Thanks for the suggestions, always appreciated, but some of this stuff is kind of redundant since you are playing on a PC and most of this stuff is built right into Windows already - can't you just alt-tab out of the game (or not even need to alt-tab if you play in windowed mode) and make use of those?
It would be nice if there was an option to reduce the amount of player and monster skill effect visuals but it's not that simple unfortunately. They can either be on or off really, and turning them off is not an option since a lot of monster skills depend on them for the player to know what is coming and what they should do - not all, but a lot of the boss effects at least. Some monster skills DO have a lot of unnecessary effects though and I do actively make changes to them as I come across them. If you know of any just let me know so I can check and adjust.
Screen brightness - you should use your graphics card control panel for that. The brightness controls were removed from the game a few patches ago as it was badly implemented and also interfering with some new stuff I'm working on. I didn't feel it was worthwhile to spend time rewriting it since it's not really something most people even touch that often and it's just as convenient to do it in your control panel.