[Edratman]

Another nice option is MA Tien Chen. They were seriously reworked in the last patch and you now have two excellant capitol only rainbow mages and a host of decent mages available in all castles. I use a cheap non-combatent rainbow pretender whose paths include 4F,4E, 4N and 4A, and very good scales. The pretender can work in conjunction with the capitol only mages to forge all the boosts required to turn the non-capitol mages into a diverse and formidable spell casting force.

I like this diversity for 2 reasons. Primarily you don't get gem starved in your key path, and you get to use virtually all the spells in the grimmoire.

These also enable me to get the 3 globals up that I love to have, the forge, natures bounty and gift of health.

This is probably only good for SP. I have yet to see the MP studs praise MA TC.