[Magic] Battlemages and their favourite spells

[Luke Bunyip]

It occurred to me recently that none of the GURPS magic use in my RPG group had consisted of mage vs mage combat, and we have only had one combat which involved a mage. Even that was flawed (owing to our misreading of the rules). This to me seems to be a shocking state of affairs, and given my understanding of the trusty GURPS magic system, it should be easy to address.

But I want a short cut. When we first got GURPS, we did test combat after test combat. We could do this, but I suspect that, given the list of spells, we could do this for a while before we find spell applications and spell combinations which work well in combat.

So, my questions are thus:

What would you put down as your top ten spells for a battle mage, and why?

What are good spell combinations, that is which spells work well together? And I am interested in both offensive and defensive spell combo's here.