[suggestion] a toggle option that prevents sparks and fireballs from being fired at nothing.

I'd like a toggle option that causes the game to ask me for confirmation before allowing me to fire an ember burst, fireball, or flame jet when no valid targets either allied or enemy are in the target zone.
I'd like it to look something like how choosing the placement of fire wall attachments does. You highlight the target, click, then hit "done" if you're satisfied with the placement or "cancel" if you're not. I'd be fine with this option only effecting completely empty target areas of this particular type of burst damage attack, but it might be nice to have it extend to all AoE selections as well.

The reason I wish for this is that the combination of the itty-bitty playing board and my own human clumsiness has caused me to accidentally launch a ton of ember bursts at nothing, uselessly. I'm guessing that I can't be the most fat-fingered player around, so if it's bugging me, it must be driving a few other folks absolutely bonkers.

Quite a few AoE effects are useful even when targets aren't within their effects (like placing acid or fire tiles ahead of time, smoke bombs, etc.) but the only reason I can see for losing an ember burst in this way is if you're intentionally throwing it away simply to get it out of your hand... Maybe because you were under the effects of Blind Rage or something that threatens you simply for holding that card. For this reason, I don't mind that it remains a possible option. I'd just like it if a few of the burst damage-dealing AoE recognized that this option wasn't the common one.
I appreciate the game's generosity in attempting to streamline the spellcasting process, but I think I've convinced myself that I can't 100% trust myself not to screw up my AoE target selections on a fairly regular basis.

Edit: Replace title "spark" with "ember burst". My bad.

 

What kind of spark can be fired at nothing? As far as I've seen, you can't use any sparks without a valid target.

 

I'm getting my terminology twisted around. Ember burst. There's another game I'm playing where the little fireballs are called spark. :/
I'll edit things and fix that.

 

It'd make sense to say that you just don't have the option to use AoEs at all when there are no valid targets. That limitation is already in place for other attacks, and is relevant for cards like Blind Rage or Demonic Miasma.

 

Hang on, am I missing something? Can't you just cancel Ember Bursts once you see that you can't highlight anything?

If you can't, then that needs to change in the code. If you can, well, then this behavior is completely up to the player.

 

Here's how ember burst works.
1. Select the card. At this point you can still cancel it by un-selecting it again.
2. Mouse over an area. The target area that could be hit is highlighted under your mouse pointer (but not selected yet). You can still cancel by mousing back down to the card and un-selecting it.
3. Click when you like the area you have highlighted to select it. You are now past the point of no return, the attack is instantly initiated, damage is done, and your turn ends.

The problem is all in 3. Just the act of pressing the mouse button is enough to cause my aim to waver enough (just by a pixel or two, commonly) that the AoE selection will sometimes be off by a square, especially if that area is crowded by lots of little character tokens that are making it difficult to get the game to see where I'm trying to aim.
It's bad enough when it causes you to get a sub-optimal attack off, but it's weirdest by far that this simply allows you to fire the thing at completely empty space, resulting in a total miss. It's like a tiny piece of my turn-based-tactics game wants to be a third-person-shooter, instead.

 

Couldn't you make the same complaint about every action card in the game then? For example when choosing which target to attack with Simple Strike or when choosing which direction to card Burning Fingers, once you've clicked the target then the card is immediately used regardless of whether you misclicked. In the case of cone attacks such as Burning Fingers you might hit nothing at all (similarly for burst attacks and linear attacks). In the case of single target attacks such as Simple Strike, you might accidentally click on one of your own characters - which is potentially worse than hitting nothing at all.

I personally would not want a confirmation before every action - because I think that would quickly become very tedious. Perhaps there's some other way to address that issue. It sounds to me like the core of your critisim is that you think it's sometimes too difficult to click the square that you are trying to click.

There is definitely the potential for misclicks in this game, and I'm sure there are some improvements that could be made (particularly when some characters are partually obstructed by other characters). But in general I think the squares on the game board are large enough that players can be expected to be able to reliable click the square they are aiming for as long as there isn't something else making that difficult for them.

 

Nope, I can't, and I'm not.
I'm not going to accidentally fire a melee attack or a heal at thin air. I'm not going to drop lava someplace accidentally, because the game actually lets me select my tiles one at a time and if I don't like my options I can even hit cancel.
You may not have noticed (probably because of the earlier confusion over spell nomenclature), but in the original post, I was making an attempt to point out that there's a certain class of burst damage AoE that all fall into this weird group that make aiming more difficult with regards to the user interface. Ember burst is simply the one I have the most experience with, personally. Cone AoE is just a tiny bit more user-friendly because of how much easier it is to find and hit the arrows without hitting one of the others by accident, but again, it's a bit odd that you can simply fire it off at nothing if you really want to.

There is. A toggle option. This is what I'm asking for. You wouldn't need to worry about it at all.

 

My most often misclick is actually move card instead of any attack card.

- For most targeted attack card, the hitbox of the characters is big enough to not cause misclick. If there are multiple characters clump up together, I unconsciously be more careful while picking target.
- For Cone based attack, there are only 4 direction to choose from, I never actually aim at the tiles but rather the direction/characters
- However, for moves card and ember burst (or to a lesser degree, linear acid card) most of the time you target the tile rather than the characters. The tile's hitbox is much smaller than the characters. And due to the angle of the game, a small shift can result in a different tile easily.