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Specializing works with a party of more than one, allowing all spells of the mages type to be cast "on curve". What's interesting, is with a single character party, the best damage spells work fine, though still way behind weapon damage. I keep a spellbook of Area Of Effect, Status Effect (the ones I can cast/scale well enough to matter), Single Target with guaranteed hit, (zap, acid gas) Single Target with high damage (Soul Lance), Explosive Powder for Mob Fishing, a Summon, a Transform, a Heal, and Transmute All. I keep a second spell book with all of my long term buffs, and another book for stuff I'm not using but might or can't yet.

I will say, many of the spells we all avoid because mages are squishy can be very effective with a jack-of-all-classes character. Like, why is charged fist a cast-on-self spell? When am I gonna think my mage would do better with more melee damage? Offensive spells that hit hard or hit multiple targets like Flame and such have their uses, and running out of Mana just means switch to a weapon. My character doesn't rely on damage spells very much, they're used more for leveling, when I can get away with them for fun, or in the case of hard to hit mobs, those spells that never miss. Also Glyphs and Damage Over Time Area of Effect spells are great crowd control tools.

All of this only applies to running the game solo, which I appologize for over-stating, there just isn't much difficulty to the balance of DS and LOA after a larger number of characters are vying for XP. Hyperborea even, a very difficult game on Hard, becomes much easier when your party size finally starts going beyond 2. So, for Vanilla DS, a major criticism it commonly receives is that so much of the content GPG created goes unused, because the game never demands the sacrifice they represent, or because experience and leveling become stunted when having to share. This may balance out, sort of, by advancing larger parties slower, somewhat limiting the advantage of having another body on the field, but not by quite enough to matter in most cases.