The extent of Doctor Fate/Strange's ability.

[devias]

I've never been able to comprehend sorcerers and magicians nor their powers. It just seems that they are able to conveniently conjure up a spell that dispels the evil threatening them whenever they want. This notion must be wrong, so my question is, what are the best feats of Doctor Fate/Strange you have seen? Or any other magicians really.

I know literally nothing about Doctor Strange. The only times I've seen him in a comic book is when Hulk was crushing his hands and the time where he was thrasing an asssassin in a hand-to-hand fight but was then shot about two panels later.

The latest I've seen of Doctor Fate was in the JSA series. In JSA #30, he made a grand entrance and made a group of villains who was previously knocking the JSA around piss their pants. Of course, they didn't know it was a rookie Fate. He was quite awesome in the subsequent issues too.

[JediXMan]

Best feat for Fate that I know of was fighting Spectre.

Best feat for Strange was probably this:

[Beatboks]

Jedixman does list feats up their for both, but I'd consider the best feat for Strange to be his defeat of Shuma Gorath (admittedly he was merged with a chaos demon called Ariok (I think- it's been a while).

In the case of Fate, classic Fate's best feat would be when he fought the combined might of a lord of order and a lord of Chaos (Ynar and Vaneamon). They'd grown tired of the war between order and chaos and decided that they would just take everything for them selves. In order to win this battle he merged with his wife Inza so that he was now powered by Order, Chaos and the human spirit (this was where the idea for the later Merged Straus fate first came). His Battle against the Lord of Chaos Totec was also pretty good (after it was over he had to recreate all existence on Earth as it had been destroyed)

Straus fate's best feat arguably when the vampire Bennett was following the orders of the Lords of Order to destroy existence so that the next age of Order could begin, Bennett and Fate got to experience all creation (the Lords of Order and Chaos didn't even notice a change great joke)

Inza Fate would have been either when she was able to create power globes in the suburb of New York that she lived that literally magically fulfilled the wishes of those in the suburb, brought dead souls back from hell, or took power from the locals who idolized her to defeat the Lord of Chaos who until then had been the source of his power.

As to Devias' original question. In most cases Sorcerer/Wizards draw power from a source or from many sources. Almost none are like other super heroes with a simple level of power. The thing with sorcerers is that they need to either build the spell or establish the link with the source. The convenience for some of the most powerful (like Fate, SS Strange, Spectre) is that they can draw power from almost any mystic source, so when they face beings who are powerful entities who are actually sources of magic they can draw from them. Strange did this to defeat Dormammu and others, Fate did also to defeat many of his (or they drew equally powerful gods), Arion did the same to defeat his brother Dann, the Ice sorceress who had created the Ice age and was killing the Earth and by drawing on the power of the Earth goddess defeated the dark lord (damn name escapes me). Inza Fate in order to bring those souls back from hell drew power from those "lives" who lived near her (the entire suburb to be precise)

It's the nature of magic, the one most prepared or that can last long enough to build their power wins.