MA Ulm - you called me a forge what?

[Baalz]

Oh, perhaps I wasn't clear. You definitely can't afford everything I suggest is beneficial on your pretender and get the scales you need, you have to pick out of the choices as to what is most important for you. I would not at all suggest going with heat and misfortune, that will significantly cut into your vital income. I'd probably go with something like order-3, production-3, drain-3, death-3, dom-4, E4 N4 S3 D3 F2 A2 W2.

The blessing is the critical factor that puts you up into the "almost invincible" category rather than "really tough". When you're talking about a 12 hitpoint guy, the difference between taking a hit every 3-4 turns while regenerating 1 point per turn is *huge* compared to taking 2 hits every 3-4 turns while not regenerating. Using winged boots and a lucky pendant (again, a huge difference in halving your hits...plus it's cheap) you don't have a whole lot of choices for more reinvig and regen, and nothing using your smiths to forge. To be honest, I just find the cost/benefit for the smith thug with no blessing is too high with his mortality rate. You could make the call that you think other options are better an opt not to use the holy smith thugs, but its hard to argue the cost of the blessing is too high if you do plan to use them.

Additionally, having an E4 pretender helps a lot in casting the larger spells you might be considering like Earth Blood Deep Well or Forge of the ancients or iron angel. Of course you can always forge boosters, but one extra level often makes such endeavors *much* cheaper rather than depending on an elemental staff or ring of wizardry. Finally, as you may have noticed you'll want to be spending a bunch of earth gems, so having E4 on the guy you already planned to send extensively site searching is hard to classify as a waste.