MAngband

This book is totally overpriced and underpowered. In new vanilla Angband, it has been pulled before Tenser's and Kelek's and I totally understand why. Except for the powerful Mana Storm spell (that can be learned at level 42), all other spells are completely useless, considering how late you find the book.
My level 36 mage found a copy in a vault at 1800ft, so here's a little comparison with other spells.
a) Acid Bolt: level 10, mana 6, fail 0%, dam 13d8
To be compared with Fire Bolt, level 9, mana 9, fail 0%, dam 15d8... this spell should do a lot more damage to be really useful, or changed to a Water Bolt
b) Cloud Kill: level 12, mana 9, fail 0%, dam 38
To be compared with Stinking Cloud, level 3, mana 3, fail 0%, dam 28... totally useless because of the damage, even if the radius of effect is 3 instead of 2
c) Acid Ball: level 20, mana 15, fail 0%, dam 76
To be compared with Fire Ball, level 19, mana 18, fail 0%, dam 91... same as previous spells, ubercrap damage and resistable by too many monsters to be of any use, at this point Tidal Wave does 112 dam of unresistable water at 0% fail too
d) Ice Storm: level 27, mana 25, fail 0%, dam 106
An alternative to Tidal Wave, level 29, mana 21, fail 0%, dam 112... this is probably the only other useful spell here, as it has a radius of 3 instead of 2 for Tidal Wave, but it should be changed to a "real" ice storm (ice damage and not cold damage!)
e) Meteor Swarm: level 35, mana 35, fail 25%, dam 101
Another alternative to Tidal Wave, but the fail rate makes it totally useless... unless the damage is improved

http://www.juti.nl/hugo/Angband/Spoiler/characters.htm

3.0.8 spoilers are hosted above, so you can peek through the spell changes etc.

Even Mana Storm is rather useless from an RP point of view: 300-400 damage per round is not enough to be useful in killing monsters, as a round of melee often does more damage even for mages. Thus, mages often spend most of the game as "weak warriors" when it comes to fighting monsters.

Generally, mages have to stop using spells to fight monsters around the mid-20's level range.

The "low" spellbooks that we currently have with Tidal Wave etc are actually very well balanced to allow mages to rely on spells rather than melee up to the mid-30's level range. It's for this reason that I support keeping them in the future even if they aren't "canon".

The "high" spellbooks from latest vanilla contain a lot more damage spells that I suspect would allow mages to prefer spells to melee later in the game. However, Mana Storm still needs to have a damage upgrade before mages can truly abandon their "weak warrior" fighting style.

Ah, thanks for those comments Ashi, thats just the stuff we need to hear about. We have a lot of new stuff to digest, and it will be an interesting puzzle to figure out just what we need to tweak to keep the vanilla spirit, but also make things work out sensibly in realtime.

I just read the spell spoilers above... I really like the new spells in Raal's and Kelek's and I'm gonna implement some for PWMang. I agree that the 4 basic books are perfectly balanced now and I won't touch them. I will keep GoI for now (that is another huge issue... mages in vanilla don't have it but are still able to beat the game, I wonder what would be the impact in real time), as well as the damage for Mana Storm (400 is ok for mages that can have 4 bpr, considering that in PWMang sorcerors have only 1bpr and their main offensive spell does 600 damage).

The only reason you'd want to keep GoI in realtime is that monsters can often get a second or even third action by the time you can react to their first. This causes a realtime-only instadeath situation from monsters that can double breathe while you are carrying plenty of heals and teleports, even though they theoretically only breathe "1 time in 3".

A simple (sounding) fix would be one such that if a monster uses a magic or breath attack, its next action may not be a magic or breath.

I don't know how hard that would be to implement, but it would be a great improvement on the game in general, not just for mages.

A lot of realtime monster-related issues would be solved if monsters had a finite, regenerating mana pool from which to draw all of their abilities and spells.

That's what separates player controlled characters from computer controlled monsters: Finite mana and superior logic vs. infinite mana and superior reaction time.