Deaths:
Unfortunately, I didn't look closely enough at the buffs on a random unique in High Peak. The first time I hit him (which happened to be a crit) caused his disruption shield to fail and explode for something like 4000 initial damage. The shield rune and 54% arcane dropped the final damage dealt to character's health to a mere 1845 damage, still enough to kill him.
I understand that some people are looking at Disruption shield and thinking about how to revise it. Needless to say, I'm firmly in the camp that its "self penalty" should be reduced in some way.
He lost his extra life from the Blood of life in Limir's quest due letting health drop a little too low, and then getting hit by a burst of damage. Better play on my part could have resulted in that quest finishing without a loss of his only spare life.
Build:
I wanted to try out the new Spell/Stone talent tree with the Arcane Blade. Historically, I had used the Crystal Focus to get around high physical damage enemies. Grabbing Spell/Stone was at the cost of the Veteran Talent tree and Blood Frenzy talent (which doesn't really work without serious Stamina recovery) from my usual build.
I generally focus on bump damage (which doesn't use mana), shield runes supported by Aegis, probability travel, and telepathy when I can get it. This combination is able to handle Farportals in in almost a trivial manner. Generally only have to be truly cautious with the random bosses. But in b34 I found all the far portal bosses doable (and I ran through something like 20-30 of them). Of course, I didn't run into a random boss with disruption shield until High Peak.
I was quite happy with the net result from the Stone tree. Earthquake makes for an interesting alternative to Inferno. Less damage but more mitigation in the form of stuns. Also a bit easier on the mana bank. Needed to bump up Earthen Missiles to 5/5 because of Arcane Combat for the times when I did use it - otherwise I probably would have just let it at 1. Crystalline Focus was definitely worth it. It was a noticeable damage improvement.
The reduced durations due to saves I found nice. You're still going to be hit with 1 turn of the effect (even when it reports -1 turn. I was amused by that, although perhaps the display should be capped to report 0 rather than -1). I received Chant of Fortitude as an early reward and was quite happy with the results throughout the game.
Equipment selection:
I also tried out dual wielding after find an extremely impressive 1-handed randart waraxe. I used spare cash to buy the randart dagger to complimenting it. I parsed the log afterwards to find out what the fateful crit that triggered the disruption shield did damage wise (after resistances from the random boss):
Main Hand: 1052 physical + 23 from procs
Off hand: 170 Physical + 167 from procs
Total: 1412 damage
The newer Ego's are quite nice, but I'm finding it harder and harder to justify 2-handed weapons as magical effects on two 1-handed weapons continue to get better and have more synergy. Early and mid-game I was using Stunning blow non-stop, but late game, especially on enemies or with high saves reducing it duration to a single turn, it was less useful. The 60% damage boost every 5 turns was nice, but it fell to the wayside compared to the damage from synergistic 2 magical weapons had.
I was also surprised to find myself not using the Glory of the Pride. I had it, but I felt I had a more survivable setup with out it. Which was kinda refreshing. I think it was in part to more and better Ego types, results in better (and perhaps more common?) quality randarts.
General Feelings
I'm liking alot of changes to the game since my last run through. The fact that the Merchant doesn't try and impale himself on the Assassin Lord's daggers was an extremely welcome change. Greater variety in magic items was cool to discover.
As for the class itself, I admit to relying on Probability travel alot. If you removed that I'm not sure the build as is would be viable, or at least there would have been some farportal levels/bosses it would not have been able to handle. Certainly it would much more random relying on just teleport and phase door, which is generally bad with the permadeath roguelike option.
The open and closed trees at birth still feel odd. For example, I don't understand why Arcane Blades start with a Cunning tree already opened. And with the addition of the Spell/Stone tree, the class feels even more starved for category points. In some sense its good to have options in the trees, but I can't really imagine playing the class as anything but a Cornac (extra category point) or Skeleton (innate heal and shield to replace infusion slots - results in extra category points). The class always gets a big boost by going back West for the category point reward as well.
Overall, the class is certainly strong enough to win the game, at least with the Conveyance school. Other builds seem possible (I know several people advocate heavy Spellpower and Arcane Combat at high % triggering), so I'm somewhat surprised at why there are so few Arcane Blade winners.
Edited: Fixed final hit damage - I can't add apparently.