Originally Posted by LukasPrism
Here’s my take:

1) Get rid of all level indicators on icons (they look messy anyway and will look worse when we get to IV or even VII). If you want to see what level a spell is you can hover or use the slot indicators to filter them. We also don’t need the same icon more than once (imagine when we have six magic missile icons with different numerals on them).

2) When you click a spell icon to cast it, everything on the hotbar dims and the slot indicators glow that are of an appropriate level for casting or upcasting that spell. Clicking on the slot indicator of your choice casts the spell and expends the slot. If you can cast from an item an extra slot indicator could temporarily appear on the far right that lets you use that charge.

That way there are less things jumping around and a direct correlation between remaining slots and expenditure.
TL;DR: No and no. Here's why:

1) Minimum spell levels are very useful. As of now, spell icons are not clear and distinguishable enough to rely on them alone (try Shadowheart on level 4 to see what I mean). Tooltips are out of the question because they take too much time to appear. If anything, Larian can replace Roman numerals for spell levels with Arabic ones. This is doable now as they appear to be ditching the keyboard shortcuts for hotbar items. At least they didn't work last time I tried them.

2) The way Larian has organised the new UI is completely the other way around to what you describe. First you select the spell level, then you choose the spell from the filtered list, and then you cast it. The current implementation is a bit wonky, things don't work this way when you click the level 1 Spell Slot, but I hope they will fix it.
And if you don't know the spell level, but know which spell you need, you first choose the spell from the full list, then select the level and optionally version. The versioning adds a lot of mess for things like Chromatic Orb and Enhance Ability, so Larian will have to find a way to streamline this particular use-case scenario. Personally, I don't know how it can be done to be convenient.

In any case, what you suggest here would result in going back and forth between different bars:
2.1 Click on the spell icon on the hotbar
2.1.1 (Optional) For some spells such as Chromatic Orb, you need to choose the spell subtype / version. In Patch 6, this was done via popup; now it's done on the same hotbar.
2.2 Click the spell slot (I don't know, does Larian have an official name for that new black bar? Anyway, I'm going to call it "action bar").

The problem I see here is that players will definitely become confused as to how they are going to choose the spell level. The spell slot icons on the action bar have to have very strong cues to attract user's attention, because at this moment users look at a different part of the screen. This would be a UX disaster!