Mang, I'm lvl 16 right now and cleaned the entire freedom isles, upper/lower hadar includin' the spider queen and WAS on the progress of grindin' the ardan peaks/t. mines until I realized my greater druids staff has an incredibly hippy habit of slowly deteriorating its morale the more I defeat creatures. The more you kick ass the less it likes you, how gay is that? Anyway, reminding myself of the battle where I first suppressed and upgraded the item, I thought I could manage such a reasonable fight until I found out that this time... the peace lovin' staff has GINORMOUS legions of not so "peaceful" forest creatures and lots of gremlins with like 6500 hit points as keepers... All I had to say was, well... F**k. with lots of ***'s.
Well I'm off to Arlania now, to finally face that ridiculously powerful staff of destruction in hopes of getting the staff itself or some other magic related reward. I think I read the ungrateful s.o.b. that is the archmage doesn't actually give you the staff stating you're not strong enough and gives you another intelligence boosting staff similar to the druids staff (archmages staff iirc) which is better than nothing I guess. Either way it sure beats having to suppress THAT army of tree hugging doom. I got a recent save with the staffs morale just about to go zero, so I'm gonna use it to get the replacement, heh.
Btw at lvl 16 I got Chaos(3), Distortion(2), HigherMagic(3), Destroyer(3) with a whopping 27(!) intelligence with the g. druids staff. One more level and I got Distortion (3) which means spamming geysers with like 2500dmg twice a turn for 3 turns until I run out of mana. I think the demons won't like it.
Also I think I got shamans(42), evil beholders(42), horsemen(42), cannoneers(36), archmages(42), knights(42), alchemists(30) including reserves and yes, apparently I have sacrifice too. I usually use it to either create full stacks of scarce new units like I did with the knights and the horsemen or to replenish heavy losses (never had to/last resort) always by sacrificing infinite "horde" stacks. I even kept a few weak mobs alive here and there should I need an easy battle to do that... *controlled environment*
I think I can access hypnosis by supressing an artifact I have, never bothered to do it before buy maybe I should... What school is it anyway?