Aaaaah, okay, finally reached the point of some Pathfinder character art by other people! Here's the very first not-drawn-by-me picture of Talbot done by immelmann. This is before or right around the beginning of the first season of Wolfriders of Malvia, really early on, so this Talbot's still a fresh-faced and eager amateur adventurer/mercenary boy.

Considering the title this picture came with, I'll go into Talbot's array of spells for this one. As anyone who's ever played a spellcaster in DnD/Pathfinder knows, don't actually generally want to go for the blasting spells early on. I mean, you CAN, but the thing is that your couple of Magic Missiles and maybe one or two Fireballs aren't going to be helpful for long, and after that you're pretty much helpless and useless. The better idea is for you to instead help with utility. Whether that's enchantments, buffs, debuffs, or battlefield control, you should probably lean more towards that stuff than the pure damage output.

So early on, Talbot had a lot more of the control-type spells. For instance, the Flaming Sphere from the title was a big fireball that could be moved around and controlled for a time, which was used to not only damage enemies but to route/control, light up areas, and even blind and smokescreen when combined with Pyrotechnics. Talbot used spells like that, Wall of Ice, Aqueous Orb, and Grease to help control the battlefield, while also using Haste and Enlarge Person to buff his companions. There's one particular fun story where Talbot used an Aqueous Orb (a giant ball of water) to collect a bunch of enemies within it, used Create Pit to make a big hole in the floor, moved the Orb into it, then froze over the top of the pit with Wall of Ice to trap the enemies in there.

It's a bit of a shame later on, after levels got a lot higher and enemies got a lot harder, that Talbot had to switch over and adopt to using big damage spells like Chain Lightning and Disintegrate later on instead. Dice are often a bitch, and it felt as though it was necessary to have that better chance of damage with magic against a lot of enemies than to get murdered because the dice weren't rolling in our favor. Talbot today still uses control/utility magic a fair amount, but the days of throwing Glitterdust and Grease and Color Spray around is mostly a thing of the past.