Gotta love my infinity helm wearing samurai wasting all available spellpoints, and have regenerated most of the SP's by the time I meet the next group of monsters. Nuclear blast isn't quite what I was excpecting tho, but I trust it gets better once her fire skill and level increases. Freeze all is ok when it works and banish is
very nice against undead, don't leave home without it
Basically what I've done is; low levels I concentrated in melee/ranged weapon skills. Then I put bloodlust in her hand, and spent points/practised magic. Now that she's using uncursed weapon, I spent points in bow a few times, and now I can't anymore. And I let the statunlocked personal skills go up on their own. Their not that great, so I won't waste points in them on level up.
That's pretty much how I developed my ninja, with the exception that she's still using cursed weapon (CoC). And there's nothing like throwing the death cloud on that bigass gang of monsters, and watch half of them die in the first few rounds...
Usually what I do in the first round against casters is; soul shield with bishop, element shield with samurai and death cloud with ninja (unless they're real low casters, then my bishop starts with haste). Then the ninja just throws what seems appropriate at the enemy, depending on resistances, and samurai uses nuclear blast every round until the enemy is at close range (unless the enemy has high fire resistance, or they're undead). Good thing about those "hit all" spells is that, the more there are enemise, better they get compared to the bow.
It's hard to say. I'm happy with the magic from my hybrids, probably mainly because I've spent some sweat and tears practising their skills. Usually when I meet a group of easy mobs, I take them down using only spells from the less developed realms on my chars, thus getting some practise in them. Besides, I think I gotta get them good at casting, since there's just the samurai, ninja and bishop in my group.
Pointless babble I guess (from the looks of it now), and just my 2 cents