[F. Gottwald]

fair points, but i stand by my words.
i wasn´t saying that mages are hopeless without those high-level spells, but in my opinion without them they have little to offer that a cleric can´t provide.
you will usually not care whether you´re hurling glyphs of warding or skull traps at your opponents, but you will care about the damage those spells do - and aerie is behind single class spellcasters by quite a margin. similarly, while aerie has access to a large number of summoning spells, she can´t utilise the best one of them (animate dad) to full effect.

aerie is indeed marginally useful as a ´swiss army mage´, but i never felt any need for that type of character - 3 fully packed scroll cases will suffice for all the wizard spells you might never need but which might make your day some time and the truly crucial spell effects (like stone to flesh, resurrection, restoration, cure poison) are available in form of items if push comes to shove and shove comes to oops. aerie only really fits the bill if you´re desperate for a cleric and a backup wizard and have only 1 slot left... unless you pick her up for her charm and radiant personality (or as someone to pick on).

a simple example should demonstrate my point: assume you could clone aerie, then compare the 2 of them against edwin and viconia as a team - i could hardly think of a situation in which the 2 aeries would be more useful (unless we get a group of naked dancing aeries as a cheap xena rip-off... but i am digressing). on the other hand, 2 jans could do all sorts of wonderful things that edwin and yoshimo could not because thief and mage abilities wonderfully complement each other (but then, 2 jans would annoy any party enough to be in danger of ending up nailed upside down to the gates of athkatla with a turnip up each nostril or worse).