Today when I recently started mages again I looked closely at some of the categories I never use. This lead me to look at stone skin and other close combat talents. I noticed that Stone Skin and Phantasmal Shield create an effect very similar the wyrmic ability Icy Skin. So I decided to try to play a mage character like a wyrmic or warrior. So far it bin pretty easy but I have not faced any hard bosses yet. The 2 times I have died was caused by my bad judgment and skeleton mages. Here is the character link:
http://te4.org/characters/931/tome/e0d028f3-25b6-11e0-a46f-001cc000edf0

If any one has any ideas of what I should try I am open to suggestions

Some how I didn't expect to be unable to kill or be killed by myself. But here I am standing in a small arena with no exit. It's master already lies crumpled at my feet and his body decays even as I write this. My clone remains however and he is unassailable while offering no serious threat. I can't leave while he is alive apparently and I can't finish this gods-forsaken quest either. Well to be fair it might be because we are undead already but you can sure bet I have come close to being destroyed several times before this. The conundrum continues and so I write out of boredom and frustration...

Reorganized talents a bit. Helped out an injured Loremaster. I'm given a choice between Disarm, a melee skill, and 2 ranged skills. Mind Sear's cooldown of 2 looks awesome but my failed attempt at a wilder summoner has left me with a bad impression of equilibrium-related skills. Disarm it is then.

As a sidenote, the sucessful quest completition text reads "press j to read the quest log" even though i've since mapped the quest log to Q. Same happens when i press = btw, i get "hotkey not defined - tou may define a hotkey by pressing m and following the instructions there" even though i've since mapped the talent bar to S.

Since i'm nitpicking - it would be great if i were given an indicationt hat talent catagories can be imprived only once. Oh well.

Almost got killed while alt-tabbing: i hit the teleport skill instead of remapping it. Looks like the game requires me to click ont he taskbar.

Run into a glade with 4 honey trees. I've been hacking bees and bears for 10 minutes now. Make that 15. My reward was an orange pointy har called Pitchfurnace. I'll be keeping my rough leather cap of 20% resist stun.

Found a house full of cutpurses. Hah! I far- er, flame at your general direction.

Failed an escort mission: the NPC was suicidal, run straight into a glade of honey trees. I did my best but once he was down i teleported outta there asap.

Gah, failed another one, 2 squares away from the portal. I hate sand drakes. My @ icon keeps disappearing after i recover from blindness.

Got a third escort mission in a row. I better not fail this one! ...died from poison 3 steps away from the stairs. Oh looks, it's the dungeon boss. No wonder. A part of the screen turned blue and i died again.

This time when i saw the blue spell i climbed up the stairs to rest. When i came back the spell was still there. Thankfully Stunning Blow managed to stun the monster and gave me the time needed to finish it. It dropped a pair of boots called frost treads. Had to dump 3 points into dex to wear them. +1 Light radius, nice. Would hae preferred the extra 2 lives though.

Came back to the town - elemental time. It takes 2 flame spells to take them down. With a bit of dancing around house corners i managed to take even the big one. Now to see how Angolwen's jewlery shop works.

Gah, the staff shop had Gwai's Burninator! That would have been handy 5 minutes ago against the elementals. Oh well, i can spare 50 gold, let's try this on other, innocent creatures.

Made an opal ring int he process, much better than the +3 con stitution one i've been wearing for ages now. Let's hit the maze next door. Found a Behemoth Hide at the 2nd level. This is fast,i just keep clicking towards the bottom right and mow down everything. One creature at a time makes this a piece of cake. At level 5 i found an orange armor but it's no match for the Behemoth. Found an orange dagger too.

Wait, did i just kill the dungeon boss? he dropped the steel helm of garkul. I guess i have to put a point in heavy armour now. Finally, this last level up allowed me to have enough Strength to equip that voratum greatsword i've been lugging around. Let's find the teleport rune back to the surface.

Angolwen is selling interesting amulets but i prefer my current one. According to the quest log i have to visit the sandworm tunnels now but since my previosu character died there i'll for the hidden city mentioned in the "storming the city" quest. WHile searchign for it i run into the thieves/merchant quest. So i went to Last Hope to see how he was doing after rescuing him. His shop is kind of... random.

Hey it turns out Angolwen was the city mentioned inthe quest. Duh. The head-honcho teleported me to a mountaintop - wow, lotsa lighting-themed enemies around here. Fiery Hands & Flame to the rescue. Is there a recall rune in this level? Oh well, rod of recall, back to Derth, they seem to be doing fine. No new entries in the questlog - but i don't want to do the sandworms!

A random wolf ambush bumped me to level 20. Looks like i'll buy that divination telent category afterall. Run into a crypt. Nothing bad can come out of this. Died after 10 turns to some disease spell. Died again. Noticing that the orb of recall is still recharging.

Managed to survive the level. Felt reassured and went down the stairs. Lost my remaining two lives in a couple of rounds. Next time i'll be less cocky and stick to the questlog order.

On the positive side i unlocked the storm wizard class, i'll give it a go next time.

Note: very weird, i can edit comments but not actual blog posts. Apologies, i'll dump this over here:

Killed Bill the Troll and gained 3 levels in a row. He gave me another orange belt. I think i prefer my girdle of power to this girdle of calm waters.

Went back to town to sell some stuff then entered the nearby ruins. Stumbled upon a phial of darkness ont he first level.

Level 8 died to skeleton mages guarding a locked room.

Stuck a class point to arcane dexterity. The effect on Flame and Lightning spell damage was minimal.

Turns out there's still wizards around, they live in a town called Angolwen. Better check it out. Bought a nice Healing infusion to replace the Regeneration one.

Run into another injured seer. I wonder what will happen if i take the same reward twice? Will it stack or will the reward be completely wasted? Woops, looks like it's wasted. Meh, that could have been +4 to magic.

Something blinded me and i died next turn. When i resurrected i was still blinded. Oh, it's a sand drake. Well hello there, what are you doing at level 2 of Kor'pul? He breathes sand which blinds me again. 4 turns after i can see again. Well, sort of, i can't see my @ icon. Time to dump some points into constitution; i pump it to 23 to enable the generic talent "Health".

Note to self: when resurecting, remember to switch arcane combat on.

Leveled up; put some points into strength to unlock arcane feed. I wonder if i can have 2 sustained talents working at the same time. Turns out i can. Great, less manasurge rune micromanagement.

Bah, two levels doswn i'm still using manasurge like crazy. Also i found a second Wintertide Phial. Guss i'll be selling this one. Or both - i find this dwarven lamp i found much more convenient.

Saw an spider, moved in to whack it. It had some nasty spells. Turns out it was the dungeon boss, called Shade. That healing rune i bought from Angolwen really came handy. It dropped a feathersteel amulet. Looks like i won't be having any encumburance problems with this character.

Level 12: realized i have a category point. Gain access to conveyance. Pumped magic enough to learn teleport. Maxed Fire & Lightning with the remaining class points. Feeling quite mighty atm!

Made an alchemist. Saw he has a mandatory golem pet and scrapped him.

Made a fighter but he died at level 1. On the plus side i now know i can't go upstairs to the map while poisoned.

Made an archer. I don't know where to put talent points to make him any different from my dead slinger.

Made an arcane blade. Still having trouble seeing where i should spent talent points but at least they are different than those of the archer/slinger. I'll stick with that atm. Hope i won't get killed in level 1 this time.

As a sidenote a "random" option wouldn't hurt.

Put the extra category level into magical combat and pumped arcane combat to 5/5. Died at level 4 to rattlesnake.

Apparently at level 5 i get 2 class skills. I put 1 into flame and 1 into lightning.

Run into a seer lost in the woods. He's offered some training for helping him out. Picked the divination category reward. The category is still grayed out and i can't put any points in the skills. I don't get it.

Completing "an apprentice task" will cause you to fail "the curse of magic." Go figure. It ought to fail you for giving your first item to the apprentice, just to keep me from wasting time and effort...

So I'd been sending Darkgod some difs that where from b18 and it was a headache. Finally learned to compile on windows though so now I can actually use my SVN for something other then just checking out incoming changes.

I ran into a few pitfalls while learning to compile though, namely once the exe is produced you need to copy the dll files over from a release copy. Another issue I had was that I downloaded the wrong SDL library (it was for windows but not for mingw). Aside from that it was easier then I imagined and took less time then I thought it would. None of the libraries require installation, just unpacking. The only thing that needed to be installed was mingw.

Anyway, I think keeping things up to date will help keep me motivated to finish up the chronomancer and make things a lot easier for Darkgod and myself.

I am finding the order you do things in is incredibly important.

My last character Smashface, a level 13 fighter skelly (made for the fighter report week on the forums) had to be put down (as a rabid dog) after discovering that he would not be able to obtain the rod of recall which basically hosed him for the rest of the game. He was on his way to completing the antimagic quest, had already done the fortress (barely surviving vs a nigh unkillable boss!!) and had done the maze, the old forest and the cursed/merchants quests. He obtained 2x Hymn of preservation from escorts while losing one escort quest to a suicidal warrior.

After this fiasco, I have decided the order in which this character needs to be built is as follows:

+ Get out of the start-up dungeon. (level 5 after killing the boss waiting near the exit.)

+ Prepare before you leave the start-up dungeon: Make sure to collect enough staves/jewelry to do the apprentice mage quest and complete it on exiting the start-up dungeon. Also try and do a vault if you can find one that has infusions to replace your runes with so you can at least have some defenses while on the antimagic quest. I have found infusions to be incredibly rare outside of vaults, though very infrequently you can find them lying about on the floor.

+ Go get the antimagic quest AFTER completing the mage quest. You might end up having to do the trapped quest early because walking around looking for the apprentice mage can take quite awhile since he spawns within a huge radius of Anglowen.

+ Be sure to get the orb of scrying asap (you automatically qualify since you should have picked up the Cloak of Deception from your dead master's corpse.

+ Do the Trollmire! (be wary of using gifts from escorts yet. You can have them but you can't use them or you will negate the antimagic quest.)

+ Do the maze. It is harder than some of the other starting dungeons but it is slightly more rewarding and you can find some interesting items there on occasion. The Labyrinth boss is not a pushover but if you get a little lucky you should be able to stun him which will give you time to back away from him/heal/regen/etc. Shield Wall x4-5 is essential to keep yourself from being smushed here.

+ Then do the old forest. The hardest part about this are the nests and escort quests. The combination can get you killed if you are trying to keep your escort alive (almost impossible in some scenarios as they are prone towards extreme depression and suicidal tendencies because of some drama in their recent past.)

+ You should be able to do the fortress now, and since you don't need to breath it should not be too much trouble to get to the next level from the water filled parts.

Be ware of He Who Walks (orange (h)orror/wurm) as he can kick your butt even if you are maxed out in shield wall etc. Other than him the level shouldn't be too hard.

The boss below on the other hand is either easy or hard depending on whether you can get him stun-locked. Not an easy feat I found, though I was able to do so readily with a berserker at the start of beta 18.

After capturing the Fortress you should be level 15-16 which is minimally right on time for the antimagic quest (since you can't take it before level 5 as a skelly) though perhaps a bit early. I haven't tried it since I failed with my rogue but I suspect a skelly fighter will have an easier time of it. You might want to do the other two Into the Darkness quests first to level up for better results. The two last monsters I hear are the hardest.

Anyway I plan to follow this on my NEXT skelly fighter in an attempt to make a character report for the forums use.

Run into the worm queen right next to the stairs. I managed to nail her while blinded but got killed in the process. When i respawned i got instakilled. Respawn, instakill again. And again. In a wtf moment i stopped hitting the respawn button - the worms continued to move around while i was dead?!

I waited it out, once they dispersed i managed to somehow get up the stairs. Noticed i had zero (0) health. Rested, got downstairs, killed the rest of the worms, the quitems were gone.

I lost my final two lives buried in crumbling tunnels while searching for the teleport exit.

Adding insult to injury, the wilder summoner istarted died before reaching level 2.

I think i'm in a maze. Doesn't look like the "secret town to the southwest" to me...