Despite my limited non-staff perspective, I still do think a lot of the few slots we get as certain subguild gickers are occupied by flavor spells and cantrips that are fun but have very little practical utility. Even if there are one or two big 'gotcha' spells at the end of our branching trees, it'd be nice to see the rest of the kit have more synergy, even if its application is totally non-combat-oriented.
I agree. I was missing one or two spells on my subguild elementalist, and I knew what one of them was, and it was crazy powerful. Except I never would have used it because my character wasn't a hunter or killer.
Most of the spells I would have used with any regularity were scattered across the other two subguilds, so at a point where I was almost maxxed, I basically used one spell (plus one supplementary spell to make it work better in some situations). Practiced the others but didn't use them. At all.
I picked that subguild because that one spell I used all the time was vital to my character concept. Even though one of the other subguilds had more spells I would have used fairly often. 
I am replying to say a big +1 to the sentiments here that totally line up with my experience as well. Fluff spells that have no practical use are frustrating..especially when their one practical use as listed on the helpfile doesn't work at all or doesn't work as you might expect. When this happens I submit a bug report with the bug command. So far nothing has been serious enough to warrant a report via the website or has "broken" my concepts.
Luckily we at least have main guilds that allow our characters to have a role of some kind, though the stigma of the gem if you have it is still bad enough that it becomes a challenge. The nerf to being ungemmed as I alluded to is that the new branching process takes much more practice to get to the good stuff. As a gemmed unrestricted practice helps but doesn't negate that higher practice requirement.
Synthesis quoted an example of a 40 days played subguild magicker being deadly. So yeah, just about 1000 hours of playing to realistically get there is what I would expect if ungemmed and needing to work out a way to delve into the dark arts in secret. If gemmed the time it takes is probably about half that, so 20 days played, but with gem stigma it can be boring or painful at times to see so many RP opportunities closed off.
I am glad that I have a long career of playing much hated breeds and elves because being ignored or spat on and kept out of most RP events is my normal experience.
The original point of this thread is to try and mitigate the stigma on GDB posts against people who try to play a magicker. I am glad there have been some veterans posting here who confirmed my own experiences with the new process without revealing too much IC detail. Think about it.. these changes went in like 3 RL years ago now or something, and just now we can post these generalizations describing aspects of the experience. In that time I played roughly a handful, haven't even gotten through a quarter of the subguilds and far less than that in enough depth to get an idea. I also enjoyed some mundanes with pretty long lives of course. And I have been playing this game way too much on and off for a decade now. I do hope more people give the subguilds a look and hopefully now with realistic expectations, but if I see people allude to players of magickers as being nothing more than twinks who want a quick path to power I will politely refer them to this thread to correct their false, (outdated?) impressions.
