We elaborate thermodynamic and multifractal formalisms for general classes of potential functions and their average growth rates. We then apply these formalisms to certain geometrically finite Kleinian groups which may have parabolic elements of different ranks. We show that for these groups our revised formalisms give access to a description of the spectrum of ‘homological growth rates’ in terms of Hausdorff dimension. Furthermore, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of ‘thermodynamic phase transitions’.