Derth arena is locked out after they are attacked, which is usually after maj eyal and you are at least level 10; Talk to the relaxing man. After this the mountains, and forest by the lake southwest of derth are marvelous to go through, followed by the ruined dungeon.
The portable chest in the lake through the old forest is excellent for money and carrying things. Get the key before swimming down into the lake.
Daikara should be done after the western beach if you want its timeless content fastest, although the sand takes travel tools to safely go through.
The halfling ruins will help you focus if passed perfectly. The elvish ruins start more difficultly but have a less steep curve. The spellblaze is a perfectly honest name with a trap at the end.
The ultimate challenge on this trip comes after the final ruins.

Usually, playing a fighter is just not my style. Hack, slash, more hack, more slash, and someone dies. Well, this is not the case with the fighter here, as I was happy to find out yesterday.
Yes, it does include a lot of h&s. Aside of that, you also have crowd control abilities. On these first levels these are abilities that can stun or knockback. Both of these can be very handy if you find yourself cornered and attacked by several monsters at once. (Ever seen four or more 'h' monsters speeding up and running towards you, when you are standing in the middle of a huge room? It is frightening.)

My choice of skills included the following (and I try to keep spoilers low here):
Shield pummel: Can stun the enemy and offers decent damage.
Repulse: Knocks back and dazes your attackers (the ones that stand next to you). It won't work if someone or something is behind the monster though, so the usage is somewhat limited.
Rush: Very useful for ranged attackers (archers and mages both), partly because you move there in an instant, but the daze effect is also very handy.
Riposte: Attacking enemies for free is always a good idea. Especially when you are surrounded.
Overpower: An effective attack with an additional chance of knockback. Very useful.

So I've just unlocked the summoner yesterday, and decided to give it a go. As my previous experiences with Tome4 were only limited to getting a warrior up to lvl 11, I'd say I had no idea how hard it will be.. but I was able to survive the first 6 levels, and kill the boss in the first dungeon. This post is just a very simple strategy guide for those early levels for others who would like to try this class.

Level 1: Run!
The first rule of survival is simple: summon and run. Your main goal here is to get some weapon, which can be accomplished in two ways: one is to find a suitable weapon (it helps if you raise your str to 11), the other one is to collect enough useless stuff to sell them and buy one in the shop. For this, you need to explore the wilderness, but - because your are pretty squishy yet - the best possible tactic is to stay close to the entrance and flee if needed.
If you learn the turtle - which is a very good idea to do, btw - you can try to hold back single monsters. Summon it, wait until the monster starts to attack it, then run away a few steps. When the turtle disappears, summon your ranged pet a few steps away from the monster, and move again. Then the same with your wolf, next to the monster. You can repeat this until the monster dies or until your equilibrium prevents you from summoning. In that case (and the same for several monsters coming towards you at once) run to the entrance and leave the area.

Level 1-3: Deal damage
After you found at least one decent weapon, you can change your tactics. First of all, improve your ranged pet, so it will deal decent damage, and maybe also your turtle, so it will stay for a longer period of time. Now you can team with your pet: You can tank for your ranged pet, you can work together with your melee pet or you can deal damage while your turtle holds back the enemy. The damage you can deal together is now enough to kill a group of enemies - if they come one after another. Never stay in the open, always get to some corridor where you and your pet can hit, but there is space only for one enemy. A useful tip here: if you don't see any space where you can summon your pet, try to summon it on top the monster. If there is an open space next to it, your pet will appear there, even if it is behind the monster or outside of your LoS.

Level 3: Kill the troll
Now you should be able to kill that first boss. It helps if your cunning is 20+, but not required. Probably the easiest way is to run around and use your turtle to hinder it and your ranged pet to damage it.

All in all, the first levels of the summoners are not easy, but doable with a little patience. On the other hand, it's good fun, I really enjoyed it, and I suspect that the summoner can become really powerful after some levelling.

Alchemists are great to play; Dancing with and blasting my foes alongside my intelligent and loyal companion who holds its own with its' pair of weapons is on par with the best and my favorite styles of combat in the game. Although there are a few quality of life issues that I can't log in to forums, so I'll leave them here.

The alchemist infusion sustains will delete all the remaining fire damage when their staff is fire typed and they use channel staff, the supercharge golem is a full heal resurrection instead of the designed partial percent, and the second golem magic talent looks like it needs to be a sustain or have a duration listed.

As promised here comes T-Engine4 and ToME4 beta25 ! See http://te4.org/

Don't forget to help ToME by with donations( http://te4.org/donate ) !

Release highlights:

• Various important fixes and updates
• Balances tweaks
• New Thaloren starting zones, along with their own city
• Starting zones reduced to 3 levels, next tier zones to 5 levels

Expanded changelist:

• Ring of blood orb wont take your money if you killed the blood master
• User chat notification upon death
• Unlocks made while offline are now also available while online
• Merged Heavy & Massive armour trainings into a single talent (that goes to 10 like the weapon ones). At level 1 it allows heavy gloves/helms/boots, at level 2 heavy armours, at level 3 shields and at level 4 massive armours. Classes start with enough levels to wear their starting gear
• Aura of Silence description shows the radius
• Silence correctly prevents usage of runes
• Using timetravel spells will not break the ingame chat
• Sotrming the city quest is now more obviously presented on the worldmap
• Armour changed again, it is back to a flat damage reduction
• New stat: armour hardiness, it's base 30% and can be increased with Armour Training. It represents how much of a blow is affected by armour
• Fixed Slime Roots
• Fixed dual weapon training and corrupted strength
• Achievements list now colors in green achievements got by your current character
• Reduced the length of all starting zones to 3 levels and the next zone tier (daikara, maze, ...) to 5
• Antimagic quest now grants Antimagic achievement
• Removed all lava floors from the wyrm room in vor armoury
• Spectators wont decay in the ring of blood
• Fixed long load times when loading a populated level
• Fix crash on big maps
• Rod of Recall / Teleport: Angolwen cooldown adjusted to 400
• Bill is no longer the boss of the trollmire, he has been replaced by Prox, an other troll, which hits not nearly as hard
• Bill has now got his own special level, whose access must be found. And he is now nastier
• The slave combatant has the correct number of infusions
• Dreadmasters now correctly summon dreads
• Defensive throw should now take place after counter attacks
• Reorganized and rebalanced the age manipulation tree
• Removed stat increasing effects from an anomaly
• Wormhole is now instant cast
• Cut sustain cost of Door to the Past in half
• Lowered cost of relentless strikes
• Striking stance now increases accuracy instead of critical power
• Rushing strike stun duration reduced
• Roundhouse kick damage reduced (a bit)
• Spacetime tuning now has a cap on how high it can raise your paradox
• Shattering Impact can only trigger once per turn
• Put much-needed door in the bandit fortress
• Added some non-lava floors to one of the demon nest vaults
• Added dialog to the alchemists to inform the player that they're not the only one working on these ingredients
• Made squid ink more visible
• Changed elixir of stoneskin on-drink message so it makes more sense for skeletons
• Equilibrium and Paradox sustains only check for failure on activation
• Fixed loot generation in vault to be more diverse
• Fix wraithform cost
• Tactical display is now handled by entities (actors) display callback (no change for modules, except they can customize it as needed)
• Added lifebars to tactical display mode
• Melinda got tiles!
• Various fixes
• Daikara rift can not spawn on the previous/next level changers
• Random worldmap encounters can not happen at birth
• Atamathon is now displayed on all tiles settings
• Actor list display wont show the player anymore
• Kill Bill achievement is possible even with the new troll boss (the last lore note drops from him but not on death). Still, quite hard to pull off!
• Bosses will be marked as purple on the minimap
• New starting zones for the Thaloren: The main thaloren camp, Shatur; the lair of norgos; the heart of the gloom
• Timeless wont produce negative timed effects
• Fix Aim to work as advertised
• Fixes sand tunnels in briagh lair
• Fixes the terrain cloning issue with Rune of the Rift and Time Skip.
• Also adjusted wormhole entrance range.

Have fun!

So I went to the last floor of the crypt with my cursed thalore. I thought I wouldn't make it without better speed, even with my charge and movement infusion, keeping in mind that I play an almost total melee character (excepting gloom bolts). The cultists and I had fun playing axe tag and I was surprised to see the BBED appear. While she let me trade blows with her I started planning to get -some- range options so I could avoid having to finish a chase.. and then she dropped arrows of unerring flight annihilation. I picked them up and the game crashed. Lol too much awesome?

A few weeks ago there was the 2011's 7DRL contest
As each year there was many participant and many interesting results.

One of particular interest is Darren Grey's Broken Bottle module. He decided at the last minute to use the T-Engine4 to create his game, with no prior knowledge of lua or T-Engine.
And he succeeded, he made a complete and fun game in less than seven days.

What's even better is that it scored 4th on the evaluation (while he is on the comity he obviously did not get to vote for his own creation).

Well done Darren!

As promised here comes T-Engine4 and ToME4 beta24 ! See http://te4.org/

Small bugfix release for beta23.

Oh and I mastered OSX compilation in VMWare, so this comes with an OSX version right now! (and it might even work!)

Don't forget to help ToME by with donations( http://te4.org/donate ) !

Release highlights:

• Various important fixes and updates

Expanded changelist:

• Fix the alchemists quest, again
• The slave combatant in the ring of blood has got a higher level of relentless strikes and a second regen infusion
• Fixed Kryl Feijan
• Weapon Combat renamed to Combat Accuracy
• New damage shield gfx
• Fix weather effects scrolling
• Rework some racial descriptions
• Rain in the old forest should feel much more like rain now
• Give random lore a specific definition in loot tables so that it will drop more often
• Overhauled the speeds system. Now when a talent or object grants +X% foo speed it means you can do X% more of action foo in the same time. So if you get a 100% combat speed increase you will attack twice as fast
• Speeds now stacking is now multiplicative
• Damage resistances are now stacking multiplicatively
• Melinda's father reward can not cause duplicate arts
• The Spellblaze Crystal has more mana regen
• Demon Plane spell now correctly ends if one of the actors dies instantly upon arrival
• Demon Plane spell damage is now bound to the caster's damge increases
• Fix Demon Plane when used with escorts on the level
• Stores now have boots/hands/...
• Corrupted Strength and Dual Weapon Training can not create infinite damage at super high (npc) levels
• Cooldowns go down in worldmap
• Online charsheet now displays talents tooltips and achievement's level
• Lumberjack quest will correctly pop even if taken into an ambush at the same time
• Fix Sharp Bones when saving/reloading
• Can not cheese out the 600 damage achievements using the Mouth
• Fixed minimap going bonkers

Have fun!

I've written a run-down of my experiences after completing my first game. Beware of spoilers, obviously. The adventures of Ostafel, Dwarf Fighter begins after many false starts, and quite a few restarts (oops - you've run out of lives!)

Learning Curve

Not too difficult to pick up, though it took me longer than I care to admit to figure out how to bind hotkeys. Of course, even now there are still many other mechanics I've yet to figure out. (Grrr, disarm, how do you work?)

Class: Why a fighter?

It was the only class with which I could survive the first dungeon. Okay, so I'm rubbish at the game, however, the fact that alternate classes require different strategies piques my interest - and bodes well for future games. Make no mistake however, though it wasn't my first choice, playing a fighter was fun. By the end, I grew to love the skills, especially the Shield Offense and Warcries Techniques. In hindsight, I did fumble a lot over skill placement. (e.g. getting both heavy & massive armor mastery). Furthermore, were it not for my Movement Infusion, I would never be able to catch ranged opponents. Perhaps I should have invested in Combat Techniques?

Quests & Dungeons

:

As this was my first complete game, I ended up skipping a number of dungeons. As I played, I completed quests that seemed interesting to me at the time. In fact, this led to the bizarre situation of collecting 7/10 staves, jumping on the anti-magic bandwagon, then subsequently scaring off the apprentice when I tried to approach him again. Though I technically "failed", the quest hung around in my quest log until the end of the game. Speaking of which, even when I entered the final tower, I was unaware that it was the end-game until I saw the portal. Challenging the bosses at level 43 was a nasty affair; luckily, the clearly visible runes tipped me off: so, thank-you game design, the fight was tough enough even after disabling the 4 runes straight-away! Overall, the tower, while lengthy, was nevertheless enjoyable, and there's nothing like a room full of demons to keep you on your toes. Disarm is terrifying.

Shiny Loot

:

Transmogrification Chest is fantastic. I enjoy looting but dislike cluttered inventories in RPGs, so this was a great way to deal with the junk. But what's junk? When push came to shove, I often had trouble deciding if it was better to have +Stats vs. +damage or vs. +resists. Also, because of my anti-magic affiliations, I had to pass up many significantly better items: most notably in the weapon department. My end-game weapon only had 36 Power. In hindsight, I'm none too pleased with my decision, though I suspect it may have been a worthwhile trade-off had I made better use of the Anti-magic tree.

Misc: Interface, Graphics, & Sound

Being able to use a mouse is a blessing - games that require the numpad makes playing on my laptop...discouraging. The layout of the game is very accessible. In combination with a pleasant-looking tileset, and interesting soundtracks: wow, what an incredible journey!

Memorable Highlights:

Rescuing the merchant from the assassin den, assaulting the orcish stronghold with the paladins, and the "lightning storm" at Derth.

***That's enough out of me, thank you for reading. I'd welcome any feedback on what I should have or could have done better, in addition to any other classes that would be easy to pick up next. And of course a huge thank you to Darkgod, for creating such a fantastic game!

As promised here comes T-Engine4 and ToME4 beta23 ! See http://te4.org/

Small bugfix release for beta22.

Don't forget to help ToME by with donations( http://te4.org/donate ) !

Release highlights:

• Various fixes

Expanded changelist:

• Fix the transmogrification chest
• Fix level of orcs in the escape from reknor
• Fix mage apprentice quest for archmages
• Particles can be attached to any entities, not just actors
• Particles attached to an entity now display on the same z-order as the entity
• Fix the brotherhood quest
• Achievements are now broadcasted over the community chat
• Combat trainer is back in Last Hope
• Reduce the cooldown and cost of Perfect Strike
• The Blood Master wont aggro while controlling a slave

Have fun!