Wizards need some improvement bigtime

[UmmonTL]

Giving the Staff of Cthulhu a summon function is a great idea.

Fireball seems fine to me, it's better to make other stuff more fun/interesting. As I in my very few wizard rounds have found out, newbies desperately need its reliability.

Empower seems fine to me, if a wiz wants to melee with it maybe it or another spell needs to give stun immunity or fairly high resistance at least so the wizard can fight for a good while. Was the spellshield thingie removed? Can't see it on the wiki anymore.

Knock could work sort of like an emp grenade, emagging bots, blowing APCs and disabling electronics for a bit as well as opening doors.

Now for Animate Dead, Having seen and fought skeletons during my telesci adventures and some wizard rounds I have to agree, they are way too weak. I guess you can consider them a fun little bonus to a spell that gibs corpses but with the long cooldown shocking grasp just outclasses animate dead in every way.
TL/DR of my ideas: Either make the skeletons tough enough to be a danger on their own or make the spell give you more critters at once. Also hats and skullbot puns.
Spoiler!

Reducing the cooldown or giving an Area of Effect would just force wizards to kill more instead of letting the skeletons do the work. This would be useful in mixed rounds though where you can use the corpses others left lying around. Buffing what you get out of the spell seems like a better idea to me, I think it should at least be a danger to attack one on your own with nothing more than a toolbox.
Ideas for buffing the skeleton:

• Make it tougher, a magic skeleton should be able to take a bit more punishment. Also critters are pretty slow to react so it's easy to attack in a smart way that gives it little to no time to strike back.
  
• Give it a regen ability. I like the whole de-limbing and putting itself back together idea but it seems fairly complicated to implement. It could just revive as long as there is blood/gibs/corpses nearby (give the janitor some use ), maybe even heal itself from those sources. Or it could get a drain life component to its attacks. This kind of goes back to the being tougher thing.
  
• Get more bang for your buck. Instead of getting one tough skeleton you could simply get more creatures per corpse. Make the spell create some animate gibs like those on meat station or a spirit like in the void. None of those are too threatening but as a group they would be quite tough. Gibs can't be shot, spirit can knock you down easily.
  
• Control/direct the skeleton? Maybe a way to give the skeletons orders would improve their usefulness. If you can gather a bunch of them and have them run towards a target they might be more effective than just standing around somewhere. You could also give the gibbed player control over the skeleton as the wizards servant(mindslave), unable to use items but able to drag things/bodies, open doors and of course punch things. Has the advantage that a player killed this way can still have some fun in that round.
  
• Let skeletons wear hats and make skullbot puns. Do it.

I'm not suggesting that all of these should be implemented together, tougher skeletons or the giblets/spirit idea should both be easy enough to do and give the spell some use. The mindslave/order ideas might be fun but I'm guessing that's a lot more work

Finally the idea of more/better objectives.
I like the idea of a more interesting version of the ritual using the alchemy circle and bits collected from the station. However these items should not be stuff you can just grab from the derelict level or that are just left lying around, it should still force some conflict between station and wizards. Also I'm not sure if this could be done but it would be neat if the wizards would share their ritual objectives so they can help each other instead of both doing their own thing. Then again, getting a partner who just rampages could screw your round so maybe not or maybe just have one wizard with the ritual objective per round so others can help if they want but don't have to.
Spoiler!

What could the ritual entail?

• Drawing the circle somewhere on the station. This should involve some steps that are always the same but take a little bit of time during which the circle might be destroyed. I'm thinking drawing something with salt, needing a certain amount of blood or a live/several dead sacrifices, something along those lines. The wizard would have more than one shot at this and once complete it would be indestructible. Not sure if it should be possible to make a second one once the first is completed
  
• Gathering ingredients. This could be done beforehand so the crew can't just ambush you at your circle. On the other hand having the circle prepared should be something worth considering, probably depends on how much time it takes to make the circle. Items could be limbs/asses from certain people, maybe a brain, some of the randomized personal items or any of the usual traitor target items. The problem is that the items would have to be protected from destruction and the wizard would need a way to locate them if they are not something common. It could also involve a sacrifice of a beloved station pet.
  
• Defending the circle once everything is collected? Fueling the ritual somehow? Once everything is collected and the ritual begins the crew should still have some hope to interrupt the ritual, they could steal the items from the circle or maybe the wizard needs to do some more things to finish the ritual, maybe a small puzzle. The problem here is balancing it, a puzzle would require the wizard to pay attention making it hard to fend off the crew at the same time. If it just takes a bit of time it might be better, the problem is that the giant alchemy circle would not have very many places on the station where it could be hidden.
  
• Grand Finale. This is basically when the wizard has won, but just making it another nuke would be kind of lame. A giant meteor storm might have more flair but it would just take longer for the same end result. Still, surviving those storms can be a bit of fun. The cool ways of ending it would be to either have the ritual summon a giant boss monster that is almost indestructible and rampages around the station or have certain critters spawn at increasing rates around the station so the crew has to fend them off while getting to the shuttle. Similar to disaster rounds (or bored admin rounds) really. The critters could have several flavors, ghosts/undead, void creatures, martians, meat creatures, animal critters, etc.

All this would be a huge effort to implement though so something simpler would obviously be better. However I'm not sure what, you could basically give wizards some regular traitor objectives but with teleport and phase shift just grabbing stuff would be way too easy. Killing monkeys/borgs is pretty lame.