The advice the other guy gave sounds good. I personally liked Magic Missle. If you keep it levelled, it does really good damage, at range, and is always available (although, you end up going through a lot of spirit points, so that can be a challenge).
As for Way of the Battlemage - I think that's more useful in FoV. I found when playing FoV that enemies got a lot harder, but with level 10+ WoBM, the extra 50%+ bonus would allow Fireball + Firewall to kill almost anything that wasn't a boss in one hit. Even the bosses get more manageable with WoBM - especially if you spam magic missle (and maybe magic blast, but I didn't take that - I tried magic blast for awhile, but personally, I find the recharge on it is just too long for what it does).
This totally depends on you, but I personally did spend some points on Dex and Str, for the armor bonuses, and for the Cond Body/Height. Reflex - because I hate having status effects like bleed, burn, poison, etc. Ind. Will takes care of most of the worst effects, but having some Cond. Body and Height. Reflex can help too.
I still had way more Int than Dex or Str though. I think towards the end of the game, I had like 25 or 30 points of 'natural' Str/Dex, and with armor/jewelry/etc I had like 40 or 60, which meant I had enough armor and status defense bonuses to really help.
If you really want to use a weapon, go for it. Mostly, I equipped one handed weapons and shields which gave me useful bonuses (like Int, magic damage, Ind. Will, mana regen, defense, etc).
One option which might be useful is taking Defensinve Posture and Healing - I found with a reasonablly decent set of armor, plus Def. Posture, + Healing, I could really tank enemies, which made Firewall a lot more useful (since I wasn't as likely to die quickly). Once I got the full Ulthring's set, and enchanted/charmed it, Defensive posture seemed a bit overkill, but it was nice earlier in the game when the armor still kind of sucked.
This might be stating the obvious for anyone who's already played the game, but one thing I found, once I got dragon form, was that in outdoor environments, spirit point consumption was not a problem - I had enough points to last me 2 - 3 battles, then I'd just morph into dragon and my spirit points would recharge in like 4 seconds (dragon form gets a massive spirit point regen bonus, probably because there is no dragon melee attack - everything uses mana). I had very little downtime between battles on the Flying Fortresses because of this - At the end of a couple battles, I'd be low on health, low on battle, but I'd hit healing, which would heal me about 60%, then morph to dragon, hit dragon healing and heal to 100%, and then morph back (total time about 5 seconds), where I'd have full health, full mana. This meant I didn't have to worry much about just mana dumping with magic attacks and heals (although for indoor dungeons, I'd rely a bit more on potions).
Once you get to about 70-80 Int points, plus a couple mana regen enchantments, maybe some Mana Efficiency Skill, even in human form you can regen mana so rapidly you almost never need potions - of course, you don't get there until significantly late in the game.
In FoV, I got to the point where there was no possible way for me to ever get low on mana - I'd literally regen faster than I could spend it.
Last edited by Lucreel; 12/04/11 10:35 PM.