I've recently started playing flare on my netbook and it runs awesomely. Thanks!! I really think this game and engine have a huge potential.

However, it's somewhat uncomfortable to play with the touchpad and I don't like carrying a mouse around.

Looks like the engine is actually kind of prepared for playing the game with a joystick/gamepad since there are options for it and it's possible to disable mouse aiming.

However, it seems like mouse aiming is for now the only way to play the game efficiently for a ranger/spellcaster, as it's extremelly hard to aim using the keyboard, it's limited to 8 directions (or 4 if you are not careful on the timing when releasing the arrow keys).

Are there plans to improve this or is the game intended to be used with mouse aiming? if so, which one will be the method used?

I think there are, mainly, 2 alternative aiming methods for keyboard/gamepad control:

1) autoaim: the power is automatically aimed to  the closest target that is in the general direction the player is facing. This is probably the simplest one and hopefully there won't be any problems for the skilled player to target the enemy he wants.

2) targetting (a la ocarina of time or like in the mana world project): an specific button is used to select between the surrounding enemies which one is the one to be targetted by the power. Then, the character can move around and every power triggered will always be directed to the same enemy independly of the direction the player was walking to, so you can move freely without tinking of facing the enemy, in a similar way as you would do with a keyboard/mouse combination.

Any other option?