I've been playing a lot of magical types. The variety of tactics is fun, I enjoy pets (even if, like children, they want to make me rip my hair out at times), and I find killing stuff at a distance to be personally rewarding and fulfilling. However! At around level 3, I find myself meeting nastier critters, who can kill me at a distance. I've lost a few characters (I always play DM/permadeath) to Octos, some of the blobbies, and especially those dang Djinn Fizzes. Seems like it doesn't take more than one or two acid attacks to take me out. So! What are some defensive strategies? Are there good skills I'm missing out on that can buff me up? For the record, my current adventurer, Pernil, has staves, golemancy, mathemagic, Promethean, magic training, blood magic and alchemy. He's on level 3, and a little scared, but still alive!
Best defense is a good offense. Focus on killing any casters in your line of sight immediately before dealing with other enemies. Unlimited healing (psionics, fleshsmithing, wand lore) and escape methods (burglarly, invisibility potions) help too.
Put a damage-over time on the enemy, or lay a trap that they can walk into (e.g. exploding rune, summon a pet), then get out of LOS. Or just stay at full health; casters are scary but they shouldn't be that scary on level 3, djinn fizzes aside.
I find that keeping Meatshield up at all times helps a lot in terms of survivability. Also, if you know that there are monsters on the floor with a specific ranged attack, you can try to wear equipment that gives resistance to its element, if the random number generator allows it.
Sight Range. The further you can see something, the less likely you get blasted to death without knowing. Which is why 80% of the mages pick astrology just for radiance aura.
Radiant Aura isn't a bad idea. It will stun foes that do manage to reach you (if you're being careless or what have you), plus it makes ALL your spells more effective by increasing their range. Also makes any Teleport spell more powerful for the same reasons. Just don't put any points into it
Meatshield is dangerous to rely on, because the extra HP it gives will go away if you get hit too much...but you want the extra HP in case you get hit! So exactly when you need the HP, it's about to go away...basically, it's a trap disguised as a spell.
A small boost? It's +4! For that reason alone, I think meatshield is a great spell for warriors. Even if your Magic Power is 0, +4 regen is pretty handy.
Yeah, but +4 still leaves you at only 1 HP/9 turns (1/3 on Dwarven). Compared to something like Lively Regen, that's small!
On Going Rogue, base health regen is 1 point per 13 turns. With the +4 from Meatshield, it's 1 point per 9 turns. That's an improvement of a whopping 44%...except that 1 point per 9 turns is still absolutely terrible. As 123stw notes, even Wand Lore does better, giving 23HP per 80 turns (effectively 1 point per 3.5 turns) via Coral Wands. Alchemy with the appropriate (and hilariously plentiful) ingredients gives 20HP/turn. Psionics requires two skillpoints invested (though one of them gives you the gamebreaking Psychokinetic Shove), and then gives you 36HP per 9 turns and 15 mana (base cost). Bottom line is, Meatshield's healing effects are terrible on Going Rogue. Less so on the lesser difficulties; on Elvish you go from 1 point per 5 turns to 1 point per 1 turns, an improvement of 500% and enough regen that you can basically ignore everything else. Even on Dwarfish you get an improvement of 233%, and 1HP per 3 turns is pretty decent.
Knit Tissue is the worst of the healing spells at 5 + .25MP hitpoints healed and with an associated debuff. Sure, it's the only scaling healing spell in the game and it scales strongly, but mages only really need healing spells very early on, at which point it's just bad (and warriors of course will never have the magic power for its scaling to matter). Fortunately the debuff doesn't stack, so chain-casting it can get your HP up reasonably quickly. Still: No skill investment: Alchemy ~> Wand Lore (Wand Lore is better early on especially if you start with a coral wand) 2 point investment: Alchemy (doubled healing potion production rate) > Psionics > Fleshsmithing I don't count Meatshield as a healing skill on GR. It's just a trap to trick you into wasting mana. A theoretical mage with 40 magic power would cast Knit Flesh for 3 mana and restore 15HP, though the first casting would effectively only restore 12 due to the debuff. That's really not all that impressive.
Wand lore scales as you get more coral wands. You can easily use 1 2 to 3 times before recharging if you got spares. So if you actually want to dump 2 points in it like you do with alchemy, then you can get even more healing with like 10 5 burnrate corals sitting in your inventory.
All of my characters that have invested at all in alchemy have had more healing potions than they know what to do with. Keep in mind that those potions are an instant 20HP heal (as opposed to Coral's 23HP over 10 turns). More importantly, they stack in the inventory, making them far more compact than the one-slot-per-wand that you get with Wand Lore. Alchemy is pretty absurdly good at healing once you get past the first floor, which tends to be short on ingredients.
Well, Alchemy stack nicely providing you make them all always, and you have roughly 200 health potions of them by end game. Otherwise you are stuck with a pile of iron, a pile of ore, a pile of rust, a pile of alcohol, some vitae, fruits, etc. And of course every other ingredient you are going to need for everything else you intend to make. The difference between wand lore and alchemy is that, with wand lore you get something right away and only put 2 points in at the end (like around floor 7 for melee). While alchemy doesn't do anything early on and need the 2 points quite early. You really need to roll that coral wand at the very start to take full advantage of wand lore. There's also fungal of course, which might be less maintenance than alchemy if use moderately.
Fungal is the bomb. 3 separate ways to heal (Fairywodger, Blungecap, and Prince), Sagacity boost (Mob-Bonnet), mana recovery (Night cap), emergency backup invisibility (Hoglanterns), and in a real emergency if you must, you can pop 3 Lobstermanes, a Fell Truffle, 3 Plumber's, 3 Grunge Ears, and 3 Blungecaps and wade into battle like a Warrior for a few turns -- and come out with more HP than you had when you started.
Back to the original question: hide behind pets. That's the quick and easy solution to any ranged problem. Monsters can't fire through other monsters. You'll also want to use a healing potion whenever you have a chance of dying from a single ranged attack. You should also consider Psionics too. Two reasons: 1: Its main attacks don't require line of sight, it just requires that you can see the enemy. In other words, your own pet won't get in the way of you. 2: The second skill lets you damage and push enemies back, but it also stalls the enemies for that turn too. So with enough mana, you can kill a group of ranged enemies without them getting a chance to fire back at you. Oh yeah, and like the other guys said - astrology's first skill is great for what you're trying to do. Half because of the extra sight, and half because it's on-melee-damage ability is really really good for a staff wizard. If you're considering what skills to dump... well, magic training is good for wizards that don't need more skillsets, but not worth it if you do. You could probably also ditch... Golemancery, since Promethean already gives you a pet. Mathemagic sucks for the early game, but for a wizard-focused Going Rogue character it becomes insanely powerful in the late-game, so I'd keep it.
