BruceVC
Magister
Direct attacks consistently work. There's very few enemies that are outright immune to all direct attack, but save-or-die is pretty much at the whim of the dice. You can target 5x save-or-die at at enemy and some might end up surviving by pure chance. If you bombard the area with 5 nukes, they will die, period, even if they make every saving throw, because even if they save, they still take damage, and therefore, the strength of your artillery bombardment already assumes this as a baseline, whereas save-or-die means total binary failure. In all the IE and similar games, I would just nuke until they were dead. Always worked.Magic missile, lightning bolt and fireball are juste meme material in AD&D, there are not supposed to be what you are actually picking.
Your post basically summarizes my normal combat strategy in games like IWD, NWN or BG. I select spells to wipe out enemies or weaken them so my warriors have an easier time. And I always consider AoE spells like Evards Tentacles
But I also choose spells to protect me from magic and to weaken powerful enemies with spell resistance like Globe of Invulnerability and Mordenkainen's disjuction