So got around to testing this new system and with the added perspective of doing so as a lower lvl player (since I used my console smurf account because I had uninstalled the game from steam).
Not a whole lot to add, it ended up being as bad, boring as it sounded, with added issues I had not imagined, such as aleph scarcity. It brings only tedium, especially if you are a 5th council (other than Ginebra), killing elites lost its rewarding feeling as expected and quite simply looking around the environment for aleph deposits =/= fun, man it was depressing doing “Hanging by a Thread”, seeing all those elites that spawn at the beginning of the last phase and knowing they mean nothing.
Since the aleph deposits are most certainly not OP the only kind of band-aid temporary fix I can imagine is reducing the aleph they spawn to only 1 (regardless of mmr) while giving back aleph to elites, and have them simply be an alternative way of gaining aleph, the kind of thing you just bump into but not necessarily waste time hunting for.
But in general the whole state of the game is currently depressing, sadly the bad in recent updates vastly outweighs the good, like I was telling a veteran raider I frequently group up with the other day (one that has been in the game even longer than I), at least we got to experience the game in its kind of “golden age” when it was buy to play, post Hades, because what we have now is just a shell of what once was…