I'm trying to plan a LAN party to include this game but have found the following problem I can't fix.

Sorcerer casting speed is atrocious. the whole animation has to complete before she can cast the next spell.

I know from the past this is not normal, and I've tried every compatibility mode I can think of as well as all of the -launch that was posted here, tried doing some google searches and I got nothing.

I've tried this on 3 different computers, Win 10 for 2 of them, Win 8 on the other.

Any ideas?

What spells are your thinking of? It's been many years since I played this multiplayer, but I remember some spells required the animation to complete (perhaps magic missile) and others that you could cast in quick succession (like the fire bomb spell [not sure of name -- it puts a pillar of fire down and when a creature touches it, it explodes).

Magic Missile can be cast like 2-3 times in an animation, you can see it in the mobile version as an example.

This pretty much makes the sorceress and wizard not viable options without a fix

my lvl66 casts about 3 times per second, way faster than when you create a new character (1 cast per second maybe).
i guess cast speed scales with your character level?

i find that class (wizard, sorceress) to grow very powerful as it gets more books, skills and items. it gets really easy (and very cool) when you get items with: spell duration increased / mana shield / quick mana recovery. optionally, quick recovery is nice too!

but somewhere after level 60 i found that XP goes so damn slow that it's no fun anymore..
also, when i played via LAN, as sorceress i was gaining XP so much faster than the other classes that we ended up having a huge gap in levels.