Hm, apart from resting I could also think of some kind of other purge-mechanics for the spell cool-downs between the fights. For example, it could cost you 100 gold coins to remove one cool-down turn from the spell, 200 coins to remove two cool-down turns, 300 for three turns etc. Or it could be tied to your life energy, so that you have to sacrifice 5 health points for one cool-down turn removal, 10 for two and so on.
That’s a pretty steep price to pay (in either gold or Health) for what you get in return. At those rates, it doesn't look worth it, and the result - people balking at the cost, in effect is the same as not having any cooldown reset mechanic at all.
I apologize for repeating my idea of resting to reset the cooldowns, but I’d just like to expand on the thought. As I said, Divine Divinity had a cooldown on how often you could rest.
Grand Theft Auto uses the 1 second = 1 minute of gametime. 6 in-game hours is 6 real-time minutes. What if in DOS 1 second of real-time was 30 minutes of game-time, making 6 in-game hours 12 real-time minutes? That's too long if you just want to rush back to town and rest after every encounter, but not that long if you're actually out and about doing things and not just waiting out the clock.
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Grokalibre - I like the idea of the powerful spells requiring setup, that would fit in with the current system we have here of combining elemental attacks.
I just proposed the addition of a Chilled status in the General Feedback thread:
For the Ice skills, there should be an effect between "nothing" and the complete immobilization of the Frozen status. I propose the "Chilled" status: Those inflicted suffer a heavy penalty to initiative, and their Movement is halved for the duration (they can only move half as much with their movement points). An Chilled enemy struck by another Ice spell suffers a penalty to their saving throws against Frozen status (i.e. you hit an enemy with Ice Bolt once, they become chilled. Hit them a second time, they're more likely to be frozen). If you add the status, Ice Bolt will NEVER freeze an enemy unless they are Chilled.
I agree that some of the low-level damage spells could also be mostly useful for creating surfaces, or requiring double-taps to deal their damage - first tap inflicts a status, the second tap deals damage to enemies inflicted with that status.
One of the problems is that you start out level 1 characters with a bunch of CLEARLY higher-level spells. There's no way Teleport, Winterbreath, and Fireball will be level 1 spells. In in final, it's more likely that a 4-element generalist mage would start out with your basic Blitzbolt, Flare, Poison Dart, and Ice Bolt spells.
