The spells are easy to max out and each Horadric Jewel costs only 3k phials. That’s pretty player-friendly I will give you that.
However the only real use of excessive phials, exchanging them for Horadric Knowledge scrolls, is currently prohibitively pointless because players get only 200 Knowledge per 2000 phials and it requires 240k Knowledge to get a repeatable cache.
For context, the elites in the overworld that takes no effort to kill grant 480 Knowledge. Lair bosses grant no Knowledge at all and their hoard chests often drop only 100~130 phials.
As a result, phial related NMD affixes are also worthless and waiting 10 seconds for Astaroth to finish dropping large amount of phials feels like we’re getting mocked.
Yeah this is pretty bad… I have like 300k phials and nothing to do with them. The crafted knowledge is a joke. Why even bother implementing something like that when the requirements for earning the repeatable are so high?
Increase the cost and DRASTICALLY increase the amount of Knowledge gained per scroll.
I have a feeling they made sparks too easy to get last season so they found a way to make you play out an alt for another spark keeping you playing longer. That means their 3rd party partners rake in a bit more as there is nothing to keep you engaged to get the mats you need.
So now you don’t get sparks, mythics or runes. Seems well thought out for seasonal content. /sarcasm
You don’t even get scrolls or any “physical” item you can transfer now. It happens instantly on whatever character you do the conversion on and it requires level 15 before you can even get access to do it.