You had some neat ideas for abilities that will be possible to implement in or after v0.3. I'll make a note for myself to not forget them.
Lich requiring souls is one possibility. I also had an exciting thought concerning v0.3. What if lich would need to drain the life from things around and replace tiles with dead grass/trees? It would probably be incredible to walk through and leave only death behind. One issue I see with this is the Capital where there are fewer things to consume, but then maybe allow draining corpses too, there is an abundance of them there. :D
As for the ability improvements, perhaps in a sense like there are runes in Diablo 3 that change the skill significantly, but its core remains the same. I'll add it somewhere lower on the list. The priority will be to get more abilities for all professions that have them up to level 5, and then I'll add more. Also in v0.4, there will be extensive modding support, so adding new or alternate versions of abilities should be relatively easy with editors. Modding would be possible even now, but it would be hard to edit animations just in the config file.
Thanks again for awesome suggestions!