duvessa wrote:Well the thing is, currently it isn't a drawback, the spell is totally reliable in 8 directions and it's trivial to get monsters to follow you on one of those.
A retargetable spell would be useful in a much broader variety of tactical applications, far beyond what the current spell can do. That is why the current behavior acts as a limitation.
You could totally redesign the spell to make it a drawback, of course (preferably not the way you suggest, since that way has literally the same problem).
No, it only has a small fraction of the same problem. The problem is fixed for all monsters that can and should choose alternate paths of approaching if you're openly powering up a ray at them, and it's fixed in a way that adds tactical considerations and difficulty, rather than just firing on any old approaching monster in practically any terrain and hitting '.' until they die or the spell runs out. I did not know that was the intended tactical application of this spell, and I don't think it's a particularly interesting one.
I will certainly grant you that the problem remains for those monsters that don't mind to blunder into the path of your spell -- presumably the same ones that would blunder into flame clouds. (Note that the same "problem" exists for placing flame clouds in front of non-orthogonally approaching monsters, as you cannot predict which space they move to next, except perhaps with some fiddling with the targeting interface.)
Possibly this is fixed by reversing the direction monsters draw their path to approach? Perhaps that is a bit drastic to fix the behavior of one spell. Though you could also draw the path of Searing Ray in reverse from the endpoint to the player so it would follow the same path as an approaching monster, then cue the questions about why the targeting at Range 2 looks so different for Searing Ray than for every other spell, and if all spell targeting is changed to avoid special-casing, you might as well just go ahead change monster pathfinding as that is more opaque to the player.