To keep this short since apparently this forum loves to delete your post if you click preview than cancel.
Currently the familiar system forces players to fight against low level monsters for no benefit other than familiars.
There have been repeated attempts to prevent this kind of behaviour from developers, removing any opportunity where it's beneficial to farm against lower level mobs.
This update has been counter intuitive to this purpose, the following is a suggestion to fix it:
Allow all monsters that don't normally drop a familiar, to drop a dummy familiar that can be extracted for points.
By doing this it becomes beneficial to fight post level 200 monsters for the purpose of obtaining familiars, even if it isn't the most efficient means.
Currently the system requires players to,
on average with +100% drop rate, farm against low level monsters for: 33 minutes per common to rare upgrade, 82 minutes per rare to epic upgrade, and 247 minutes per epic to unique upgrade. The result of this is a total of 363 minutes, on average, per unique card obtained.
This means that each player, on average, has to spend at-least 6 hours grinding monsters that yield no benefit other than familiars, per attempt at a decent potential familiar. Even if you downgrade this to only epic, that requires nearly 2 hours grinding per attempt, with the rates for obtaining a decent potential line being abysmal.
The current implementation of the familiar system effectively forces players to farm against low level mobs for weeks with the sole purpose of obtaining a familiar of equal benefit to that of what they had before the revamp. Months if you want to be on par with players that benefited from the events that occurred when the revamp was first implemented.
It's fine gating people into hours of grinding for a decent familiar, as long as this grinding isn't done EXCLUSIVELY to obtain the familiar. Allow people to passively do it when farming mesos, items, nodes etc from later game content. Don't force people into grinding level 5 mobs for potentially hundreds of hours just to obtain a familiar that puts them on par with how the game was prior to the revamp.
Comments
If you wanted to farm epics directly, at an estimated drop of 1/72000 and 200% drop it's about 1.3hrs per epic card, which translates to an average of 77.3 hours to get a Boss% epic.
Putting that into perspective, at a reasonable rate (on reboot) of 400m/hr, that's 30b you're giving up to obtain this one familiar...