Warmage vs Battle Sorcerer

[Astralia123]

As long as you do have access to Complete Mage, I wonder why did not anyone mention Focused Specialist. This specialized wizard variant grants you 3 extra spell slot on your specialized school in total, and cost you 3 banned schools. Which does not seem to be a problem for OP, as you are not looking at some more eldritchy things and mostly focus on damage spells.

Just keep in mind that you benefit from each of the schools: abjuration (shield and anti-spells things), conjuration (or not if you are not expecting damaging golems with spells or fore armours), evocation (all the damage spells), necromancy (false life and nasty damage/debuffs with no save) and transmutation (with grants important things like wraith strike). Enchantment and illusion are less important, and you may find substitute to abjuration/necromancy if you have got right class features.


There are some cool (or not cool) options:

Armour: fighter substitute class feature, either armoured mage in CM or dragonscale husk in Dragon Magic. Abjurant champion offers another solution but cost you levels. If you are a dwarf, runecaster (Race of Stone) provides a once-for-all solution for arcane failure, but may not be your best choice.

Spell channelling: the best spell channelling ability goes with either ordained champion (CC) or spellsword, which can channel ANY spells into your weapon (which is incredibly powerful with higher spell levels) , but you have to lost at least 3-4 caster levels if you start with wizard spell list. It should also be mentioned that, the channelled spell can be applied to thrown weapons, and can be done before the combat.
RBM is the second best spell channeling ability, which doesn't cost you actions to do it, but limited to a much shorter list of available spells. Still can do some clever tricks, though.
The next is duskblade's spell channelling. It is melee only and can only be a standard action, but can be applied to ANY spells he knowns (usually only duskblade spells, though).
Lastly is smite spell feat. It costs very low but is limited to touch spells, and is most inconvenient.

Combat casting: which is casting-while-attacking ability. Spontaneous metamagic will do it 1 time per day with a very high feat cost. RMB already provides one solution for you at mid-to-high levels, though, so you can just stick to it. Some other PrCs like abjurant champion allows you quicken some limited list of spells.