new player, just got my first win (RL/nightmare). what now?

[lucaszuip]

in the past 2 weeks i started and quickly fell in love with this game. less confusing than ADOM, higher stakes than underrail (no permadeath there). today, after about 50 hours, 35 of which on steam/with an account (was playing the free game first) i finally beat the game for the first time.

I played a shadowblade on nightmare/roguelike and had a blast. incredibly tanky, mobile, high damage, slippery. after trying doombringer, bulwark and archmage this one just felt overpowered by comparison. in the last half of the game i almost never dropped below 50% and when i did i could quickly leave and heal back to full in 2-3 turns, then decide to either reset or go back in. most mobs didnt even hit me as i had 100+ defense and could silence+oneshot most spellcasters. definitely made some mistakes though, i feel like invis and mirror image were useless, conditioning didnt do much of anything for the amount of points, and i should have gotten chants way way earlier (only did so at 34). here is the character:

https://te4.org/characters/386064/tome/ ... aa2743b0ec

now im wondering what to do next? i unlocked a TON of classes and several races in this playthrough, but my motivation to try again is not there atm. i already beat nightmare, but insane seems extremely daunting, especially if i start playing other classes as i dont want to play shadowblade again. i feel like replaying nightmare with other classes will lead to boredom (been there, done that) but starting insane will lead to endless low lvl deaths while experimenting with builds, as insane does not seem like a good difficulty for experimentation. what do you guys think? is there room for figuring out builds and experimenting on insane or is that more the realm for optimal "solved" builds? i am not a fan of using step by step guides so maybe i should stick to nightmare.

[mckwack]

I'd say go with Insane/Adventure, so you'd have a little bit of leeway to see whether your current build could survive Insane, or whether you'd need to experiment with re-building your character.

Another option would be to experiment with new race/class combinations to see if you can build something even better than your current build that could survive Insane.

Otherwise simply concentrate on unlocking everything else that you haven't unlocked yet (the DLC's new races and/or classes could be a good start).

OR, try the "Ember of Rage / EoR" campaign, which is totally different than the standard "Age of Ascendancy / AoA" campaign. It'll be a fresh new start building a fresh new race/class combinations that are not present in AoA (EoR classes can later be unlocked to be playable in AoA and vice versa, however you will never be able to play EoR races in AoA and vice versa either).

Options, options..

PS congratulations, by the way, for your first win!