ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I was watching an old Let's Play http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg8lUYDf ... 40BF028564 (start at about 10:30) where the guy's Archer dies because Aim didn't let him move up the stairs. That's a pretty common thing I noticed watching inexperienced ToME players: they don't pay enough attention to their status effects. (Personally I've moved them to just below the resource bars on my interface, but newbies won't know to do something like that, of course)

What would help with situations like that would be if every time the player tried to something a status effect prevents, the corresponding box(es) would do something to draw attention. Additionally, if talents on the hotbar are unavailable due to a status effect, the box should flash on mouseover. Maybe they should flash when freshly applied, too (although that might be a bit much). Another possibility would be to have DoT effects flash when mousing over the health bar, but I don't think enough people do that for it to be useful.

• Try to move while pinned? The pinned box flashes.
• Try to use a healing infusion while frozen? The frozen box should flash when the cursor is over the heal icon.

Now that I think about it, it would be useful to dynamically put a conspicious line in the mouseover description for greyed-out talents describing why they are unavailable.

• "You need more mana to use this talent."
• "You need to be below 25% of your mana to use this talent."
• "You cannot be in sight of anyone in a range of 6 or more to use this talent."
• "You cannot have Surge sustained to use this talent."
• "You must remove the 'Impending Doom' effect to use this talent."