What if Walk It Off was how it is now, but it also gave you a 20-30% movement bonus while you were debuffed (and maybe buffed too?) To simulate you "walking stuff off." Maybe even a 1-2 AP (or speed) bonus while debufffed? Obviously not very helpful when stunned or hard CCed, but soft CC like curses could be beneficial in a certain way.
I dunno, because as you pointed out, there's still a lot of hard CC which movement and AP wouldn't help with. Personally, I'd still have to prefer just removing the downside because I see no reason for it to exist on that Talent.
My philosophy is that Talents don't always need a downside - sometimes the downside is as simple as "taking this Talent means one fewer point you can spend on something else". When you only get 2 starting + 5 later points all game, having to pick between a lot of good choices can be just as hard as having to pick which of the least bad ones you want.
Here's another tradeoff idea for a talent incompatible with Far Out Man (so mages have a bit more choice, though they still need a few more talents):
Personal Mage: You have -5m range on your spells and scrolls, but they deal 25% more damage.
Numbers could use tweaking, but the general idea is to make a talent for spellswords or aggressive close-range mages in mind.
Nice concept, but it would have to be adjusted so that it only applies to (damage) spells with a default range of 10 m or more, because as written, that would mean touch-range spells would have 0 m range.
