I've noticed a few people working together for alchemy recepies and so forth, and even one page people were using from another wiki.

Maybe one of us should request a Wikia wiki? It's not too hard to get, and I've seen other indie games get them (Elona, say.)

A full-fledged wiki for the game would be great... we could create pages for each and every item or effect, and list all the various ways you can make/generate them, with links, plus all the various things they can be used to create. Very useful to a new player (if quite spoilery.)

A wiki would be an excellent place to collect that sort of thing. As MG goes out of beta, I'm planning on restructuring the forums a bit, and restricting the posting of spoilers here somewhat, so it would be cool for there to be a repository for them.

All right, there's now a Mage Guild wiki at http://mageguild.wikia.com. Of course, there's nothing in it yet; I haven't had time to add anything. But I will in a bit if nobody beats me to it.

I've been collecting a lot of notes / strategies and basically writing a FAQ. I don't know if I'm interested in dividing this up into seperate articles for a wki or not but I could certainly post it somewhere as a text file in a week when it is more complete.

Also, has anybody beat the game/ascended yet? The farthest I can get legitimately is level 10. I got to the boss the invis trick before it got patched but, alas, I got one hitted.

so far I havent been focusing on really raising my max life that much and that seems to be the key to winning. that and life magic for armor and heal.

Actually, I never found raising Max HP that important. It's nice to mix Gargoyle or Golem remains for HP+ every once in a while, but it's no priority. So far, the two most useful things I try to do every game is 1) get an Amulet of Reversal to quickly invert yourself and double the available spells and 2) get an Amulet of Death to quickly Undeadify yourself to protect from Vampires and Liches and also to double your healing options.

In addition to that, I work towards a healthy supply of Energy-Charged Crystal balls (you sense knowledge).

Personally, I think getting more health is a top priority in almost any roguelike. Note that potions of increase hp/mp become less effective the more you use them, so they're not as good as they used to be.

Deemer's advice is good though. An amulet of reversal is a great tool for massively increasing your versatility. The amulet of undeath is good as well, but sometimes you can't find as many amulets as you want or you just have something else in mind for them. I mix my extra potions of death with potions of inversion or dissolution to make more potions of life for that. Energy charged crystal balls are fantastic and everyone should use them.

Life magic is a good spell school, but I think you could get through the game with any combination. Armor lets you get away with having fewer hit points, and heal is really nice to have on any character, but I think that building your character around your school choices and playing them appropriately is more important than which schools you choose. Just as an example, the elemental school gives what I consider to be the best offensive options in the game, so taking edges like powerful bolt is redundant, and you would be better served by using those on spell training, or something to improve your defense.

Cosmic is a great choice for any character because once inverted, you can haste yourself to double speed for only 1 mp.