[2019] Spell buffs are great but many aren't enjoyable regardless of damage due to this lack of polish when it comes to attacking near obstacles

This is a big problem that affects a whole host of projectile skills, and we've looked into improving it multiple times; The best solution requires rewriting all projectile code and everything it touches (a very time consuming and volatile task), the other solution requires rewriting every skill that has this issue and making them heavier on performance in the process. I would absolutely love to make this change when we can, as it limits improving both old skills as well as the design of projectile skills in the future, but it will come at the cost of improvements and content we could be making in that time. Because of this, there is no way we can make any promises on any sort of timeframe.

The reason it’s a problem is because the game engine has no way to distinguish between abilities or players or monsters, we’d be adding that functionality to either terrain or to projectiles, and that ain’t simple.

Projectiles are their own system with very hardwired rules including separated client and server projectiles to be responsive, while Glacial Cascade has its own custom behaviour. Ball Lightning is another good example, the projectile is small but the zap area is larger. We’d effectively have to change every projectile to act like Ball Lightning, but with one hit per cast per enemy (which is the more performance intensive option)

It's not bad, but if every projectile acted that way fired by every monster, you'd start to feel it. Fast flying arrows, for example, would have to check enemies considerably more often than Ball Lightning, which doesn't have to check nearby as often as it is moving slower.

I believe we've done this for some mechanics before, perhaps just boss mechanics, I can't remember what it was on off the top of my head. If we were to do this for faster skills like Scourge Arrow, it'd instead need to check every location the projectile passed near every time interval, which is more expensive if you're firing rapidly, but probably okay for a single Scourge Arrow.