Help with Wizard/Evil ending

[Tursmo]

Hey, I'm on my second playthrough after doing the Ultimate Good ending and decided to give the Wizard a spin. It has been somewhat easy going, even with his extremely low defense and somewhat bad offense, but I feel pretty stuck at the ultimate evil ending.

Even the minibosses take forever to kill. Mana recharges so slowly and doesn't even do all that great damage and pretty much all of their hits kill me in one hit. I did get to Tancred, but the one-shots are destroying me. I have the best armor/weapon, but I'm missing 1-2 hp upgrades.

Is there a trick to this? Should I be spamming certain spell or abusing some tactic?

[Malkav0]

Originally posted by Tursmo:

Hey, I'm on my second playthrough after doing the Ultimate Good ending and decided to give the Wizard a spin. It has been somewhat easy going, even with his extremely low defense and somewhat bad offense, but I feel pretty stuck at the ultimate evil ending.

Even the minibosses take forever to kill. Mana recharges so slowly and doesn't even do all that great damage and pretty much all of their hits kill me in one hit. I did get to Tancred, but the one-shots are destroying me. I have the best armor/weapon, but I'm missing 1-2 hp upgrades.

Is there a trick to this? Should I be spamming certain spell or abusing some tactic?

Yes, there is. First, go with full upgrades - farm the first Kadjanto dungeon enemy if needed.
Go in with full elixirs. Use flame shield for defense, it must always be up. Use fireballs so you can still attack when you have no mana, and use life drain as soon as you're around mid-life (generally one hit). Once you're out of mana, use elixir if:
-you still have shield and got hit once from full life
-you don't have shield or are not full life
For mobility, use the charged attack, even without mana, it's just to move around fast enough. Five elixirs should be plenty enough. You can also attempt to use meteor instead of fireballs, in this case, focus on avoidance while meteor hits, so that your mana refills

[Zérodaim]

If you're going to grind for XP, I found the Combblestone Cemetery dungeon to be solid.
Go up, cross the 4 spikes pit, and just above you is a tiny corridor with a miniboss worth 250XP (just like Kadjanto's big enemy at the entrance). You can two shot it then one shot the basic enemy, and reload the room very quickly. Use potions and extra lives to refill mana when empty, and you can get a few thousands of XP in no time.

I haven't fought Tancred as mage, but he's fairly easy to bait into charging. Focus on dodging and mana should recover enough to heal back to full / damage him. The imp familiar can do a lot of work too.

[Tursmo]

Thanks for the tips. I can't be arsed to farm (the one of the few negative sides of this game in my opinion), so I'll just use the code to get some XP and try the bosses again fully maxed out.

EDIT: That was it. Getting the max hp and mana helped a lot. Combine that with the fire-shield so I was not getting 1 shot, instead of 2-3 shotting. More mana also meant more heals. The fire shield was the biggest game changer. I didn't really need it during the normal game, but with the tankier enemies it is a nice source of sustained damage and stops the one-shots.

[Gangrene]

Spamming hellfire did it for me. I ran out of mana too often with normal attacks/other spells.