Type: Defense
Strategy: This is the last of the immunity spells. This one will keep all but +5 magic weapons from hurting the mage, which will give him time to clean up the area or vacate. Make up your mind quickly, you only have four rounds of immunity.
Importance: Moderate
Type: Touch damage
Strategy: This spell is awesome if you don't mind sending your mage in close. Just make sure the critter you are battling is busy fighting one of your warriors. This spell will create a magical +5 planar rift blade that will do two to 24 points of damage per hit. It also lets the mage fight as a fighter of half his level, and if the monster fails a save, it is disintegrated.
Importance: High
Type: Touch damage
Strategy: This is one of those nice emergency spells. Chain up some heavy damage spells and a maze spell, and anything that makes the mistake of hitting your mage is damaged heavily and put somewhere for a while until you are ready to deal with it.
Importance: Moderate
Use: Other
Strategy: This is one of the level 9 worthless spells. All this will do is drain some levels off the monster so they lose some hit points and abilities. Big whoop. When you are fighting monsters against whom this spell will actually do something, it won't do enough to make it worth the spell slot in your memory.
Importance: Low
Type: Dispel
Strategy: This is a good spell if one of your party members has been imprisoned or mazed. Cast this in the area, and they will come back. I recommend not having this memorized; carry some scrolls with you for this spell instead.
Importance: Low
Type: Summoning
Strategy: This spell gives you the ultimate pet: a pit fiend. Again, make sure you have your protection from evil spell running, or you will have another mad demon to deal with.
Importance: Low
Type: Hindrance
Strategy: This is one mean spell. All you must do is cast this and touch a creature to have it disappear forever with no save. This is a sure thing as long as your mage can hit something, but if he has a problem with that, this spell is worthless. Carry it in your memory; it won't let you down.
Importance: High
Type: Missile damage
Strategy: This spell is not as big of a deal as it sounds. This will call down meteors in an area for four rounds, doing four to 40 points of damage per round, provide that the monsters stand in the meteor shower. Don't expect to get more than two hits because the monsters don't stick around. Would you?
Importance: Moderate
Type: Missile damage
Strategy: This spell will instantly kill any creature of 60 hit points or less with no saving throw. Sure, most monsters are more than 60 hit points, but this will finish off any monster that you hurt.
Importance: High
Type: Imbuement
Strategy: This spell has some uses, but I prefer to keep my Mages as Mages for the purpose of casting real damage spells. If I want another pet, I will summon one. This will give a Mage the ability to change shape into a bunch of different monsters, and he will get the abilities that come with them.
Importance: Low
Type: Missile damage
Strategy: This is an awesome spell to use against those mages that think all their spell protections will stop you cold. Cast this, and every one of the protection spells will just disappear, making the mage quiver in fear.
Importance: High
Type: Defense
Strategy: This spell is good for those long fights that you know you will run out of spells in the middle of. Cast this, and any spell cast at you will be soaked up, and you can cast up to that level of the spell that was in your memory at one time. For example, if a mage hits you with a polymorph other spell, you will have four extra spell levels you can cast. So, if you had magic missile and fireball in your memory, but you had already cast them, you can now cast them again.
Importance: Moderate
Type: Other
Strategy: This spell does what it says: It stops time for all but the mage. The mage then has six rounds to do what he wants and cast what spells he wants, which can be devastating for the opposing forces. We love this spell and think every mage should have and use it.
Importance: Vital
Type: Missile damage
Strategy: This spell is good for large groups of monsters in the hope that one will fail its save. But, when fighting one or two monsters, it's worthless. Any spell that allows a save at this level is very limited in its usefulness, and this is one of those. We killed two monsters in six casts, and in each cast, there were about four to six monsters in the area of effect. The effort was not worth it, in our opinion, when we could have used imprison and rid ourselves of six monsters in six casts.
Importance: Low