bel wrote:I also favour removing out-of-LoS damage. I think CBL could do without any compensatory buffs; it would still be a pretty good spell for its level.
My proposal was not really about buff or nerfs: I just think radius 1 and 2 explosions would be much less annoying. SquareLoS radius 3 explosions are too big, imo. Implementing this proposal would also remove the counter-intuitive result which I mentioned in my OP: at higher power the self-damage is so high that the spell actually becomes less useful in many situations.
I should also mention a few key differences between radius 3 explosions created by CBL and a radius 3 Fire Storm explosion (for instance). The explosion is centered at the ball (when it explodes), which means that it's one square away from the monster at the time of the explosion. Second, there are multiple balls created by CBL. Third, the explosion is not instantaneous, but the ball needs to travel a bit. The total result of these three factors is that you are typically closer to the explosion even if you back away after casting CBL. This means that size 3 explosions do much more self-damage to the caster.
An alternative proposal would be to have the size 3 explosions occur with a fixed probability, independent of spellpower. 20% seems like a good number. Spellpower would only determine the number of balls created and their damage.
What if the size of the explosions was dependent on the distance from the player (So you could only get size 3 explosions when the ball was 4 spaces from the player, size 2 explosions when the ball was 3 away and size 1 when the balls were two away) spellpower could determine ball travel speed (since this would effect how far away it was, and therefore the size of the explosion) as well as number of balls and damage.
As an additional possibility, you could even keep the potential for self damage, and have it be the *distance travelled* that determines explosion size, so if you don't move at all, you'd be safe, but movement would require you pay attention to what balls were launched and from where, and which ones would explode in squares you might move into, that might make it drift back into too fiddly to use properly, but at least it'd always be *possible* to use without self harm.