What are the best primary school and secondary school for someone who mostly solos?
You're going to get suggestions from everyone based on their favorite schools. I have five wizards, all from different schools, and I've soloed most of the game with all of them. From my own personal experience so far I've found Death to be the easiest to solo with. In my case, Fire is my secondary but I rarely use it. A lot is going to depend on your preferred style of play because all of the schools require different strategies.
You're going to get suggestions from everyone based on their favorite schools. I have five wizards, all from different schools, and I've soloed most of the game with all of them. From my own personal experience so far I've found Death to be the easiest to solo with. In my case, Fire is my secondary but I rarely use it. A lot is going to depend on your preferred style of play because all of the schools require different strategies.
I've got five Wizards and have soloed through Avalon on four. My Balance is struggling with soloing Azteca; she just doesn't have enough damage. The Life, Death and Fire pretty much soloed through Khrysalis - excepting some obvious Team Up dungeons.
When soloing, a Life Mastery and life through Satyr comes in handy IMO for pretty much anyone. My Life has Death through Feint, but was able to solo (slowly) without using Death attacks for the most part.
Last Character is Storm, soloing in Mooshu right now.
I'd agree that Death was easiest to Solo, and Fire next. Life isn't difficult, but since she has fewer attack spells than most other schools, and no AoE until eight pips, of course it's taking longer
Various schools have problems at certain levels while they wait to get certain spells.
Death has a slight problem doing without an attack all spell until level 48, but when it comes, scarecrow is awesome, and death is so strong doing without isn't really that hard.
Life has it much tougher, no attack all spell until level 58, which is a serious pain, since you can't really get to level 58 without doing at least one of Wintertusk or Celestia, two of the hardest worlds in the game.
Ice suffers a little from not getting it's school blade until level 38, after that Ice is great.
Perhaps the hardest school is myth, with a huge gap in single attack spells, getting cyclops for 3 pips at level 12 and no bigger single attack until 8 pip medusa at level 58. Minotaur at 5 pips is a lame substitute for questing, the double attack nature of minotaur makes it work poorly with traps. Myth also suffers later on from having no strong attack all spell, humongofrog is great when first learned, but you don't really ever get a stronger attack all spell until level 100. There is a reason myth wizards are rarely seen.
Balance is hard to solo with, but the explanation why is complex and subtle. Balance can be great fun as a second wizard, when you are already familiar with game mechanics, but I don't really recommend balance as a first wizard.
Storm and Fire are both hard-hitting offensive schools. Storm in particular is good at finishing fights quickly, though pretty fragile health wise. There is a reason storm wizards are very common. Fire is a little slower due to its emphasis on damage-over-time spells, but a little less likely to run out if health than storm.
Death's life steal attacks make it easy to maintain health without having to cast healing spells, and can do well in areas where red wisps are hard to come by, such as long dungeons. But its spells are a little weak offensively; death gets there, but it can take a while.
Beware of the whole concept of "secondary schools". Attack spells from other schools than your main school may seem tempting early on, but as time goes on you will find off-school attacks compare very poorly to your main school attacks. You will never have as many modifying spells like blades and traps to increase an off school attack's damage, and the off-school attacks treat power pips as regular pips, wasting them. You do better to acquire specific off-school spells that help you in other ways than direct attacks.
For most schools one of your highest priorities should be feint. This 70% trap from the death school is a pain to get, requiring 7 training points, but it is the biggest single damage modifier in the game, and thus extremely useful. Fire and myth will find traps less useful do to the multi-attack nature of their spells, and should give feint a lower priority.
Balance has some very useful spells. The best is the tri-blade usable with your school (elemental or spirit), that you can learn from Niles, the balance tree. The triple trap he also teaches can be slightly useful but is more of an optional spell than the tri-blade. Reshuffle can be helpful for giving you an emergency extension to your deck when you run out of cards, which in turn lets you build smaller decks, making it easier to draw the important cards. Reshuffle is taught by Mildred Farseer on Collossus avenue (her house is near Mindy Pixiecorn).
Many players learn life to get extra healing spells, with 4 training points you can learn sprite, and with 3 more you can learn satyr. These are nice, but 7 training points is a bit steep when you can buy both as treasure cards from the bazaar. Early on, the gold cost may seem high, but by the time you get to dragonspyre, the gold cost of these cards will seem trivial.
Tower shield is a necessity for PvP but not so important for questing, for 5 training points you can learn tower shield from the ice school.
