[Arker]

Oh, the other nice thing about summon earth power is it gives a little antifatigue too. And the other nice thing about boosting your battle-smiths up higher than just enough to cast the spell - blade wind has extra effects. It's, like, 42 blades? or close to that, but with a +, meaning that there are more blades if the mage casting is higher than the minimum level. With Ulm I generally have more earth gems than I know what to do with, between a substantial income of them and a huge forge bonus (the smiths forge bonus plus plenty of dwarven hammers) so about the time in the game you're talking about, I'll even start empowering the battle mages. One properly boosted battle smith that can stand there and cast back-to-back blade winds through the battle can cut down literally hundreds of lightly-armoured enemies.