nope.  If anything, the spell tiers should be a requirement to get access to more spells (even ones from the magic tree or other parts of the mage traits).

Having the spells auto-unlock removes choices, which just forces more people to play in a narrower way.  But flipping it around makes choices more important as needing level 3 fire to unlock fireballs and the annointed by fire spell means that you're taking one less 'booster' choice.  So you can't be that massive spell master without actually improving your core spell areas.

Ofc, the other problem would be that every single hero would need to be redone if you remove the spell tiers, which IMO is not worth it.

(plus I don't see a poll here)

In my opinion,

The problem with this is the spell tiers are some of the most meaningful choices we have currently. I don't think the game will be improved by making the player face less interesting choices.

Spell tiers should power up certain spells.

For the Mage tree, it should be

Pyromancy/Aqua/Aero/Geo to unlock spells, and should require 2/3/4/5.

Fire/water/air/earth for elemental unlocking- having higher mastery unlocks more summons, should be one summon for lvls 2/3/4/5.

Life/death should have their own rules. (if I had my way, I'd get rid of life/death differences entirely- never liked it)

I think that's the key. A level 5 water caster should cast level 1 spells at a much higher efficiency (ideally 5 times). You can also have other traits that make the spell more powerful, but element proficiency should matter.

I know I am going against game design, but probably the issue is at the base, at basing the spell power mainly on shard nodes. Because resource nodes are more important than caster proficiency every champion cast the same spell mostly at the same effect. It's ok to have shards affecting spell power, but they should not be the main factor.

Hey! perhaps now that every single mechanic is being overhauled this one could be overhauled too!

I think the scaling is a huge problem in the game design and it would help if the spells scale only with the abilities of the hero. The shards should give the player different kinds of mana (air mana, earth mana, ...), like in Disciples, and a player should be able to convert mana at a rate of 2 : 1.

So in short;

Spells don't scale well when leveling except a few exceptions (Fire Dart, Coal Stones, Despair ) .

Higher level Spell Traits should boost lower level spells within the lines they are in.

Traits should then boost overall performance in addition to the above bonuses.

Summoning should be tied to the elemental Traits that they are summoned from not independent such that a generalized summonig trait is created but higher spell level spell traits are also needed for those summonings like 1, 3, and 5.