Greetings, all! Thankee for your kind replies!
Starting my team with 8 SPD each helped me do Midnight Oil + flaming staff shot. Before leaving for the Undead lands near Cyseal, I got all my casters Wildfire, which is effectively, "Cast on turn one. On future turns, use two or more spells/melee specials." In addition, I made my characters 'self-contained,' meaning my Water/Air Mage does his Water/Air stuff without relying on another character to set up or finish a combo. It's worked so far.
Doing all the stuff in Cyseal that I know about (before departing toward Silverglen) got me to level 3.5ish.
Saving and reloading before treasure chests (and saving in a separate slot once I found soemthing interesting) tremendously helped: It's how I got 2 legendary items at level 2, and probably a few more legendaries (and one Unique!) since then!
