High Elves are really great at getting several magic skills and increasing them quickly, so you're not stuck with only 1 magic school for half the game and die soon because randomness has given everything you fight a nearly immunity to the magic school you follow.
And their high training capacity allow them to get hunger free spell quickly.
I knew freezing cloud was awesome from a previous High Elf run, but this new High Elf have not found any ice book (and i'm playing a fire elementalist).
At some point i found a book with poisonous cloud and became able to cast this one hunger free.
And it's very usefull too.
I was exploring a bit of Snake Pit and saw at the other side of a big room Margery and her Hell Knights.
Usually Margery is very very dangerous to my characters at the level i am when i meet her (she has 164 health and cast repeatedly fireball and bolt of fire). I had only a puny ring of fire (so only 1 level of fire protection)
They were not aware of my character (extraordinarily stealthy helps a lot) .
I flooded progressively the whole room in poisonous cloud (works like smite for the targetting so no need to move close or having clear LOS), once hell knight and Margery were touched, they were poisonned, i used Shadow Creature that spawned a few nagas and ran away with a potion of speed.
Came back later, Margery corpse and lots of hell knight items were on the ground, as i doubt the few nagas were strong enough, it's then the poisonous cloud that got them. they must have been poisonned by each tile they were forced to travel, getting them very high level of poisonning (poison clouds stay several turns).
Good that i have a nice artifact that come with poison resistance
I hope i'll find a book with ignite poison to have an use of poisonous cloud for poison immune enemies, but so far it has contributed greatly to the survival of my character.
And for those surviving up to close contact, sticky flame + poisonned drop their remaining health rather quickly.