Help beating the Elven Ringmaster?

[The Space Rat]

I can beat the Vampire boss just fine, but the Ringmaster is hard walling me and I'm not sure what I should be doing about it.

[Wraith_Magus]

This is one of those mid-game bosses where it really depends on how far you are in the game. He's not even a speedbump if you have storyline-based powerups like having existing spell skills (from previous retirements) and ethereal equipment, where I can just get to the school using storyline powerups using the "auto-fight boss" and "auto go to next level" while I'm still trying to set up my early-game transmutations, but took some preparation the first time I faced him. Just beating him down with raw power before he gets a chance to do anything is an option. He spends his first two moves just trying to protect against your primary elements, but if you have existing powerful non-primary elements, this means nothing, and it certainly does nothing if you just have a strong weapon and turn his face into a stabbing speedbag.

You've clearly already gotten past this area once, so you don't need to retire yet, you probably are just finding that whatever your current build is, the ringmaster is countering it, so the best trick if brute force isn't working is to just use another build.

A powerful set of equipment you should have access to at that point in the game is the golden katar (electric katana if you unlocked electric last run), ninja gear, boots of agility, and let's say just keep the ring of mental exertion on. (Provided you did the accessory storyline by now.) The first three all increase your attack speed, and you do way more damage like that than you might think. When I got go the training knight in shining armor, I was surprised to find that in spite of casting every attack spell I knew, melee attacks were still the overwhelming majority of my damage.

Ring of mental exertion, meanwhile, will conveniently halve your max mana, while the big threat of the ringmaster is an attack based on how much mana you have. Another way to do this is to just turn off perma-cast of most of your attack spells, and make them have wizards manually assigned to them (or turn on some transmutations, I guess) so that your mana is constantly dipping down. I was using gloves of spell fluency constantly at that point in the game, so just wearing those and spamming every spell I knew with perma-cast and then ordering transmutations until your mana income/outcome is in the red should keep you from dying to mana burn. You should also know the guard spell by this point in the game, so put guard into a quickbar slot, and use guard if you see the boss start to cast the mana burn spell.

[Dragoslove]

I just make sure I have spells set up that let me dump my mana when fighting him. You can also save a few interrupts for his ability that deals damage based on your mana. He's probably the only boss where setting to craft some expensive stuff during the fight is helpful.