Well, after reading up a bit more about Battle Mages in Sacred, it turns out they’re not really the hybrid I thought they were, and they’re really most effective as a pure caster. Since I’d already selected a few non-appropriate skills, and you’re limited in the total you’ll get to choose, I decided to start over again.

It didn’t take too long to catch up to where I was before since I wasn’t that far in to begin with, and it’s much easier this time around now that I’ve pretty much gone pure mage. Part of that is luck, having found a couple fireball upgrade tokens, and now I kill most monsters in one cast. I finished off all the side quests I could find in the first few towns, getting me up to level 10, and made my way to Porto Vallum to continue the main quest line.

I did knock the difficulty back down to Bronze, though. Not that Silver was too hard, but higher difficulties are usually overcome in action RPGs by more grinding for levels and better loot, and I don’t really want to waste more time than necessary on that.

Also, the main problem I’m having with the game so far is in the controls. Clicks work *most* of the time, but I regularly run into cases where, say, right-clicking to cast a spell doesn’t actually do anything because the cursor was too close to a selectable target, altering the intended function. The “/nopickup” feature from Diablo 2 is also sorely missed; no, I didn’t really want you to run halfway across the screen and pick up that gold on the ground mid-battle…