Is dead revival magic still canon? Wasn’t it retconned like many other things? I lost track on whats real by now
fire magics are holy you heathen
morock save this heathen 
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apocalypse bringer and death, they are literally immitations of chaos
imo glass would probably hurt a shit ton
also lightning if you know how to use it without killing someone
Light magic
Get blinded idiot
Lightning. A human body can suffer a lot of voltage before you become lethal.
Shadow
it’d like, drain the life from your body piece by piece, twisting and deforming like a full body purple nurple.
If not painful it’d at least be horrifying
the poor thousands of ravennian ensigns I’ve killed in order to get some valerii drops after being literally incinerated and scorched into not even a cinder
Using a magic like acid or lightning along with healing could be some of the most painful and cruel magic combinations. Basically getting them to the brink of death to heal them to take more of a beating and make the death far more slow and painful. Believe me acid has got to take the cake here
I’ll go over each base magic to get a basis on how well it could be used for torture following some basic restrictions— We’ll consider how well they can torture on their own, using no external help; then we’ll consider this against an average AO inhabitant, one who can presumably use magic; without further ado…
I’ll go in order of Magics i think would be Worst, to the Best:
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Wind Magic: I seriously can’t think of anything that wind magic could do that would induce torture. It’s not a solid material… it can’t bend like in ATLA, so no forced suffocation shenanigans… its not capable of applying bleed, so this isn’t a “sheering wind” type of thing… it’s only notable property is that it can push people. My best idea is if you could forcibly dry the target by sending wind into all orifices and wet locations— Gust their eyes dry, Irritate their nostrils, scrape their mouth, strip their sweat. This doesn’t sound as funny as everything else, so low ranking Wind gets.
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Glass / Wood / Crystal / Earth / Metal: All of these have a few attributes in common— generic solid materials. AKA, they can all do the same things as eachother without much difference. One key strength about solid magics are their ability to trap targets using solid structures. My first idea was creating tons of the elements powder, and suffocating your target; my other idea was restraining the target and forcing large, but not lethal, holes into their bodies— then waiting for their bodies to heal and repeating the cycle. These are all relatively tame though, compared to some later torture methods. Unfortunately, my powder idea kinda falls when you consider that Powder magics are their own category, so it would be right to assume that these elements couldn’t do the suffocation idea. At the very least, you could splinter chunks into a persons flesh to cause a lot of irritation (this will be brought up a bit).
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Sand / Snow: As stated previously— Suffocation is a powerful torture method, as humans tend to like breathing. Snow has the advantage of also being cold, which could numb the body by a bit, and would force excessive energy loss, making the suffocation faster. I will constantly state the power of forcing these particles in a targets flesh as that causes a large amount of discomfort. Unfortunately, these are pure powders, so i can’t think of much else after this.
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Poison Magic: It just sounds boring. That’s it. Boo, viral warfare. Given all the other symptoms you can get in AO, poison just seems kinda mild. We also don’t know which poison it is, so this is just a moot point. I would rank this lower, but again, we don’t know what type of poisoning it is; but It’s probably less than overall magic contamination.
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Water Magic: Without external tools, it’d be pretty hard to restrain somebody to use the magic as effectively for torture. My main problem is peoples ability to fly and/or create platforms; if you were able to conjure enough water (or constantly move it), you could get somebody in a constant loop of getting on the verge of drowning, then letting them breath. If water were better at restraining people, you could also implement our beloved Water Boarding. overall, this is a good step in torture, constantly forcing victims to expend their own energy for the glimpse of survival is 2x the damage (physical and psychological), and much cooler for torture means. You could also bloat a target with water to cause extreme discomfort, but i felt like i shouldn’t go into too much detail on this end.
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Shadow Magic: hear me out— Humans don’t like being in the dark; thats already giving a psychological torture… BUT! Shadow has more to offer. Shadow in AO is capable of draining energy (at least light), so it could potentially do this to sound and human resources: Create a large domain of shadow, which would at least isolate the target from all other creatures and hopefully sounds… This will slowly trigger insanity on them, as all of their energy is slowly siphoned from them. You then lighten the load so that they hardly survive, and then repeat this cycle. This is truly a great magic for Torture! we don’t know the true capabilities of Shadow’s draining, but people do not like being tired, and shadow seemingly has the best abilities to exploit this.
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Ice Magic: Personally, i quite like the cold, but too much is also a bad thing. This has all the features of solid magics, but with the advantage of being cold. I would be repeating myself if i had brought up all the features from solid and powder magics; so i wont— but I will leave the warning of numbness. Unlike other solid magics, you could accidentally make your target numb, and they’d no longer feel as much pain (bad). One cool thing you could do is force targets to repeatedly experience thermal shock! Make some form of ice pulley, and constantly dip them in and out of a frozen cubicle! Your victims will Hate it!
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Fire / Explosion: Fire is probably the better one in this case, but Explosion shoud basically be the same once small enough. Burning is a famously painful thing to experience. Fire is capable of constantly doing this, and you could definetly torture a person for a good bit with this… my problem is that your nerves will burn and this will become less effective over time. Heat and Cold, are two sides of the same coin… my argument goes back to ice and— THERMAL TORTURE!!! You can’t restrain people as well, but the fire could swarm them much easier than most other methods. Explosion loses the ability of spreading flames for the perk of being able to pelt people with popping wounds.
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Acid / Magma: Acid… the gold old go getter torture method. It feels like burning, your flesh is getting eaten, and that hurts. If you haven’t noticed, this Torture list has been mostly ranked on how much overall damage is given in the session, not by how much pain and trauma you can generationally inflict. I put this above Fire / Explosion because I imagine these two would hurt slightly more. Magama has a unique advantage of being able to cool down, which i could image being used for some extreme stuff, lie cauterizing the magma into solid impairments. Acid is over here because he’s a chill guy, despite not having the solidification ability (i think the feeling of clothes / materials wielding together with you would hurt just a bit more). These two would again, damage your nerves over time, preventing you from feeling anything.
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Light Magic: This has two sides— Laser, or UV burns. You could constantly (and precisely) beam off pieces of a person, all whilst giving them a horridly long tanning session. Constantly glaring a light thats just brighter than their eyes have adapted to will also be an annoying punishment… one that Light magic can seemingly do through the game onto a person (i play at night). Light is technically a heat magic by real world standards, so most of this would also burn you quite badly. It falls under the same problem of eventually destroying the targets nerves, preventing them from feeling pain (really bad for torture!). Also, if Light is emulating sun light, you have the fun effect of applying this niche status called skin cancer.
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Lightning Magic: Shock Therapy gone wrong. Unfortunately, most AO inhabitants wouldn’t have a good enough understanding of Biology to force people into doing actions they wouldn’t want to do.. and given how Healing is restricted to spirit, i might have to also assume controlling flesh is gatekept by such as well. Either way, constant shocks are very, *very,*bad to experience. It’s called lightning, not electricity though, so it might have too high of a voltage to do minor electrical damage— but the potential is there. Such energy output is also capable of causing burns.
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Plasma Magic: This is literrally Fire perks of lightning. We don’t have any acounts on how a plasma would feel… but i think it’d be slightly sparky + an unholy burning sensation. Copy everything from fire and lightning, but drop a bit of the control on it… except you might not have to. Again, its lightning, not electricity, Plasma having a slightly worse electrical output might allow you to actually taze people! Its literally fire + a tazer, that has to be good!
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Ash Magic: If you came to any other guess than this… you might need to look at the magic options more clearly. I believe we all agree this was inspired by Volcanic Ash— notably the likes of Pompeii… and if you know what happened to those people… Yeah, rough was to go. Ash has the perks of Powders AND Heat magics, which is enough for me to justify it being the greatest torture device. Smoldering particles will stick to every bit of your skin, suffocating you and scorching your insides. Straight up evil, and definitely the most braindead torture device— just using it causes the torture, no planning needed.
I might come back to do Lost Magics and Ancients… but yeah thats it for now: BTW, worst magic for Torture is Death lmao, kinda hard to torture if the person isn’t alive to experience it.
If this was for psychological damage, shadow would definitely step up much higher. The mental torture is crazy with that ability; but as of now, i focused on “single-session” damage.
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Out of everyone you definitely knocked it out of the park and described them all best damn! Well guess I know what my evil mage slot is gonna be. Ash + lightning with a scorching/burning/charred/melting blood disease. Went lightning because you need something that can attack underwater and honestly lightning just has better stats than plasma. Could swap to savant one day if some truly heinous weapons come along as well. Put all my gear stats towards power (with attack size as secondary if needed) and attack destruction gems to commit heinous war crimes. 
Dawg this is fucking diabolical 
Some of these sentences are so out of pocket it made me fucking bust out laughing 
Why is it so well written too? Is there something you’re not telling us vro?
Taken out of context this entire post is just unhinged
Why are we grouping glass with the other solids, they’re at least above them because its much easier to cover someone in thousands of glass shards and have them all cut into you with extreme pain than it is to get a bunch of splinters or cuts with metal or rock into someone
that’ll just be instant death at this point
Also you can do that with other solids as well, just that Glass is the lightest one out of them all
glass is just inherently much better at getting into peoples wounds in tiny fragments and is much easier to get into smaller and more jagged pieces
torment mfs in dark rain, make them mad in darkness magic areas, hell, why not:
Genesis Zero
Crystal :
I mean crystals from my recollection arent as fragile as glass is
wood