You can make it a little easier on yourself by preloading a rune combination for each caster. If you select runes but exit the menu rather than pushing Cast, it will keep that same selection when you re-open the character's casting menu.

Invisibility (if you have a sufficiently skill air mage) can be a great one to keep ready like this if you aren't sure about what's coming, but failing that, a good blasting spell or even an elemental shield will do.

Otherwise, consider limiting your spellcasts to the one-rune close-range blasts. These will often be much more efficient in close quarters, in addition to being easier to manage.

Magic casting is only difficult because of the fact that if you time it wrong, you can hurt yourself, or do no damage!

If the enemy is too far away, no damage is dealt.

If you are too close to the enemy, or a door/wall, the spell can hurt your entire team.

This is still a great game though.

Look at the casting like a complex gesture to cast a spell. Magic isn't simple stuff and cast a spell isn't done as a fingertip. Also casting isn't as simple than just a "click " memorize a spell gesture. You have a little effort to do to learn the gesture of each spell and the system help you learn that progressively.

Moreover that approach allows design magic to be a bit more powerful. And again it makes sense that magic and casting a spell is more powerful than a melee or long range attack.

The conclusion is stop look at it as an obstacle but instead see it as a non basic design that makes sense and that's what it is.

EDIT:
I could add to answer the question of the thread title:
Why is casting magic so difficult? Because magic isn't a simple matter and cast a spell isn't made with a fingertips. :-)

That's such a bullshit answer to a very reasonable question.

I loved the game for its atmosphere, its graphics and lovely puzzles.
I stopped playing the game because, with 2 mages, my wrist started to hurt with all the frantic clicking required. When I looked if there were people with a similar problem I, of course, found a slew of posts saying the same and, of course, the same bullshit answer following closely.
If the point is to make a game harder by clunky controls I'm sure you would appreciate to have the pointer jumping randomly around to "simulate" the complexity and urgency of combat. Surely you can't be still and relaxed when you have monsters mauling your face, right? Fighting isn't a simple matter and swinging a sword isn't made with a fingertips.
It's exactly the same idiotic reasoning that quite frankly I find unacceptable.

Old school does not mean that you have to put up with every failed concept that was tried back then. And not every mechanic used back then is a successful one.
Old school means to keep the good aspects of old games that today's developers lost track of, while getting rid of the bad. Otherwise I could play the old games themselves, no need to shell out for a modern simulator of yesteryear in every respect.

This isn't a mechanic that's been left in the past, though. Many games have players having to do some kind of input to cast a spell beyond just pressing a button, though nowadays it tends to be drawing the rune on-screen - this is particularly common on touchscreen devices like the (3)DS and smartphones. It makes sense, casting magic isn't as simple as just hitting someone in the face with an axe, even to experienced practitioners. It also has a gameplay function as separating magic damage from spells from more mundane physical damage, rather than a mage effectively being a warrior with a different hit effect, who has less HP but does far more damage per hit. It also encourages you to prepare a spell before going into a fight.

And seriously, if clicking out simple rune patterns is hurting your wrist, don't ever play an RTS, FPS or MOBA; your wrists would explode into a storm of bone shrapnel. Though if it really bothers you, I'm fairly sure you can use the numpad instead of clicking on the runes, too. The numpad corresponds to the rune grid, both being 3x3.

Such wit...
I was playing Dune 2, Starcarft, Warcraft, Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake and Dota for years without ever feeling the slightest discomfort on my wrist and, while I would never compete on a pro level, I was quite descent around my circle. I would still play if I hadn't been bored with that kind of games.

There's not getting around the fact that magic is badly designed in this game. As I said would you find compelling mechanic if the mouse cursor would jitter around according to hits and movement or even character morale, if it was included in the game? Or would you prefer to be able to click exactly where you intent to?
In case you fail to grasp the analogy let me make it simple: Introducing artificially hard controls to simulate complexity is a bad concept.

When I first heard about the rune system, I thought it was brilliant. In practice it didn't work out so well.
I still like the game and had it recommended. I just don't forget to mention that aspect which could be quite important to some and, apparently, not so much to others.

PS: Numpad doesn't work. Would be quite good if it did, but since it's a real time game there's no way to designate for which character you press the buttons for.

Perhaps the system can be improved, but it's quite common that control aren't necessarily one simple click, there's ton of example of that like Doom rocket jump, controls in car race manipulation, combos types, and quite more.

The one click approach end in tedious simplification like murdering in one click. It's pure naive streamlining, not better controls. I'm surprised you get wrist problem with that magic system.

You have a different point of view but it's just that your point of view. It removes shortcuts bar or shortkeys and its limit, I prefer that than using 10 keys on the keyboard. It allows spells be more powerful it's a good change from long cooldown and long casting.

But perhaps it could be changed a bit, for example perhaps something more gesture oriented with only start click and end click, gesture between the two and still the panel as a good learning tool.

EDIT: There's already keys for movements which removes many keys for spells, it's probably what I like the most in that system, not a keayboard overload. It's in fact a rather unique approach of such games type and it's working well because of the special square approach.

Maybe the real reason and answer is that the rune system is a copy of the dungeon master system. In Dungeon master big part of the game was not only exploration but also memorizing & manual work! That was part of the concept. There was no automap, if you don't want to get lost memorize or paint a map yourself. And there was no autocast magic system (like EOB etc).... After some time in DM you got the rhyme and was mumbling e.g. ZO KATH RA in your head while forming the spell by clicking the runes, so you REALLY learned the magic and got a deep immersion and felt like an wizard (or priest). :) Personnally I enjoyed this enforced immersion in DM immensivly ... great times *sigh*.

So back to LOG, maybe the LOG magic system is in it's actual form not immersive and motivating enough for memorizing the runes and manually doing the magic like DM?

DM had an completly open system, unlike LOG: by testing and training you could find new spells as also your casting abilities were growing...maybe this is the missing motivation in LOG for better acceptance of the "hard" manual magic system?.

I agree with others who've said magic is clunky in this game, but having said that I also think the rune system has merit.

Quite frankly I'd have preferred something like the casting Arx Fatalis. You click and drag anywhere on the screen in the patterns necessary and the spell casts. Combine that with a "Casting key" on the keyboard that has to be held down whenever the magic user is casting a spell and the same thing could be implemented for this game without losing the flavor of how magic works.

And I too think the "balancing factor" argument is pure bullshit. Balance the game, not the player.

>OP: The magic system is designed as it was intended to be, for the old school, based on Dungeon Master.

Intricately dancing around monsters trying to setup your spells/rune combos while attacking with your front row fighters was par for the course.

Practice makes perfect, and you might even improve in reflexes/coordination in the process, unlike the wimpy, licensed and endlessly franchised low-risk games of today that showcase technology over gameplay.

Tony.

EDIT: OOOPS, didn't realise I'd necroposted - sorry!

There is no sorcerer in my squad, it solves the some bad design problem.

Yeah, clicking the runes is part of the game. It reminds me a bit of disarming a bomb while other things are going on. You don't click the "disarm bomb" button. You'd click the red or yellow wires. Kids and your hotkeys these days. It also reminds me of whack-a-mole, for some reason. It requires some personal dexterity skill. I've had times where there's a lot going on and futzed a magic spell, clicking on too many or the wrong icons. That's the way it's supposed to be, I think! I cussed at myself, not the game.

I would be very surprised if he had.

The problem with this, though, is that it effectively reduces the playing field during combat to the little square in the bottom right, since that's where your attention needs to be instead of the actual game screen and the snail attacking you.

I'd consider that bad design, but that may just be me. (Dancing around mobs, when you can, watching them out of the corner of your eye... >_> )