Atarlost wrote:
True, but there's a limit to what utility spells you can add to most schools without duplicating geomancy.
Sure, if by "schools" you mean "elemental schools". Not so true of the others.
There's more to utility spells than just creating obstacles. Globe of Light is a utility spell. :) Consider the Death Mold's ability to apport objects to itself. That's a utility spell that mages don't have access to at all. It's particularly useful to Death Molds because they can't move reliably -- but there are plenty of other times it would be handy for a normal mage.
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On the other hand, several schools lack damage dealers even though there are GF_FOOs that correspond to them.
If you need a few attacks of all those different attack types, pick up Thaumaturgy, not Geomancy. They won't be as powerful unless you dump some serious skilll points there, but you do get a broad range of attack elements -- including some that don't really make a lot of sense. I am baffled, for instance, by the idea of casting a circular wave of arrow. The visible image of a wave attack is a huge, slowly but inexorably advancing, tsunami or moving cloud of the appropriate element. It's understandable with water, or fire, or poison, or even gravity if you
Star Trek it a bit. But arrow?
There is also a thematic question here, on the subject of utility vs. damage spells: Should most of what a mage (as opposed to thaumaturge or geomancer) studies be attacks? Really, when we think of the best example of a general mage in the source material -- our favorite Maia Mage in grey -- we see a character who fights heroically with a sword as well as by standing back and throwing fireballs. Gandalf uses magic for utility spells like lighting the end of his staff (Globe of Light -- an advanced version of which is good to entertain hobbits!) as well as to call down fire on the wargs.