Spellcasters are weak?

[Lasty]

Magic is one way to get extra tools in your toolkit, but evocations and gods are also ways to do that. I expect that veteran players who prefer melee to magic find that with a strong god and/or evokers their toolkit is sufficiently robust. I prefer magic overall because my experience is that, when used correctly, it allows for greater fault tolerance and danger avoidance, but that may well be more about playstyle. A well-built character with a high investment in magic should usually have defences that are only somewhat worse than an average zero-to-low-magic character, and their method of solving problems will allow them to avoid testing those defences as often as the zero-to-low-magic character character will.

Well-built low-magic characters usually spend a similar amount of XP on their primary offence as well-built high-magic characters spend on the non-Spellcasting portion of their offence, assuming the former is going for a weapon with a min delay reached at ~20 skill and the latter is going for a L6 dual-skill top-end offensive spell or a L7 single-school one -- getting two skills to 15 is about as expensive as getting one to 20. The low-magic characters will often spend a little less on Invocations/Evocations than the high-magic ones spend on Spellcasting, but I've seen a wide range of approaches on both sides.

Since melee as an offensive tool tends to be more situationally reliable (few enemies meaningfully resist, no mp constraints) but deal both less damage/time and less reliable damage/time, a high-magic approach tends to be more swingy -- you drop a lot of damage, then have to cool off; if you can safely cool off then it tends to leave you in a better situation than melee, and if you can't, it tends to leave you in a worse situation than melee. Ally-generating magic is an exception, in that it is quite powerful and the effects hang around making things better for you for a while afterwards. If you have a backup form of offence (usually melee) then the swing is smaller, but since your melee will probably be somewhat worse than a low-magic character, there's still more power swing.

[amaril]

The fighter/mage distinction is overrated too, even in the early game. A spell like Animate Skeleton or Sticks to Snakes is easily castable in a ring mail or whatever, and gives you a serious boost to survivability. Not saying TM is an easier start than GL (it isn't, mainly because of the disparity in starting weapon and the difficulty TM can have at xl1), but a d2 human w/ sticks to snakes probably should survive more encounters than one w/ a quarterstaff and some nets. You don't have to learn every spell in your book to get good value out of it.

[VeryAngryFelid]

I think it's impossible to have Sticks to Snakes reliable in ring mail on D2, actually even Tm in robe has problems with miscasting it because it trains UC at this point. Generally if it's Tm, it will have better defenses in robe (Spider Form) and if it's not Tm, then it has no reason to train Transmutations that early, other skills are more useful.

[amaril]

An xl 2 hu tm in a ring mail that has only been training uc has 43% failure on sts. Which is usable and powerful, just difficult to quickly flood los with. A lv3 hu in ring mail w/ 11 13 13 stats and 3.2 tm has 28% failure on sts. Idk if it's worth getting it to lower % for awhile; low-powered sts is still spammable and kinda broken.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Why ring mail for Tm at XL2?

[amaril]

Well, the xl3 hu from my last post has 2/12 defenses in robe and 12% sts vs. 5/11 defenses and 28% sts so i would wear the ring mail but that might just be a player preference thing.