Hey guys I need some help in having fun in Tome. I want to make a sort of Ultimate Mage-y Melee Adventurer.
Yeah, you'll be wanting to go AB.* Iirc, you don't
need corrupted strength to dual-wield staves, if you're going for that (you might still
want it, for the extra melee procs)... though it's been so long since I've actually seen two decent short staves at the same time on a character I could definitely be misremembering. You're also
definitely going to want to splash one of the mindslayer trees to open up triple-wielding -- I usually go for psi-fighting (and possibly the TW strength of purpose/quantum feed one, to further make everything scale off more things) to get that extra scale on willpower/cunning, but any of them will do. Every single adventurer build in existence wants to do that, actually. It also
massively simplifies meeting stat requirements, since the beyond the flesh stat boost from gems is vaguely ridiculous.
If you've got ashes and you're aiming for further silliness, you might consider the demonic pact tree (demon seed... and that passive life steal at the end of it's pretty sexy). You'd have to do some weapon swapping to get the seeds, but having a 15th level firebolt -- mainhand seeds are, in fact,
weapon seeds, and can be stuck in both in the psi-wield slot and your offhand... and the granted talent levels
stack -- blasting off on top of everything else (to say nothing of what the other slots bring to the table) is... pretty great.
Mostly my advice just boils down to "Do whatever, but don't forget the mindslayer". You're more or less going to be wanting to pick up stone, the arcane combat tree, and then basically whatever. Survival-y stuff, because those two are mostly going to cover your offensive needs. Flurry or that acid-flurry wyrmics have (or both!) is usually a good idea, too. Think cursed have something similar as well.
As for those addons, Rob, outside of escorts enhances (Escort easymodo -- it makes them follow you around and gives 'em something like 2% max HP regen) and the succor one (alchies prefer to not choose alch potions you've already accepted when deciding which potion to complete,
you get to choose your escorts) they're all UI stuff.
*Well, arcane combat. Probably stone (earthen missiles) as your primary proc, unless you've got Ashes and are also splashing doombringer (incinerating blows/burning sacrifice, etc), in which case fire/wildfire (stone is less category points. Go with stone.).
E: Oh, right. A shalore for the timeless/unstoppable combo? Shalore for the timeless/unstoppable combo. You want to do that. Everyone wants to do that. It's honestly kinda' broken, especially when paired up with draconic will as well.