Otherwise, here goes:SUGGESTION 1: I'd really rather have the damage blob appear on the PORTRAITS, instead of the bars, of characters.
RATIONALE: Whenever one of my chars is hit, a " >27< " appears on their health bars... completely obscuring them, and for like a full second I have no idea how much life my character has - it is completely hidden by the damage blob. Worse yet, if the character is getting "thousand-cutted" (butchering the irregular verb here), receiving small hits in rapid succession (esp. when surrounded), I can't see the health bar, ever. Hit, hit, hit, hit, AARGH dead, what?
SUGGESTION 2: Add some sort of damage gauge to magic spells.
RATIONALE: Weapons have their damage shown, why not spells? I can't easily choose between, say, Fireburst and Shock; neither the energy cost nor the potential damage is shown anywhere.
EXAMPLE: Add a brief description in the skills list, where they change from "Spell: ???" to the actual spell name. Show it as "Spell: Shock (damage: 27, energy: 10)"
SUGGESTION 3: Have magic runes remember their last setup.
RATIONALE: Picking runes one by one is fun the first few times; later on it's just tedious: when I fire off melee or ranged attacks with one click, and have to click 5 times to cast a spell, I often end up not using magic at all, other than for a big-damage starter. If the runes were all there the next time I'm casting, I'd just hit the cast button and the spell would fly off, without re-entering everything.
SUGGESTION 4: Add a "spellbook", storing known spells.
RATIONALE: hey, I have bad memory. The game draws a map (in non-oldschool mode), so why wouldn't it store spells, once learned? I wouldn't have to carry all those accursed spell scrolls, just to jog my memory. Again what's fun the first time is tedious the next. If I ever happen to lose a scroll (hey, that happens), I'll have to... what, Google for how to cast a spell I already cast like 30 times, and just forgot the rune layout..?
EXAMPLE: The spells could be shown in the "skills list", where they change from "Spell: ???" to the actual spell name. It could show up as "Spell: Shock (&)" with the rune in there, or something to that effect.
SUGGESTION 5: Make repeatable attacks less tedious again...
RATIONALE: accuracy in right-clicking shouldn't become the main goal in the game, done over and over again. Manually right-clicking the weapons, very repeatedly, makes me wonder, every time I play, if I shouldn't just AutoHotkey it, to press a key combo and have it click my two fighters' weapons, my rogue's bow and my mage's wand, perhaps even recasting some favourite spell of mine (see sugg. 3 or 4 above).
EXAMPLE: Can't we have an "ALL ATTACK" button, automatically attempting to re-use the last action each of the characters performed? Even if it were "slowed down" so as not to allow massive all-characters-together blows, it'd still help a lot.
(I see it was already suggested, but derailed here)
Anyway, thanks a lot for reviving a "golden age" game genre, and here's hoping for an editor so that Grimrock could become a platform for much more dungeon crawling goodness :]
