I play a lot of Sif games, and I too don't find the keypresses to be that onerous (I do use a macro, but a very simple one like 1->aa). As said in the post above, using channel out of LOS of monsters is often not really out of combat since you're preparing to go right back into combat, but now with more MP. It is true that, with current Sif channel, after a fight where you've exhausted MP and also want to restore HP, you have a strong incentive to channel at least a few turns until your MP is at least partially restored and then begin a normal rest. This is so that any monsters wandering into LOS early in the resting turns won't find you with very low MP.
Siegurt's proposal isn't a bad idea to reduce the amount of keystrokes the player needs to make for optimal play. I'd much prefer not applying any malus to enemies in LOS, mostly because this unnecessarily shifts the ability to be more useful against spellcasters regardless of what kind of malus it applies to spellcasters, and secondarily in the case of anti-magic because Trog is the god with the anti-magic theme (i.e. specifically helps you fight spellcasters). If you apply a malus you'd have to reduce the mana restore to compensate for having this strong additional effect. Your channel would be would be strong overall versus spellcasting enemies and much weaker against the many monsters without spells. I like Sif much more as a generalist magic god that helps *you* cast spells. A mana-drain that simply "draws from the energy field of monsters" to get MP only and possibly having a passive MP regen bonus would be better for this proposal, IMO.
I had an idea for Sif channel which could work but isn't without its own potential issues:
- Sif's channel becomes an ability that you can use to cast a spell regardless of MP.
- It applies a debuf of single-tile Silence only on the player for a duration based on how much MP was needed to make up the difference between your current MP and that required to cast the spell.
- It works seamlessly through the z/Z casting interface, so that spells costing more MP than you have at present are listed in a special color and trigger the ability automatically.
So if you have 0 MP and cast Shadow Creatures, the Silence duration is longer than if you had 3MP at the time. The duration of Silence for many use-cases would be quite short, only a few turns at most, but if you cast an L9 at 0 MP you'd be potentially silenced for 9 turns. The exact turn duration and whether this is lessened by training Invocations is something that could be tweaked.
Silence is a pretty strong debuff since you can't use scrolls (nor can summoners use t commands) with some milder secondary effects like not being able to use any MP you do get back from regen or !magic for follow-up turns as long as Silence is up. To be closer to how Sif's channel currently functions, it's possible to simply have -Cast applied for that duration instead.