Just nuke everything dead, use every spell slot at level 3+ for fireball, fireball and more fireball.
How boring.
The other side of that coin is me playing as a level 4 bard in a party without Gale and suffering from a lack of AoE damage options - 'option' singular really. It's making fight a real slog and even when I win I'm left with a party that's half dead. Currently considering a respec to sorcerer. I'm willing to accept that I may be playing the bard badly but something has to change.
I bring it up often, but a lot of people are unfamiliar with how well Dungeons and Dragons online implemented all the spells. DC casters and nukers were equally viable.
Bards were given sonic spells only for damage, but excelled at it if built that way. Alternatively they could have great CC, healing and whichever build with the best party buffs, everyone wanted a bard in their group, the caveat being they only wanted one bard, so often I was playing my bard and if a group already had one they wouldn't take a second.
Similarly wirards were preferred to sorcerers because everyone loved the CCs more than nuking, but sorcerers could also CC / Instakill if specced as such, but not many players did that.
From what I see in this game, bards don't have any damage option from spells, so mainly just illusion and enchatment, but hypnotic pattern and such are so useless, in DDO you could stop a whole group of enemies with hypnotic pattern with a wake up on hit mechanic, not as strong as hold, but still useful for a PK caster build. Necromancers could use fear for CC too, but the usual thing was to use archmage with +2 DC to main school, +1 to second, and if enchantment wasn't the +2 it would most commonly be used for the +1 alongside +2 in either illusion or necromancy.
+2 Illusion and +1 necromancy was also a thing - Illusion acrhmage got a second PK spell like ability, so now they have 2 x PK plus finger and circle of death and wail. Just kill everything except bosses which had DC immunities and some high end mobs. Mobs that were immune to some things were generally weak to others, so Llolth spiders couldnt be webbed or enchanted but they could be instakilled or stunned. The game didnt tell you this like BG3 does when you inspect mobs, you had to figure out each enemies weaknesses or look up a guide / ask party members.
Even simply magic missile spamming worked with the Shiradi elite levels things, ranged attack and spells got extra damage, stun and ability damage procs, and each missile could proc shiradi stuff, so you just spammed magic missile / chain missile / scorching ray / force missile and randomly but reliably stuff would either get paralyzed, debuffed, or take a load of random lines of damage.
