Personal experience suggests fireball hits about as hard as mystic blast, maybe a bit harder. AoE spells, like fireball, are entirely superior to a non-AoE spell that's equal in terms of statistics, for many reasons -- not the least of which is being able to shoot around corners without having LoS on a target. I slaughtered pretty much the entire elf:7 vault hurling fireballs from outside the elves sight, ferex, but that was a fairly specific scenario. I still get plenty of initial attacks on wandering, etc, creatures, from around corners and suchlike, so while it's a specific scenario, it comes up pretty often.
Fireball's also more mana efficient, generally, when dealing with two or more creatures that can be hit by it. Then, instead of being (6 mana for X damage), it's 6 mana for X damage * number effective; basically, th'amount you're getting out of your resource expenditure multiplies in relation to the number of targets it can hit. Same for the bolt, now that I check, but a line's often even more rare than a bunched up group, in crawl.
All that being said, Bolt of Fire, iirc, has higher single-target damage potential. If you've already got a decent single target spell (Mystic blast is probably better, ferex, if only due to accuracy and armor-piercing), fireball is clearly the better choice. If you don't, Bolt of Fire is probably the better choice. Another thing with fireball, though, is that if you memorize it, you can catch Delayed Fireball (which is basically a single shot, on demand perfect casting of Fireball -- a panic button, basically) for only a single spell level (Of course, if you learn th'Delayed version, you get base Fireball free anyway).
My wizard's been getting away with using Mystic blast for most things, and fireball whenever I can hit two or more targets. It's about as efficient, mana wise, as I've been able to manage so far.
Actually... check
here. If I'm reading it correctly, fireball actually has higher damage potential for single target shots, at least a few versions ago. Bolt of Fire could (potentially) do more damage in a single casting if you got a
lot of critters lined up in a row, but that's even more rare a situation than getting 2 or more bunched up.
So! Ultimate question is if you're trying to keep stealth going. Fireball is noisy and both wakes stuff up and can lure things from offscreen, which can be dangerous. I'd certainly still go with fireball though, personally. It's an iconic spell
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Topic: The 2010 Crawl Tournament Bay12 thread! It's all over! (Read 104708 times)