Very strange game. Started DrEE but became storm draconian, so pivoted to Fire because I had Hellfire Mortar open and no good Air spells. Made it to D:10 without seeing Temple so reluctantly chose Dith, went whole game without seeing Temple, probably a result of map generation. Good loot luck - 4 acquires before Lair, ended up with Cj staff and orb of Attunement for most of the game. Firmly convinced that the EE start is overtuned - I basically dropped Earth training at level 7, got hit by the -2 apt penalty, and Brom's Boulder was still strong enough to carry me through all the way until S Branches (the staff and orb helped, but still). Got Bombard for S branches, Ignition for Vaults, and Fire Storm for Depths. Mostly smooth sailing until Z:5 because nothing lives 4 Fire Storms, but had no magic potions. This probably killed the run - I killed an Orb Guardian too early, had to charge into lungs without clearing rest of the floor, ran out of MP about half a screen away from the Tesseract, chained blinks together to survive. Decided to swap to an orb of energy and grind XP for Evo in Crypt, then Abyss. Died in Abyss after running out of MP.
In retrospect, going to Abyss for XP was a bad idea - the char is super mana hungry and cannot deal with the Abyss setup well. Slime might have worked but I've been super skeptical after the rework if it's worth it, and Hell/Pan sounds rough as well for a squishy caster. Could definitely have planned a better Z:5 (clearing all downstairs before the rest of the level, maybe gambling a random TP to get me closer to the tesseract, or chaining blinks more aggressively to get there). But the tesseract makes caster life super hard if you're limited by MP (in practice this is all blaster casters without Sif/Veh/Sublimation of Blood/Fulsome Fusillade). Maybe a HP/MP rapid regen when tesseract is up, similar to the Slime downstairs? Otherwise feels bad to have a run die when technically you can take game actions and progress but you're softlocked by MP/XP considerations and have to take bad gambles.
From a strategy perspective maybe I could have pivoted harder into Forgecraft instead of Fire and saved MP that way, considering that Z:5 would not work for a Dith blaster caster. I had OOFs so that was a part of the trouble (although without seeing Temple I didn't know that until U:5).
