by q 3 on Mon Aug 27, 2012 11:32 am
There's basically two reasons to create a wall out of nothing: (1) you need extra walls for Binlor's boons; (2) you need walls to smack a monster into with knockback/PISORF. Except in very limited circumstances for the latter (basically as a knockback-optimized Half-Dragon or Orc Wizard) you're doing that before battle, not during. That is, you spam walls in convenient locations while you explore, then stop once you start to fight, so it's not like you're spending mana on IMAWAL that you could be spending on BURNDAYRAZ.
It's a niche use to be sure, but I don't think it was meant as a panacea; it's just a (to me) intuitive alternative use for a glyph that has lost a lot of its usefulness as of late. (Lower XP bonuses make the +50% less valuable, and greater ability to get XP and other goodies from popcorn make the cost of petrifying them more prohibitive.) Given that the devs seem to be past the point of major changes, I think more subtle tweaks are probably the best suggestions. E.g., reduce the MP cost a bit, increase the XP bonus, maybe a buff to wall-knockback or statue-knockback versus monster-knockback (going from 25% damage when knocking into a monster versus 50% into a wall, to 50% into a monster and 60% into a wall has made walls a lot less important for knockback strategies, especially when you have two or more monsters to kill anyway).