I'd also tone down some low-level spells, especially cantrips. A huge expressive pose and a burst of light when casting True Strike? Way too much imo.
I actually love some of the spell animations and the sense of "kick" they have.
Casters in a lot of games look like wimps doing parlor tricks, here even a basic a firebolt looks excellent in terms of visual feedback (way above its actual effectiveness, to be honest).
What I'm all in favor of toning down are:
- permanent buffs and so on, which should all be less visual noisy and the visual effect DEACTIVATED OUT OF COMBAT (even in the old Baldur'r Gate Games I hated how out of combat your high level party started looking like a bunch of walking Christmas trees).
- abilities and skill that should look like "superhuman people performing at peak physical level" rather than use magical effects.
- physics and limitations of falling, launching heavy objects, shooting arrows and bolts, etc. They should ideally look more like their real world counterparts and less like cartoony approximations. If you push a person from a cliff, that person will tend tto fly one meter or two away at most and then almost entirely in vertical, not in a extremely pronounced arc. Same with arrows and bolts. And an incredibly strong man could barely lift a barrel few centimeters from the ground, not throw them around at meters of distance. That's ogre strength.
