This was not only my first ToME win, but also my first win at any roguelike ever, and I've been playing them (horribly, no doubt) for going on a decade and a half. This win even got my 5-year-old daughter and my wife excited.
Wildfire is awesome. Burning Wake is awesome. Cleansing Flames is awesome. Fireflash is awesome. </thread> No, really, once I got those talents up and running, I was (almost) unstoppable. I still managed to go through 8 lives. The last two both came on High Peak 6 and nearly caused me to put my keyboard through the monitor, not realizing I had earned an extra life somewhere back there and also still hadn't used my Blood of Life. That boss was an AM Champion of Uhr'rok, a boss that seemed perfectly crafted to slaughter me. In a fit of stubbornness/stupidity, I still didn't put on my Ring of the Dead after coming back the last time. Fortunately, I didn't need it.
Most of everything between Dreadfell and High Peak was a cakewalk; a couple exceptions were a nasty melee guy in the prides where I tried healing through instead of teleporting away and...something else in there. I don't remember what. Oh, a combination of bad luck with a pride boss + a couple cryomancers taking turns freezing me + that 50% proc on Cleansing Flames missing several turns in a row. I successfully completed the Charred Scar event (I thought), so I about wet my pants when I entered High Peak 10 and Aeryn <spoiler>. I then pretty much jumped out of my chair and cheered when I got to the Inner Sanctum and she <spoiler>.
I certainly didn't make the best use of my build; in particular, I didn't have enough high-mana spells to get optimal use out of Distortion Shield, and my plan to use Time Prison on one of the final bosses failed the first cast and I forgot to try it again. /duh I also had an extra category point left when I went to the final fight, so I spent it on an infusion slot, then put the rune from the Temporal Rift quest in that slot, only to find out that takes a turn and I'd been blinded by one of the bosses. I also tend to forget about active effects, like half the halfling racials, so I probably would have been dead less often had I remembered to use them. /sigh So many tools, it's hard for me to remember to look through everything I have *before* I need it, instead of mashing keys and cursing.
I was concerned in the final fight (and really ever since I got the talent) about Burning Wake ticking off friendlies/neutrals. I certainly aggroed my share of sun pallies who couldn't resist running into the flames to "help" then got ticked off that they weren't smart^H^H^H^H^Hinvulnerable. I was quite happy to see that while Aeryn seemed to take a bit of damage, she didn't decide to kick my butt once the inevitable happened and she chased a boss into the fire. As for me, Wildfire kept me happy from mid-Dreadfell on; finding Firewalker (and later, Molten Skin) and Fiery Choker were just icing on the very tasty cake. The +hate/vim-on-crit unique ring finally replaced the tier 1 green ring of fire I'd been dragging around since the very early game; sadly, the +81 life proved to be the margin of survival more than once. O.o
Oh, and advice for other newbie archmages - ARCANE EYE IS THE BOMB. I'd read the description, "cannot see through walls", several times and thought it was stupid. Then I finally tried it on a vault in High Peak and realized it meant "can only see the room in which you place it", not "can't help you see what's on the other side of the wall even if you try to cast it there". Had I realized how it worked earlier, I probably could have saved myself plenty of deaths by simply not auto-exploring into bosses.
Last bit of noob advice - inspect all bosses and other uniques/rares, especially if you see a) they have Bone Shield, b) they are a corruptor, or c) they have tons of HP. Several times I inspected nasties only to see they had some surprising talent combos, ones which totally changed how I approached the fight (including a couple times I cheesed the fight by staying out of sight at the end of the corridor but not out of range of the radius of Inferno/Fireflash). There are some nasty combinations out there; Darkgod, I'm sorry (ish) for all those mean things I said about you, but I meant every single one of them.
Awesome game, awesome class, and awesome to finally win.
Now I need to try out a melee class or something; I can't imagine anything surviving some of those encounters up close, so I need to figure out how that works. Thanks for the awesome game - when I get some disposable cash, I'm definitely sending some your way.[edit]I'd be remiss if I didn't thank SageAcrin for his thoroughly helpful archmage guide, enough of which finally sank through my dense skull to give me a modicum of direction and an inkling of strategy. Thanks a bunch for your contributions.