a review from a newcomer - and some suggestions

[magelike]

How does this character do damage (especially before you got the Crystalline set)? What kind of numbers do you get?

If you check out the talents, Slow is the primary AoE damage spell: it does 60 temporal damage for 12 turns (=720 total), and it was even better when I wore the +0.2 amulet of mastery.

Attacking-wise, it didn't take too long to get my bump-attacks to do 200+ damage per turn. I did rely on "damage on hit". For example, Weapon Folding does 22 temporal (44 total), Gleamwish of charged psionic shield does 8 light, 6 fire (28 total), ring of blasting 3 lightning, 7 physical (20 total), Steel Helm of Garkul 5 physical (10 total). Just adding those up give 102 damage per turn. You can't see my secondary weapon set, but I think it's a mindstar set which has good on-hit damage as well as burst damage. Since accuracy is based off of Wil, my attacks virtually always hit, and the base weapon damage--while not a lot by "normal" weapon standards--has high APR so added to the damage total. If I pushed it, I think I could get around 250-300 damage per turn (consisting of a variety of damage types), which is perfectly sufficient. Flurry works great with this arrangement. One of the main advantages of bump-attacking, though, is the paradox recovery from Weapon Folding.

Being a Temporal Warden, however, isn't about mindlessly bump-attacking everything to death, it's about controlling the field of battle (er, time of battle?). Dimensional Step and Temporal Wake let me position myself and kill the most dangerous enemies first. If I get overwhelmed, I can Banish enemies away, run away (multiple options, including Haste), or be clever with Wormhole. Single enemies generally aren't too dangerous and can be bump-attacked to death (even if it takes a few turns). If they are dangerous, then Heroism Infusion, Haste, Slow, Stop, Flurry, etc. generally does the job. Invigorate is great if I need to increase the availability of talents.

On a final note, this character was built to withstand hits and recover quickly. Heh, this actually makes Displace Damage (38% to reflect half the damage received to a nearby enemy) a relatively potent attack!

Hey, thanks a lot for the in-depth response. I'm gonna have to try something like this out later.

[SageAcrin]

I'd highly suggest trying to dual set staff and two mindstars.

Celerity makes swaps extremely friendly, and swapping into staff every time you cast means a lot of extra Temporal Wake/Slow damage.