Best - worse magic paths

[Tyrant]

Death is excellent largely because it's has so much variety. It has virtually no buffs, but it does have good summons starting at the bottom end and going right through to the top as well as good blasts, battlefield spam, and items. It's also easy to power up with items, and the kicker is that it's "self booting" in that you can use items to increase your level to summon higher level death mages who can then take the items and summon more of the same.

I would say that nature is more useful than powerful. I really hate playing without it, but it's hard to crush the world with nature magic alone, primarily because it lacks killing power.

I think astral is overrated. It's a great secondary suit, but it has jack for summons and it's excellent BF spells are almost all single target. If i want to kill things one at a time i'll hire a crossbowman.