Strangely, we saw that as a feature and not a bug in the old days. With great power comes great responsibility -- like making sure you have room to shoot. We would purposely put the players in smaller hallways and corners to keep their magic options down. Of course, when people spam a power, they'll get plenty of magic in their face if they are not careful. But I'll take this into consideration as I know newer players may find this rather annoying. However, some of the larger area of effect spells truly do add a certain ... excitement ... to knowing when to use them and when not to. Magic dart, for example, is one of the most useful because of its small splash area but has a trade off on its damage/mana ratio.
This is a good idea in principle.
But as currently implemented, the problem often is that when I try to use a large spell in seemingly good conditions, it explodes in my face for reasons that aren't always immediately clear. At least when a player tries to fire through a tree in front of him and gets burned, it's obvious why, but sometimes it seems like it only happened because of some bush or wall behind me, or an unevenness of the terrain or ceiling, or I dunno, the game just being stupid. And when it's something like Death Cloud, this leaves me with a large chunk of health gone and poisoned.
The larger problem is that currently
there is little incentive to use high level spells, to go past the Wand of Earthsmite which one picks up as early as Quest 2. I only switch to something else to deal with the physical-immune Mercenaries on that one map of the last quest, and that's it. It's just one of the factors that discourage one from moving on, some others being:
- cost-efficiency (wands tend to be cheaper to cast, and Earthsmite more than most)
- lower level spells doing high DPS thanks to spamming (a casting/use cooldown would solve this)
- fizzling chance (but this is good, magic stat being the gateway to higher spells)
That's what I like about Peewee's mod: casting timeout, and wands doing less damage than cast spells. That encourages variety and progression in spell use instead of spamming 1 wand throughout the whole game. If it was also possible to reliably avoid injuring yourself with higher level spells, that would be perfect.
