duvessa wrote:A damage spell overhaul was the perfect opportunity to reduce that tedium by getting rid of manual targeting. But instead the worst cases of clunky manual targeting (fireball, LRD, freezing cloud, bouncing bolts) escaped unscathed, as did magic dart and freeze and sandblast and stone arrow and iron shot and LCS and IOOD and more. And most of the spells that lost manual targeting (flame tongue -> foxfire, conjure flame, icicle -> hailstorm) got other crap attached to them that makes them more clunky to use overall. It's a shame. At least Starburst and IMB are improvements and some of the bad spells got removed...
This and again this.
Many changes have this problem but I'll example Airstrike as I'm playing an Air Elementalist and its change is awful.
Before airstrike was one of the less clunky manual spell out here and yet it required double keypress in comparison of o-tab magic. Now it requires an insane amount of backtracking too.
And I want really really really strongly stress it:
the change, in most situations, added no strategic\tactic interest, just a lot of tedium.
You wanna backtrack in an open clear space for
every non-fast melee only monster - and no, it's not the same to avoid the backtrack, because the monster may be dangerous at melee range so it's obviously better to kill it at max range possible.
No risk attached, no strategic decision, nothing - just a lot more keypress. A tons lot more keypress.
To made this more clear: in this Ae game, this is the use of Airstrike before entering Zot.
- Code:
Airstrike 5 | 17 | 204 | 446 | 417 | 277 | 150 | 40 || 1556
Even if I'd backtrack only in one third of use of the spell, this is an insane amount of keypress\time wasted in
nothing.
The problem are shared among various spells which were reworked, at the point I honestly think the situation, overall, was better before all the overhaul, at least from the point of view of interface, and a big cleaning and tweak could be very good.
What makes the situation worse for this specific spell are:
1) it's good even in late game because it's smited-target
2) dunno if it's because I've airstrike memorized but I've noticed monsters tend to stick to walls. That forces to backtrack even more.