Originally Posted by
Anarion
The kind where death is seen as an effective form of crowd control.
I mean, stepping back for a second, there are two reasons to bench V. One is combat specific: an evoker wizard smashes armies really well and OotS has way more army style fights than the average D&D game. If V always fought alongside everyone else, some types of fights would become V blows everybody up while the rest run around looking for targets. The bug slaver fight played this exact point for laughs when V used chain lightning because Elan was being annoying.