Fireballs

[Mindfire]

SPOILERS AHOY about the Wheel of Time

Spoiler: wheel of time

One thing that bugged me about the Last Battle in A Memory of Light is that the Aes Sedai would use all these big, showy, inefficient methods of killing Trollocs. Waves of Fire, mounds of Earth, stuff like that. I'm sitting there thinking, why not just one simple sharp weave of Air, and just swing it back and forth, slicing everything to ribbons? It could be tiny and require very little power.

In fact one of the funniest things in the book is when Androl shows up at Cairhien and opens up gateways into Dragonmount. For him, opening a gateway is incredibly easy, and Dragonmount is full of boiling magma, so basically he incinerates most of an army of Trollocs just by opening a giant gateway. Way more effective. In the real world, people who had the One Power at their disposal would quickly find much more efficient ways to use it than the Aes Sedai ever did.

Maybe the Aes Sedai's inefficiency is intentionally part of their character?

 

[Mindfire]

And I've always enjoyed the Creative Wizard Duels where both sides seem to be struggling to be more indirect in their attacks. That is, if it's because both are very good at spotting and countering any "Why don't you just zap him?" moves.

As a small aside, the reason most Jedi and Sith don't just instantly force choke/blast each other into oblivion is that a skilled force user can instantly counter such an obvious attack. Thus they must resort to lightsaber combat until one of them spots a convenient opening to use their powers. Or manages to stab the other in the face, whichever comes first.