ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

It's always bothered me that I can select, say, fire breath to try to get a read on its area of effect, and fail due to equilibrium without ever actually "using" the skill. The same goes for paradox. I'd rather the failure/backfire/paradox checks happen after actually choosing your target, so I still have a chance to cancel the skill if I wouldn't be able to hit my target anyway.

Unfortunately this looks like a fairly difficult change, so instead what I'd like is the ability to change the indicator for "look" by hitting a key (say, tab). Doing so would cycle through different targeting reticules - the standard "beam," a cone that extends out to the cursor, and a self-centered ball with radius out to the cursor. The targeted "radius of X" ball would require adding some new controls that I think would be excessive, so that could be left out. This way, the "look" feature could be used to check line-of-sight for different attack types, getting rid of some of the guesswork.

Honestly, while the targeting change seems harder, I think it'd be worth doing at some point. Better to do things right than to add a kludge. (And targeting needs to be overhauled to fix how targeted invoked magical items work anyway, doesn't it? I don't know the relevant code, but I assume that doing these two things at the same time would make sense.)

The code needs to more precisely define when you've irrevocably committed to using a talent, and delay several things until then. This is something that is going to have to be done eventually anyway to make targeted items work right, so...