general tips n tricks for new players

[travelingoz]

Actually DGD, I'm just using black dragons in my current mage run through with the new gift pack and I still find transmute very useful. I'm tending to use the dragons to collect the chests and spamming demon portal level 3 on the first round. I have the scaly set and twinkling boots, so once i just stone skin and then mana spring every round on whatever has come out of the portal! All of the enemy stacks surround the demons and generally from Montero onwards, by round 10 when mana regeneration starts halving, the summoned demons start finishing the remaining stacks off.
Combined with the Wanderer's gloves and level 1 Teleport, this sure beats the old mana spring-poison shower combo!
So, in this way I'm finding Transmute more useful than Mana Regeneration as the multiple attacks on the demon stacks generate more mana than i can use in the first 10 rounds!

[DGDobrev]

I totally agree with that. However, I was talking about a pure caster mage - one who barely gets his BD stack to attack and hammers the enemy with spells. In such case you will kill with spells and that does not generate any mana back.

If you do have a nice stack of BD's, they are great for mopping up weakened enemy units and in such case, Transmutation is really nice. In that particular game I was referring to, I had only 1 available, and he alone wasn't doing much, so I had to compensate with Concentration rather than Transmutation.