[Whiskeyjack]

You can be a perfectly good combat mage with just Ball Lightning and Stunbolt. The fact is, you're doing a role-overlap with sams (which is cool if your group is cool with it!), while there are things a mage brings to the table that they simply can't do. So picking up some of those things can be useful, because combat is usually a minority percentage of a run. Just like it's good for sams to be able to participate outside the combat scenes too. Too tight a niche and it's easy to get bored, or view every problem as a nail when all you have is a hammer.

[pathogen]

Lots of good feedback here already, I'll add my two cents:

It's a fine roleplaying choice to make a combat mage, but it's definitely limiting yourself gameplay-wise. Maybe it's the best fit for your group; you've already got an all-purpose mage or something. But mages are incredibly versatile in ways that most other characters aren't and if all you want to do is join them in dealing boxes of damage to enemies then you're probably doing a disservice to your team and definitely missing out on a lot of fun opportunities.

For spellcasting, Manipulation (and to a lesser degree Illusion) is definitely more versatile and can incapacitate enemies more effectively than combat spells. Health spells let you do things like increase your initiative passes (with Increase Reflexes) and buff your stats (with Increase Attribute) which lets you do things like act quicker, resist spellcasting drain, etc.

But if what you want to do is handle every situation with as much efficacy as possible, conjuring Spirits is where it's at. They can deal the damage directly for you, but they can also do a myriad of other things (including conceal you, make you run ridiculously fast, mentally influence others and even cast your own spells for you). And if you're going full-on Magician, there's no reason you can't both conjure spirits and sling magic, if you've allocated the skills for it.

I'm not advising you to change your design if focusing on combat is what works for you narratively, but I think most people new to Shadowrun are going to be immediately drawn to combat magic (because who doesn't want to shoot fire from their fingertips and fry every enemy they can see with electricity) and that's fine, but Shadowrun is also all about legwork, infiltration and creative solutions to sudden problems, and you don't want to shortchange yourself in those areas.

This is pretty great advice.