Yah, I see yer point, Zoar. I'm really not after making it easier to be good at your craft (i.e. a GM Mage). What I'm after is making it easy to apply what craft you have in a generous dollop.
All combat skill springs from an ability to manipulate variables. That includes movement, choosing which spell to cast, when to heal and when to strike, and others (including NPC manipulation, as yet an undiscovered art in UO).
The key to making mage combat Real Life Skill based (which in my opinion is the only way to truly make combat truly fun) is to allow a copious amount of those variables. Right now, because of reagant costs and mana scarcity, every mage is encourage to take the shortest most brutal route to victory, because if you don't, you either run out of manna, or run out of reagants, or run out of the gold to buy those reagants.
I don't want to see magery revert to a whore's art through easy skill gains, and over-powered spells. I DO however want to see magery have enough latitude to allow strategy to play a role in its use.
You know how combat goes right now. Both sides go right into paralyze, mana vampire, ebolt ebolt ebolt, maybe lightning, maybe some fireballs, and then either somebody is dead or somebody is running away. If it's multi-person combat, maybe somebody throws a swarm in there somewhere. Wash, rinse, repeat. (yawn).
What I want to see is something more like
Teleport on screen, manna drain, fb, stone wall to block line of sight, heal, teleport off screen, teleport back on, hide, swarm to catch your moving opponent, teleport to break the focus of an orc mage in the vicinity who has locked on to you. You choose to teleport to the other side of your opponent, so the orc mage locks on to them. They teleport to the other side of you, to trade the orc back to you. You say screw this, and try a paralyze, it works, you teleport away, and the orc gets two casts off on your opponent. You drop a flame strike, they resist, come out barely alive, teleport away, and heal. They come back in, etc. etc.
Now THAT is a battle! With options and decisions. So how do we get that without overpowering mages, or underpowering mages, or making magery too easy to come by?
The first step is clearly to make spells cost much less manna. but maybe not across the board by circle. Teleport should cost like 1 mana, stone wall should be cheap, dunno what else... but anyway, you get the gist.
Hedron
The False Prophet
www.kaaos.com