Extra-lame spells
The games have a bunch of spells that just leave me scratching my chin. I think Reflected Image, the 1st-level version of Mirror Image, takes the cake though. 
And I think it's wrong-headed that early-level spells in these games are discarded as soon as the player gets something higher up. Hardly any of them scale. Well, people'll use Magic Missile, but what else? In PnP... but then, this isn't PnP. No Invisible Servant or Message here.
By the way, does Charm Person still work to convince Mulahey to spill the beans in BGEE? Beamdog nerfed the spell all the way down, but at least Bioware originally had some inclination to make it useful outside of fighting.
And I think it's wrong-headed that early-level spells in these games are discarded as soon as the player gets something higher up. Hardly any of them scale. Well, people'll use Magic Missile, but what else? In PnP... but then, this isn't PnP. No Invisible Servant or Message here.
By the way, does Charm Person still work to convince Mulahey to spill the beans in BGEE? Beamdog nerfed the spell all the way down, but at least Bioware originally had some inclination to make it useful outside of fighting.
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Armor, Blindness, Shield, Sleep and Spook are all level 1 spells that are at worst useful and at best invaluable at some point in the game.
I have no idea what Beamdog did to charm but I can confirm that all charm-specific dialog still exists.
It's still not a horribly deadly spell, but it has the advantage of offering no save. If it stops an enemy from drinking a potion, it can effectively do 47 damage (20 damage base, plus preventing 27 healing from the potion).
Maybe my problem with the early spells is not only that they hardly scale at all but also that they are not so useful against enemies of comparable level. Comparable to the caster. I mean, Sleep is fine, but otherwise there is very little 1st-level spells can do in a fight with a bunch of Gibberlings or Hobgoblins. Spells like Blindness or Spook again may be useful after all against something stronger, like an Ogre (but in my party fighters or archers or a Command take care of those). But with weaker enemies wizards just stand by or cast their Larloch's Drain...
Of course, they ARE only 1st-level spells, but in PnP there were at least creative ways of applying cantrips, illusions... Audible Glamer - which level was that?
Not to make it into a plug for my upcoming mod, but I'm going to introduce a few low-level spells that let casters be more useful, with some ingenuity.
What am I missing?
I don't know if on SCS the AI is better at handling or dispelling it, but it's still a powerful debuff regardless.
The worst thing Bioware did in BG2, and that we now inherit, are the protection-removal spells: Secret Word, Breach and so on. By Christ, who ever told them it would be cool to have, on the one hand, mounting numbers of defenses for wizards and on the other - more and more ways to remove them? Your party members just have to devote a portion of any fight with a mage now to bringing down his shields, it's the order of the day. He does Minor Globe, I do Breach. What? Is this what I became a wizard for? It's the most fucking boring thing I've ever done in a CRPG.
So just discussing whether the spells do too much damage or whether their saving throws are right misses the point. Half of the point, anyway. Sure, now that I know that Spook has -6 to the save I can't help but think that it's way overpowered for a spell of any level. On the other hand, if the save was unmodified, it would be more tolerable power-wise, but hardly more interesting. It's just Horror for one. You may ask: well, what would be interesting? I'll give you an example: Blink. Blink from pen-and-paper would be interesting, and so could be, for example, Suggestion or Cloudkill with some clever script to make the cloud move away and clear the ground. Lots of things could be. So you see, it's almost insulting for me to hear World of Warcraft-style discussion of spells' merits - which save is better than what, how much damage per round what does and so on. I mean, those are valid topics, but I wish someone other than myself saw the other side.
P.S. What's the point of that big animation, @joluv? The mod will be made, though I don't promise a lot of spells straight away. There'll be tricky scripting, by definition.
It wasn't meant as a harsh criticism; Butch Cassidy is one of my favorite characters. Some of your ideas sound cool, you seem very determined, and I'm interested to see what you'll come up with.
Though you could spawn a lot of 2 second duration clouds in a specific order from an invisible bird, but since it will be cast in different areas and with different orientations it won't be easy anyway. You can't detect walls so it would be very hard for it not to go into "unwalkable" parts of the map and so on. Still, I won't say it's impossible because you can script it for each area given enough time (or you can make different spells and let the player choose a direction from all the 8 possible ones (N, NW, W, SW, S, SE, E, NE) the game has).
Also, did you ever take a look at Galactycon's Spellpack? It brings several spells closer to PnP IIRC besides using really smart/clever/hackish ways to get around the engine to accomplish that.
Reflect image isn't in top lamest spells though. It's usable throughout the game. I would put good berries up there. What a lame spell!
To @joluv : I'm starting small with my spells. For the first incarnation of my spell pack I'll have two utility spells and one combat spell that's proving to be a pain in the ass to code.
To @CrevsDaak : What I hate is how I have to do Breach or something similar every time I face at least a medium-level mage. It was one of the major reasons why I never went back to BG2, that magic became so dull. The first thing they all do when they see you is fire off Stoneskin and the Globe, like they've all been waiting their whole lives to be attacked. I understand it's to keep mages from being instantly hacked to death, but that itself comes from a logic that veered off in the wrong direction at some point.
It wasn't always so. Remember the original Baldur's Gate, how, for example, all of the illusions from a Mirror Image had to be put out before you could get to the wizard behind? That was solid protection, won them at least a round or two, which really made wizards not to be trifled with. But by the sequel's time somehow anything powerful and pleasant to use began to look extreme to Bioware, and more so to Beamdog, so they had to nerf and nerf until "meh" began to be considered the balance to aim for. If instead mages' invisibility wasn't so easy to see through with a cheap Detect, if their Protection From Normal Missiles made any sense against parties with quivers of +1 and +2 arrows, and so on, then they wouldn't need those crazy defenses, and the party, in turn, wouldn't need to bring them down, which just becomes absurd at high levels. The logic is too straightforward, every encounter is "solved" the same way, with a few variations... And this gets players thinking along the lines of Diablo, min-maxing, until there is no thrill, mystery or uncertainty left.
Just now I wondered to myself, as I was putting 20% fat yogurt in the fridge, what is it that draws people to savage pen-and-paper modules like the Tomb of Horrors? I've never played that one, but I read the material, and the reason has got to be that it's such a visceral and no-compromise experience. There is no "meh" in there and no predictability. What, I think, this game could use is more ways to play, rather than win, more tricks. So I'm going to look at Galactygon's pack for sure, when I get the chance. He's a smart coder, too.
About Cloudkill. How about doing it by spawning an invisible creature at cursor first, then having the bird fly to it? It wouldn't be an infinite range spell that way, but if I set it at, say, 100 feet it ought to be enough to clear out Firewine... And if I made the beacon creature move away from the caster too, or perhaps from another, immobile creature to spawn next to the caster, just so there is no meandering about? Anyway, this is getting technical for the topic.
Reflected image. Mirror Image. Hey, does anyone remember this episode from the second Conan movie? It's one of my all-time favorites. Silly, but still great:
Personally I have no trouble with a fighting system that only occasionally forces me to reload once, very rarely twice. I'm fine with party members getting beat up but everyone surviving or maybe some one kicking the bucket. If I have to think about tactics and spell selection somewhat for a fight, that's challenging enough for me. A regular encounter, to my mind, should be more diverting than dangerous for the characters. This is how it is with pen-and-paper, by default, and I think the original BG was right to take that road too. So something like the original Mirror Image or the original Sleep don't seem overpowered to me. I play this game to enjoy myself, not sweat and swear. But I can't speak for everyone.
Maybe it could all be simplified to dispel magic and an improved dispel magic version...
I could be mistaken about this, but I don't think that Breach, Secret Word and other spells of that sort are actual AD&D spells. They are not from the Player's Handbook or any issues of the Dragon Magazine or game supplement I can think of, though I admit there were many. Most likely, Bioware just made them up when combat in the sequel to BG settled into the damage/avoid damage rut. Fighting in BG2 basically comes down to using magic and weapons to dish out as much damage as you can after you've stripped off enemy defenses. There are just many, many variations and damage types and protections, but the pattern never changes.
It's all because the games gradually turned into hack-and-slash. Whereas in pen-and-paper it isn't even necessary to kill enemies to get to your quest's goal, the enemies are just obstacles. Most loot is found in stashes and treasuries, not on dead bodies, and without the power to save and reload it doesn't pay to be a homicidal maniac. Besides, you get the XP for defeating, overcoming, not killing. So if you solidly outwit Smaug to fly away and never bother Lake Town again, you should be entitled to Brand's whole XP award, maybe even a smarts bonus.
Oh yes, I could see this being implemented for the Infinity Engine games - when you reduce an opponent to, say, 30% hit points he could cry for mercy and offer to hand over his best item, then walk away. Or just more ways to get rid of opponents without fighting them. Torment, of course, did this, but the other games are much simpler, and those of us who want more out of, among other things, magic keep running into the reality that it's there just to blow people up. This is the expectation that, I think, is the most in need of upsetting. Not just with new spells, but also through quests where you outwit or entrap or talk your way through a situation - and it pays as well or better than fighting.
Fighter: TorGal
Paladin: Disguised knights
Ranger: Shadow Altar and Shade Lord
Cleric: Unseeing Eye
Druid: Faldorn
Mage: Demon
Thief: Mae'Var
Bard: Warden
1) Drink two Potions of Magic Shielding.
2) Talk to Sarevok from near the symbol of Bhaal.
3) Drink a Potion of Invisibility.
4) Set off the symbol's traps until he dies.
But again, all sorts of ways. Backstabbing a few times works great, too. It's really not difficult to get through the game only killing Mulahey, Davaeorn, and Sarevok. Hack-and-slash is not mandatory.
- Mulahey needs to die, but you can charm him and get him to attack a few kobolds.
- you can just sneak through the Bandit Camp and grab the letters before sneaking through the Cloakwood.
- sneak down to Davaeorn and get him to attack you while protected from magic. When area of effect damage occurs to chasing battle horrors drink a potion of invisibility and sit back to watch the show.
- sneak into Iron Throne.
- sneak through catacombs.
- I can't remember if Slythe is pick-pocketable, but he is charmable.
- leave the dopplegangers at the palace to the Flaming Fist.
- sneak through the maze and to the temple.
- Joluv has given you one method for Sarevok to die without you being responsible.
Hey voila the game is complete and your total kill count is 0 (and up to Sarevok's death your XP was also 0)