+150 Pages + 3 Epic Scrolls	Effect Increases
Epic+	+300 Pages + 3 Epic Scrolls	+30 Mastery
Legendary	+700 Pages + 3 Legendary Scrolls	Effect Increases
Legendary+	+1,000 Pages + 4 Legendary Scrolls	+35 Mastery
Mythic	+2,000 Pages + 4 Mythic Scrolls	Effect Increases
Mythic+	+3,000 Pages + 4 Mythic Scrolls	+40 Mastery
Ancient Mythic	+4,000 Pages + 5 Mythic Scrolls	Effect Increases

Xione

Crafting Unlocks	Ability	Cost
Level 5	1-10 Pages of a Random Spell	250 Spell Dust
Level 15	1-10 Pages of a Spell of a Chosen Color	500 Spell Dust
Level 25	15-75 Pages of a Random Spell	1000 Spell Dust
Level 35	15-75 Pages of a Spell of a Chosen Color	2000 Spell Dust
Level 45	50-100 Pages of a Spell for a Chosen Hero Class	2500 Spell Dust
Level 50	100-200 Pages of a Chosen Spell	4000 Spell Dust + 1 Xione Crystal

Are you changing the number of Spells we get playing the game?

Yes. We will be making some adjustments here since you will be needing to see more Spells. This may need to be adjusted over time as everyone settles in.

How will Spell Offers work? Will it offer spells you don’t have, spells you need to upgrade or both?

We’ve set up offers for Spells that work more or less the same as the Choose-An-Item Offers already in the game. These will generally have criteria similar to Xione’s abilities above.

We can also do offers for Random Spell Pages.

Will we be able to earn Spell Dust anywhere else or only from Xione and if a Spell is at max rarity?

At this stage those will be the 2 main ways. As this system is new, we may need to make adjustments as we go.

This has been a long work in progress and we are excited to finally get 2.5 out to you later this month, with the Gear Rework blog to follow in the future!

A massive thank-you once again to Morgs for writing up this BEHEMOTH of a spell rework blog!

A quick note from me (Jeto): If you have any questions, I will do my best to answer them either myself or get an answer for you!

But I think a lot of things will be answered once you get the update and can get in there. Found it a lot easier to understand once I updated, compared to reading and hearing about the changes in the many meetings we had.

As for any feedback, at this stage please hold off any feedback till you get a chance to try out the new system and then as always, I will pass it along to the team!