I notice that the final mage spell, Comets Shower (shouldn't it be Comet Shower?), is rather expensive. 160 PP at level 1 (more than any other spell at any level except Divine Restoration), and 320 PP at level 5. How are you supposed to get enough PP to make this practiclal?

Here is some math regarding PP for a level 56 mage (Comets Shower can be maxed at level 54, but the calculations are nicer at level 56).

PP from leveling: 3.25 * 56 = 182
On Normal mode, that's 182 * 1.5 = 273
+60 from maxed out Meditation gives you 333
That's enough for one use of Comets Shower, and PP from EN and events are not realistically going to give enough PP for another cast. (You would need well over 100 EN for that, and level ups will not give you enough.)

On Veteran mode, you only get 182 PP from leveling. Add in Meditation and that's 242, still 78 points short. If you raise your EN significantly, you might be able to cast the spell *once*, but that's if you decide PP is more important than, say, HP or speed.

On Hardcore, you only get 70% of your PP from leveling, so only 182 * .7 = 127.4. Assuming the game rounds down, that's only 127. (Notice that your PP from leveling are along not enough to cast the spell at level *one*, let alone 5. Meditation, again, gives you 60 PP, giving you 187.
You are then 133 PP short. The blessing gives you 10, and you can get a few from events, but that will still require you to get around 60 EN. Given that you need HP to survive on Hardcore (and Bodybuilding is too expensive here) and SP to get enough turns in, how are you supposed to get enough PP for *one* cast?

Consider that Ray of the Gods is learned 5 levels earlier and is 2/3 the power (4/3 against certain enemy types), it appears that Mages aren't even as good as Clerics at such high levels at burst damage.

Also, why does the spell hit only one enemy? I would expect a spell this expensive to at *least* be multi-target.

Hence why bonus levels, Learning, and herbs (more EN) are so important. You keep disregarding them, but without them gameplay at high levels isn't as varied and is rather tedious.

Here is a question: on Hardcore difficulty, does this give you enough PP to cast Comets Shower level 5 more than once?

I actually am leveling up Learning and Knowledge of Herbs in my playthrough; I just think people tend to have a tendency to think of long-term setups and ignore short-term setups. For instance, if you want to beat the game faster, you won't get as much benefit from Learning, and in the extreme case of a playthrough, you don't have time to go back and harvest early herbs.

As a side note, I've been finding level ups in this game to be rather stressful.

CRPGs are bad genre to consider for speedruns, and speedruns only work if game has some huge flaws (FF IX and its Ragnarok II weapon come to mind....).

Short-terms setups usually bite you back when you are done with them. In case with Lords of Xulima - you have to deal with very fat monsters while having significantly inferior stats. With long-term setup, you end at same place at the same time but with hundreds more stats and a dozen more levels. Surely it will make midgame a bit more tedious than in short-term setup, but short-term setup will have super tedious late game instead, Why? Because of only 2 stat points and 4 skill points? If that is the case, I wrote in other thread that optimally I see 3 Stat Points and 6 Skill points working much better.

The reason I find level ups stressful is that I feel I have to make permanent decisions before I can continue with the game. If stat and skill points were available in limitless supply and they stopped becoming increasingly difficult to obtain at some point, this wouldn't be quite so stressful.

Also, it would help if level ups and the spending of skill points were decoupled, like in the game I mentioned in the other thread and in Dragon Wars. (Dragon Wars also has an easy out: There's a place you can get 5 free skill points (=2.5 levels) once per playthrough, and the game has a New Game + feature that is available right away.)

And that's why Might and Magic VI will always have special place in my heart. It has similar skill system, but it had no level cap - neither hard nor soft, only hardcoded level cap :)) So you could always get more skill points in case you screwed your characters' builds. Might and Magic VI also allows to spend skill points outside leveling. It seems you didn't play it yet because of inclusion of real-time? if so, I'd definitely recommend it, you can play it in turned-base mode, and it is a beast of a game.

I haven't gotten around to Might and Magic 6 through 9 (or 1 for that matter).

Out of curiosity, have you ever played Dragon Wars?

VII is also quite good MM, but with VII series started going downward spiral from bad to worse. X was especially bad offender, if you question optimization of Lords of Xulima, just wait, MM X will show you how to put your PC down on its knees by tile-based pseudo-3D engine. In contrast, Might and Magic VI got a lot of fame also for being extremely well optimized, It could be run on very low-end machines without a single hiccup in performance with TONS of stuff going on screen. Dragon Wars and Bard's Tale games went mostly past me. I found it hard to enter those games later on. I think I played Bard's Tale a bit (definitely messed with its construction set), but nothing serious. Maybe one day I will try Dragon Wars (after i am done with Agarest), does it allow you to save anywhere?

Dragon Wars does allow you to save anywhere. In fact, the game has no safeguard to prevent you from saving yourself into a corner (but there is fortunately the New Game + feature). Note that the game is actually not a dungeon crawler like the Bard's Tale games.

Bard's Tale 3 does allow you to save anywhere, but avoid the DOS and Amiga versions; they have too many bugs that make the game less fun. (The version included with the later Bard's Tale game is the Apple 2 version, which is good.)

Some versions of Bard's Tale 2 let you save everywhere. In particular, the DOS version does, as does the IIgs version (the one included with the later game).

No version of the original Bard's Tale lets you save anywhere.

I will look into that one later on. My backlog became quite huge lately, and looks like Agarest will take looong time to finish.