Help! About to reach level 29 with Archmage and need advice

[smayonak]

Hello, I'm trying to reach level 30 and have a character about to reach level 29. Here's a link to the character: http://te4.org/characters/149336/tome/f ... 9852eeae46

I've died 6 times so far and have no remaining lives yet. The whole experience is stressful and all the deaths occurred because of stupid mistakes normally related to lag and slowdown incurred by left clicking on the map too often and getting hit a bunch of times without shields up (and not using auto-shield). There's three things I can do at present:

• Go after the Master.
  
  Go to the Temporal Rift.
  
  Go to the Far Portal.

There's quite a few items in my possession at the present. There's a jacket called "the Untouchable" that creates a Damage Shield equal to 130% of the damage inflicted on me, but I'm 3 strength points short of the requirement. It would be easy to swap in a +3 strength ring, but I'm not sure the jacket is worth it since I'd be sacrificing around 20 points of confusion or stun/freeze resistance. In my inventory there's also a few unique staves like the Staff of Destruction, but none seem as good as the random unique that I picked up.

I also made a tremendous number of build mistakes. I maxed out Displacement Shield and went with Storm instead of Wildfire. And my build focuses on lightning instead of fire. There's also two movement infusions and only a single Wild Infusion (physical).

Here are my questions:

* Are there any things I can do to better tackle the Master? I'm on level 4 of Dreadfell (cleared it out).
* Should I go to the Far Portal or Temporal Rift in Daikara?
* Do I have any equipment in my inventory worth using?
* Is Lucid Dreaming worth it? It looks like it is since it protects against getting sleeped but are there any enemies that use sleep?

Thanks!

[Dopaminka]

There's quite a few items in my possession at the present. There's a jacket that creates a Damage Shield equal to 130% of the damage inflicted on me, but I'm 3 strength points short of the requirement. In my inventory there's also a few unique staves available, but none are as good as the random unique that I picked up. But

I also made a tremendous number of build mistakes. I maxed out Displacement Shield and went with Storm instead of Wildfire. There's also two movement infusions and only a single Wild Infusion (physical).

Here are my questions:

* Are there any things I can do to better tackle the Master? I'm on level 4 of Dreadfell (cleared it out).
* Should I go to the Far Portal or Temporal Rift in Daikara?

Level 30 isn't that important just to beat Dreadfell, unless your build can't defeat The Master without some crucial prodigy (unlikely). Temporal Rift and especially Farportals is just asking for YASD. Seeing that you defeated Urkis - it's far more likely that an overleveled, overpowered rare will kill you, than the Master (who is fairly predictable and not the most dangerous boss in the game).

[smayonak]

Level 30 isn't that important just to beat Dreadfell, unless your build can't defeat The Master without some crucial prodigy (unlikely). Temporal Rift and especially Farportals is just asking for YASD. Seeing that you defeated Urkis - it's far more likely that an overleveled, overpowered rare will kill you, than the Master (who is fairly predictable and not the most dangerous boss in the game).

Thank you for the response! I'll try taking on the Master. I ended up equipping a ring that increased my strength so I could put on "the untouchable" jacket then removed the ring and strangely enough the jacket continued to remain on. I lost lucid dreaming... perhaps this is a mistake. We'll find out!

[smayonak]

Level 30 isn't that important just to beat Dreadfell, unless your build can't defeat The Master without some crucial prodigy (unlikely). Temporal Rift and especially Farportals is just asking for YASD. Seeing that you defeated Urkis - it's far more likely that an overleveled, overpowered rare will kill you, than the Master (who is fairly predictable and not the most dangerous boss in the game).

A status update: You were totally right. But it was really tough getting through that encounter(s). Avoiding any spoilers, it was really touch and go there with a fair amount of nasty surprises. Basically, it seems that the untouchable jacket kinda sucks. It seemed that it might allow the user to trigger a damage shield off a self-inflicted Fireflash, but it triggers after the damage is done, not before. What probably got me through the encounter was the tremendous number of damage shields, reflect shields, and disruption shield. Also healing items, wild infusions, and movement infusions. Even the Displacement Shield was surprisingly useful, although using it was an act of desperation and wasn't really a smart idea. The most important spell was without question Arcane Eye.

Thanks a lot! It feel as if a tremendous weight has been lifted.

[HousePet]

Temporal Rift should be easy by that level.

[SmallTownGuy]

Storm mage isn't quite as powerful as wildfire mage, but I wouldn't call that a build mistake. Just a class choice.

Only having a physical infusion may be a problem, though. Sometimes you just can't find a decent phys+mag and a mental anywhere.