Problem: Mages still level up extremely quickly, and it's mostly because once they have access to spells that can hit multiple enemies at once, they gain all of that EXP from the damage they deal very fast.

I've already increased the EXP curve for how fast they level, making it a little slower. I've already reduced the amount of damage that those all-enemy spells do. It's seemingly not enough, though, because Mages still start off on the weaker side and then absolutely shoot up around level 20.

So, I'm considering several options at the moment:

1) Further increase the EXP curve for mages. This will fix their progression in the early-mid game, but might make them much weaker in the end game and would require a lot of tuning that I don't fully have resources for (not enough people testing, nobody doing rigorous testing).

2) Level gate spells. Currently, all spells in the game (including all weapons and armors) do not have level gates and can be obtained at any point. This kind of goes with the philosophy of the openness of the game, but if it is breaking balance perhaps it is a good thing to put a bit of a clamp on it.

3) Increase the price of spells. Currently, the general layout from the single target spells is like this: 19/61/122/379. The all-enemy spell is 513. If I increase the price of all spells universally by a certain percentage, and/or increase the all-enemy spell by a larger amount, it could help prevent players from obtaining these massive spells too early.

4) Increase the SP needed for spells. I have noticed that Mages, once they hit a certain point, will very rarely run out of SP (due to some recovery upon level up) unless they're using something like Restore to recover the SP of other party members. Increasing the amount of SP needed for spells could help since they would have to be more considerate about using the all-target spells.