[Baalz]

Oh yeah, I love me some forge lord. I find when I play one though at a certain point its hard to justify using him for anything other than forging rings of wizardry (for 17S I think?) and crystal shields, which makes the opportunity cost of sticking other paths on him high. For dropping big combat spells crystal shields are often better than elemental staffs for you (cheaper, leaves a hand free). Even once you've got a good stock of RoW yourself you can usually trade them for a massive profit - even alchemizing. Just my experience using the forge lord...I have a hard time really leveraging extra paths.

Oooh, I've also been burned too often to take strong death + strong misfortune. Completely unscientific and antectdotal, but it seems like in my testing d3/m3 cripples you in year one around 25% of the time. D2/M2 is probably not that far off.