Please help a newbie

[skein]

Also make sure you learn to switch to your golem every once and a while and wander around. Golem builds are just as diverse as other builds. Your gear and skill set can modify widely.

For instance if you just happen to find many alchemists escorts one fun thing to do is give the channel staff skill to your golem then bump the arcane tree instead of the str tree. A golem can make very good use of a good staff if he is built right.

Bombs are incredibly damaging once you get 5/5/5/o in bombs. With a good late game build you can consistently hit for 4 figure damage and I have managed over 5k on a good crit bomb raw wearing crit gear.

Making your fist couple of category points extra run/inscription slots lets you run away easily. Using your golem to scout makes surprises much less common.

[greycat]

Fixed the stores silliness

... which silliness, exactly?

I opened just a few shops around lvl 10 , but even now at lvl 20 there's not really any better stuff in shops than what I find destroying enemies

Hmm. Well. Generally I find the stores to be crammed full of green, blue and purple gear. However, finding an actually useful piece of equipment (even if it's purple, it may not have the right properties for your character) can still be a needle/haystack thing. That's why you wait as long as possible, then do it all at once -- so you have all the haystacks laid out before you. Expect it to be tedious and time-consuming.

Typically, runes and infusions that I find in stores beat those I've found in the dungeons at this point in the game. For example I'm lucky to have found one single teleport rune, and shielding runes? Are you kidding? None. But the rune stores will typically have some. Regen infusions are a bit more common in the dungeons, but the stores usually have better ones at this time, so they can be upgraded. (Later, of course, monster drops will dominate stores.)

[lukep]

They no longer scale to level, now they are the same for every character, just changing on restock.

EDIT: changed in SVN. It still scales to your level in b43.

[Mewtarthio]

Assuming you play SVN, right? I think b43 has the usual scaling.