[Sombre]

I personally find it a bit irritating that there are some spells which are total dross unless you are using a specific item with them, such as vine men/ogre, corpse men etc. Same with dragon master and drakes - you can't make the base spell more useful because then it's too abusable with the items, which means you have more 'pitfall' summons that new players will go for and essentially waste their gems.

I'd prefer it if having the item just allowed you access to another version of the spell which was more efficient (though not 4 or 8 or 16 times as efficient) and that way the original spell could be balanced to see a bit more use.