The OP has a point here about the slanty bits..
I havent had a chance to test any of this yet.... I'll do some of that later tonight.... but my first thoughts upon seeing the control change was: This is going to massively debalance everything.
The biggest problem is that this is going to make hitting things *much* harder, or at least that's how it seems to me. With the whole caliber thing and all. One of the reasons why the caliber thing worked in the first place is because you had those angles to get around enemy shots, and for some of the stranger spells, the angled aiming kinda let you "tweak" things a bit to make them hit better. Like that super-long range fire shot spell that is tossed in an arc; I forget the name of it, but it almost *needed* to be fired at angles almost all the time to be useful (when I used it, anyway). I used that spell alot, but if I fired it full-on straight, it never ever hit a darned thing.
As with that, some spells probably just became completely useless. I can think of more than a couple spells like that that only ever hit anything if they were aimed either at an angle, or straight up; there was no point in firing certain spells straight forward, because they *would* miss or screw up somehow.
I'm thinking a number of spell classes are going to need to be completely re-designed here. Particularly on more aggressive difficulties. Like dealing with those squid things that fire the blue shots; simply firing at them straight on is almost always futile, I've always had to fire at an angle.... or happen to be using a snake spell.... in order to even hit them once. And no way was jumping over them and firing straight down going to work.
This also makes terrain an issue as well. Again, alot of that seemed to work BECAUSE the player had those options for aiming. Particularly in caves and buildings, there will now likely be many situations where you *cannot* hit an enemy unless you just happen to have something like a snake spell or whatever, because you simply cant get either horizontally or vertically aligned with them and still strike them. Heck, those snake spells probably just became extremely OP, or at least extremely necessary over nearly any other sort of spell, since they're now pretty much one of the only things capable of striking things at a low angle, which is very often necessary in this game.
I'll be interested to see what this does to the game's difficulty level. Previously, when I last played "Skilled" was becoming way too easy for me; I could dodge most things just fine and crash through many areas much too fast. This might change that, though wether or not it's a GOOD sort of change, I dunno yet. Frankly the whole idea doesnt sound like a very good one to me, but again, I'll need to really have a go at it to formulate an opinion.
