Chris, Keith, I have only one thing to say: Faith restored. Nuff said.
Glad you like it.
are there any plans on making combat feel more.. ehm, physical and the whole magic more immersive? Currently these floaty multiple projectiles feel all kinda cute and floaty, not really like attacks
And i am still missing sort of trails, glows and ambient particles from spells (so if a fireball hits some ember sparks floating around and glowing out wherever it hit, etc.)
And lastly, are there any plans to put beam-like and pulsed-beam spells in?
No plans on any of that, no. What you're talking about is largely visual polish, and we're not remotely to the point of thinking about that.
In terms of the actual combat with the multiple projectiles floating around, that's what we're going for -- that's precisely what we're talking about when we talk about shmups. The floatiness is important to make things dodge-able, etc. The original Castlevania, and a lot of other games of that nature, also used similar mechanics. When the projectiles move really fast, there are only two options: 1) don't be in the way when the shot is fired; 2) get hit. As superking pointed out, that's not exactly fun, so we've moved away from that.
And in terms of beam-like and pulsed-beam weapons, there is almost no chance of that prior to 1.0 as it would require a lot of new stuff in the physics model and I'm not really keen to do that at the moment. But there are a variety of other kinds of spells that are planned.
Did the recent change of multiplied attack power possibly affect minibosses as well? Skelebot Giants suddenly seem very weak, although it could be that I simply didn't notice before... In numbers, they've got the physical attack power roughly equal to a sniper and normal skelebot, but its magical attack is only about half of a sniper.
No, they never had a multiplier. Their balance was changed during the actual stats revamp in power coding round 1, so that is probably the source of why they are off.