I like the idea of spells being powerful but a bit random, and it's very obvious from the start that the spells were meant to be this way.
A couple of ideas for spells — of course with no guarantee of usefulness 😃:
- Lightning — several arcs of lightning would shoot out of you and go in "lightningy-random" fashion, more or less outwards. Good damage but shorter reach. The point is to have a spell that you can rely on to clean your immediate surroundings, but it wouldn't work like the spark and the fireball do (i. e. run away and the spells do the work for you).
- Tornado — one whirlwind going more or less straight towards random enemies (like fireball?), it would grab the enemies and throw them around, giving mild damage. The point: it should be good for scattering big hordes. Then you can defeat them part by part. Or, at least, the scattered horde will be easier to run away from. A con is that it can make your other attacks less effective.
- Poisonous mist/wall of fire/whatever — the spell would make a cloud of poison in a (not totally) random position. The catch is that the cloud would linger there for an extended period of time (20 rounds perhaps?), maybe slowly moving around ("with the wind"). Anything caught inside would be damaged, monster or player, each turn, as long as it remains inside. The point: a powerful damaging spell, but it's sort of a double-edged sword. Looks like it could make the game more interesting because you would like to go around the clouds while maneuvering the monsters into them. This thing should have a huge cooldown (having more than 2 clouds at the same time should be rare).
- Generic debuff spells — they would hit a bunch of monsters and debuff them for several rounds. The monsters could be e. g. slowed down, have their attack reduced to half, or they would take 50% more damage from each attack, while debuffed.
- Mistform — after casting it, you would become invisible for several rounds. The monsters would stop following you and you would be able to pass right through them without being attacked. Probably a good idea for some kind of powerup but a bad idea for a spell 😃. Not sure how it should be triggered.
- Mind control spells — one possibility would be a confusion spell that would hit several monsters and make them mull around randomly, perhaps attacking other monsters. Another would be a more direct control spell that would hit one monster, that would turn around and instead of running at you, it would run at the nearest monster and start attacking it. (Probably hard to implement but could be nice if the player can build combos around it.)
- Polymorph spell — it would transform a couple of monsters into frogs for a couple of rounds. It would do no damage but the monsters would have only 50% health and no attack power while polymorphed.
- Something that would detonate gems around you, destroying them and dealing damage to monsters around them. Probably useless idea, as the spell would wildly oscillate between useless and overpowered.
- Fetch spell — an utility spell that would fetch some gems and/or chests nearby every couple of rounds. Not sure if it makes any sense to have this alongside the greed skill.
- Rebuild wall — exiting a square where a wall has once been while casting this spell will renew that wall. Probably not worth a skill pick.
There's some detail left to work out, of course, e. g. bosses should be immune to some of those.
Ad the whirlwind guy: I had a single point in fireball and the other 10 skill picks were melee (whirlwind, slash, bash). So I had the fireball, but I don't think it was very useful. I guess it would probably be better to pick something else.
By the way, I managed to get a win with the fireball wizard. I got the life-draining artifact staff, so after obtaining it, I maximized sparks as much as I could. In the bossfight, I was hit 2 times but ended with full 100 HP nevertheless 😃 (I tried to continue but I couldn't obliterate the elemental giants as fast as I should. As soon as the little dragons came, I had to run like hell and grab the amulet. And I got hit for ~ 40 in in only five or six rounds just before that.)