[atlatea]

Fire rain depends on how high your int in early game.

If by any luck, you can get to 30 int at verona, it can be useful.

However i rate ice snake and lightning better than fire rain, ice snake is like mass slow (if you manage to score it), and lightning is also super mass slow for only 1 turn.

Lightning also good againts droids and dwarves.

They're indeed inferior to geyser and black hole, but believe me, most of the time i spent on mage class is with destruction mage build, trust me that those three are not that bad even in impossible difficulty (yeah, i said impossible difficulty and i'm not joking), in some cases you better cast them than black hole or geyser.

It also depends on your units though, if you use mostly crowd controler units, then those three is useful, especially ice snake and lightning.

As for fireball, this one is indeed suck.