Have you tried Thalore-reaver? This combination seems to be pretty powerful. And, of course, solipsist is really neat.

This. Very well put.

I disagree with you wholeheartedly.
One of the main reasons ToME is such a great game is the amount of depth it provides, we have that depth thanks to all the classes/races and their skills,
and the ability to build in more than one way just adds to that. Multiple choices are a good thing, if everything is streamlined and simplified we'd end up with something bland and boring, with no replayability. A lot of people are going to disagree with me on this probably, but there's a lot of roguelikes out there where your choices are few and far between with barely any choices between classes, or where every skill is a passive and races/classes hardly matter other than having x or y passive, this has 0 charm to me since everything feels samey and that's both boring and uncreative aside from roleplay value which honestly dies off after a while. One of the reasons I've been able to spend so much time in ToME is because of its wide array of skills of all types.

I've always been reluctant to listen to people who feel the need to shove WoW into everything, because WoW both has nothing to do with ToME nor should be taken as a standard for everything. I don't think anyone should be able to just pick up something new and excel in it right away, I'm sure this is true for WoW as well. These things require some thought and experience to grab ahold of generally, and this is fine, otherwise you should probably be looking for simpler incarnations of the genre or a different genre altogether, but to each their own I guess.

I honestly don't feel like going through all the new skills at times, but I think it's either just me being lazy or not being all that interested in the class to begin with, but more often than not it's worth checking things out and learning them, specially the newer classes which keep getting more and more fun.
As far as the "default build" thing goes, I'm fairly sure something like that was in the process of being implemented or thought about at some point in the recent past so you may want to look into that and the people involved/interested.

I'm curious as to how you arrived at the conclusion that ToME has reached a saturation point where new players give up. I assume there is anecdotal evidence involved, but I'm not clear as to the process you're describing. A plethora of choices and options (of which you can only take advantage of two at a time, race and class) somehow affects the ability of new players to learn? If anything -- and I'm speaking anecdotally and deductively -- the complex options available make it *easier* for new players. Temporal mage too difficult for you to manage? Switch to bulwark, or the relative simplicity of an alchemist. Frustrated by the lack of ranged attacks to help keep you safe until you can work out the nuances of combat? Try an archer or archmage. Struggling to deal with hordes of enemies? Try a summoner or necromancer to create allies. And so forth. The process of trial-and-error is always going to remain in an RPG -- it's not a linear rail-shooter where you just have to let the plot carry you along. And "ideal" builds are going to vary greatly between players. Do you concentrate on shadows and ranged magic with a necromancer, or on undead summoning and avoidance? One-handed weapons and off-weapon or two-handed weapons for a beserker? Stealth and surprise, or straight-up confrontation with a emphasis on avoidance for a rogue? And so forth. Theory-crafting is done as much through personal preference and experience as it is through, well, theory. A better approach, I think, would be to post your own ideas about what does and doesn't work on the forum or wiki if you want to help people who'd rather learn from the experiences of others than surf the learning curve themselves.

Personally, I think it's just preference. You're playing for whatever reason, and you find sticking to a few tried-and-true classes fulfilling. Others are intrigued by the variety of choices available to them. Either way, a new player will have to invest *some* effort into the game. If s/he has no desire to do so, perhaps ToME -- and rogue-likes in general -- simply isn't the best choice for him or her, even with the suggestion of the creators telling them exactly what to do.

I've spent enough time in this game to at least give every class a try now, and it doesn't really seem to me like there's that much excessive text in skill descriptions- a lot of them just do so many things that they need to have long descriptions (mindslayer aura skills for example). I admit that I haven't read skill descriptions in a while (beyond hopping in game just now to check a few of them), so I'd love a few examples of what you're talking about, but from what I've seen, the majority of skill descriptions seem to consist of a couple sentences (at most) of flavor text describing what it does and the important details of what the skill actually does.
On the topic of too many skills, I think that if you were to look at the number of skills across all classes, there definitely is a ridiculous number of skills. However, looking at each class individually, most have a pretty normal number of skills for an rpg character. For example, mindslayer has 55 skills (plus whatever you get from extra skill trees picked up along the way, as well as however many race skills your race has), anorithil gets 40, etc. For comparison to other games, classes in guild wars 2 get a minimum of 4 different weapons with 2-5 skills per weapon, and then a choice of three skills from somewhere around 20 utility skills, one healing skill from around 5, and one elite skill from around 4ish. In dungeons and dragons online, many classes can almost fill the screen with bars full of skills- I used 10 bars of at least 10 skills/usable items each when I played. For comparison to another single player game, skyrim, the baldur's gate games, and plenty more provide you with similar numbers of skills. There's plenty of other examples, but the point is, you don't really have THAT many skills compared to other games. (Also, would you rather each class be forced into using a small set of skills or have the choice of multiple skillsets? You're not using every skill a class has to offer in most situations.) In this game, I tend to find myself cycling between 10-20 skills in a normal fight near the end of the game, which isn't terrible at all in my opinion.

Thankfully you can skip it all. :) Some of us actually like the creative effort put into the game. Lore is good.

Looks great!
The only thing left on my wishlist now is a patch to address the skill bloating.

It's not only that there are too many skills, if we print out the text attached to each of the around 50 abilities each character has, we get a small novel. Too many buttons, too much text, too much 80's in game design in that aspect. Less is more. Streamline a bit please, I got the point where i refuse to try out new classes, because I simply don't want to read 10 pages of a novel called "skill descriptions".

I did manage to unlock it with a Thalore Hero ("No" by name) remembering to not dally this time on the floor above. The unlock itself was relatively easy ...getting there not so much as I had to deal with rare oozes growing with no PD to move me out of the range (except for a nonmagical and erratic one on my cloak.) Finding the stairs was the hard part.

I'd rather just skip the class altogether as a bad experience. But thanks for the advice.

I'm very happy to see this! Paradox mage has always been my favorite class and I look forward to seeing how they play in 1.3.

Wyrmics are kinda bad but on normal at least you should be able to get far with them somewhat easily with the right build. Put points in bellowing roar, sand breath, ice wall, lightning speed, and dissolve, those are the good skills. Pick one of the weapon trees to invest in. If you pick shield offense (which I suggest), put points in shield pummel for the stun and at least 1 point in assault for the damage burst. If you pick the 2h, get some points in stunning blow and death dance. You don't need to max every skill that you plan to use, look at how much it improves before investing points, most active skills work fine with just 3 points invested. You can always max stuff later.
Fungus tree is fine with 5/1/1/1 for a while, eventually you want to boost the 3rd skill in that tree for more equilibrium regen and faster inscription use.

Use bellowing roar and sand breath to soften up the enemies and apply debuffs, pop the fungus regen and close in to melee with movement infusion (for the stun resist) or rush if you're fighting something that can't stun/pin you. Dissolve and assault is 6-7 hits in 2 rounds which is usually enough even for tough enemies. If you find yourself in trouble you can use ice wall to cut off any pursuit and your lightning speed to run away. Bear in mind that all the skill related advice applies to 1.2.5 wyrmics, they will change (improve) significantly in 1.3.

In terms of inscriptions, go for regen, wild, movement and shield/heroism. Don't go AM as you already have fungus. Early on you also want to load up on +hp items. If you see some in the shop, transmog gems and buy them. Purchasing good inscriptions and +hp items is always a good investment.

I'd also suggest posting in the forums instead of here, as you'll get a lot more people replying and hopefully giving useful advice.