Goon Arcane Blade Guide 1.3.3
Tips
This is mostly off the top of my head but since it took me several fucking days to finally win with one most of this should be right.
1-5: (Trollmire through Prox, pretty much): Took out point from Dirty Fighting becuase I'd never remember to use it, class pts into Arcane Combat/Flame evenly, pick up Heal ASAP, then get Armor Training by level 2 and Weapon Mastery by 3. When you kill Prox assuming you're cornac you'll be able to max Flame which is a pretty important point. You can fight Bill right away but if you find no +defense gear it'll be RNG. On runs where I had a shield by this level I put my cat point into shield defense and picked up shield bash, otherwise I waited.
6-10: (more starter dungeons): Max Arcane Combat. That pretty much goes without saying! A courtesy point in Rush helps because you never know when that'll come in handy. At 8 you can pick up Arcane Feed which is pretty important, not worth maxing immediately but a couple points in it right away is good because crit chance is always welcome. By 10 you should probably have Heal at rank 3 or so with everything else put into combat training, I tend to skip phase door for now because nothing should be dangerous enough to merit it. When you hit 10, spend the category point if you find any nice shield runes (or at worst, heal infusions I guess).
11-15: (finishing t1s, Ben, Assassin Lord, SWL/Maze shenanigans): If you're a shield build which is what I'm mostly speaking in terms of, 12 is the best level in the world because it means you get Assault. Hopefully you've been prioritizing strength! Afterwards you want to immediately get Arcane Destruction because they kinda go hand in hand. Destruction doesn't need to be maxed ASAP even if it does give a good chunk of physical power, as the damage from it doesn't go up per leveling. Similarly, Assault only scales so-so so there's no rush there either but the second point into it isn't terrible or anything. An extra point or 2 into Shield Bash isn't a terrible idea, nor is working on Riposte since ABs need it at 5 to get the extra counterattack as opposed to Bulwarks who only need it at 4. Welcome to having too many goddamn things that need points. Pray for t4/t5 weapon drops from chests in SWL and Maze.
16-20: (Old Forest, Ruined Dungeon, Slaver Compound if you decide to do it, Daikara): If you haven't picked up Teleport yet this is probably the time! Things are mostly in full swing at this point for you, and you can probably afford to run Shielding or Arcane Shield from the Aegis tree. On any rare that looks scary (mostly a ruined dungeon problem, or if you're doing something crazy like checking graves in old forest/daikara) don't hesitate to stand back and spam Flame because it's pretty decent damage! For Weirdling Beast, go in with Arcane Combat/Arcane Feed turned off and then turn them back on after he devours Fiery Hands because you can probably just gib him outright with those up due to Assault's overwhelming damage combined with Arcane Destruction.
21-26: With your 20 cat point grab the Step Up tree and then proceed to max it out while ignoring everything else because if you don't do this I will become an angry ghost and haunt you because Step Up is amazing. At 24 if your Blight resist is shitty and you're not confident don't even go into dark crypt. I did it once with basically 0% blight resist but I had Wrap of Stone for emergency stone tombing that saved my life but I seriously would not recommend it even though it can drop amazing shit. Urkis won't be terribly scary for you but keep in mind a phys/magical wild is pretty handy because Hurricane sucks shit, as he's pretty prone to being stunned (if you want to be a bigger dick and took the starting point out of Dirty Fighting, put it back in for this.)
Past that the order of things doesn't really matter as much, but past 20 is a good point to start grabbing Inner Power as well as putting more points into Rush. I usually don't start dipping heavy into Cunning until level 30+ so I leave Arcane Cunning at 1/5 freeing up some class points. Generics are pretty self-explanatory, I was afraid of picking up escort trees (and also got fucked over on anorithils) so I opted to max most of Aegis and pick up controlled phase door/teleport, but for the longest time I only had 1 or 2 points at most in both shielding and arcane shielding, and only 1 in the Aegis talent itself.
Yeah strength is really the big thing early on since Arcane Destruction is great and if you're shield build then Assault is a huge deal. After you've gotten those you can at least slow it down a bit to focus on your other stats. Lucking into equipment early on is really nice, too. With the change that lets you skip floors 1-2 of t1 dungeons after completing 3 of them, as an AB I tend to go back and do them anyway while hoping to thin the artifact pool or otherwise luck into some good rares. It's a little boring but it can be a big help! Also I kinda forgot to mention this but raise Combat Accuracy as needed, if you don't find gloves with amazing +acc you'll probably need 3 points in it in by your early-mid teens.
I still want to win with a dual-wielding AB but jesus christ throwing dexterty into their stat spread is awful.
Other Links
http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=38775 (version 1.0.5 guide)