ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Defect Summary:
If the player invokes the Imbue talent, then changes his/her mind and exits out of the dialog without imbuing anything, then mana is used as if the player actually imbued an item.

Steps to Replicate:
1) Acquire at least 1 talent level under Imbue Item talent (I did it via a successful escort of the Lone Alchemist).
2) Attempt to invoke the Imbue Item talent once the PC has enough mana
3) View the list of armor to imbue
4) Hit Escape to get out of the dialog (i.e. change your mind about imbuing something)

Expected Results:
No armor is imbued, no gem is consumed, and no mana is used.

Observed Results:
Armor isn't imbued with anything, and no gems were used, but mana is used as if the player really did imbue something. Moreover, the Imbue Item talent is placed on Cooldown.

Comments:
While the bug isn't a problem for classes that regenerate mana (except for lost time), it is a relatively big problem for classes that cannot regenerate mana -- in this case, the player has to use a rune/infusion slot to restore mana, or wait until next level up!

-- The Haen.

This has long annoyed me. Fixing it would be good, but even better would be to simply remove the mana cost. Why does it need a cost? If the player, for some reason, wants to imbue multiple pieces of armor in rapid succession, does that cause problems? I don't think so. Mindslayers had a similar mechanic in their Reshape talents, and removing the cost entirely made them much more user friendly without giving the player any sort of game-breaking advantage.

Other spells cannot be cancelled without going into cooldown.
For instance spacetime tuning. If you call it, you have a dialog with a cancel button, but even if you click it, the spell goes on cooldown (for 100 turns)

Concerning imbue items, I completely agree with Susramanian. And I think that not only the mana cost, but also the cooldown should be suppressed.

This bug is(was?) still present in b31. Additionally to the mana usage and cooldown, it uses up a turn so if it's pressed accidentally that can hurt in a battle (most other non-runic skills allow a cancellation of action without using a turn).

I would be on b32 but it's unstable on this windows machine (probably related to buggy sound driver on my end though, so I won't file bugs against those crashes unless I can rule out my own setup as the problem)

Same behaviour occurs with Extract Gems talent - mana is drained even when dialog is cancelled.