Tadas

If you fight her near narrow path where you start, you can back away enough where she can not melee you. If you don't want to cheese like that, her attack that gives you wounds is dodgeable, run away from melee range once she does action indicated by explosion icon (you might need to enable combat tooltips for that, I don't know, I have it enabled always). For cipher I used Spider Silk Robe for immunity against paralyze, Saint Omaku's Mercy bow with decisive shots enchant and hot razor skewers food to get 17 penetration. Animancer's energy blade can be good option for melee as it does raw damage.

Cool, how did you do that?

Fair. I just loaded my pre end game save file and had enough mats for 16 potions (without doing any dlcs). I used 8, but that was with a lot of experimentation, in theory you can do without injuries if you pay enough attention or just use summons to tank.

It doesn't prevent injuries, just clears them, worked for me on unmoded steam version, but adra potions are better, you don't get -5 deflection penalty.

Sure, if you setup confounding factors that favor your particular class - in that particular situation your class will be number 1.

I don't think those +deflection buffs stack and they are fairly short. Rogue - mage would be better as melee dps because of his passives and more resources. You can't get blackbow in multiclass. Debatable on your team composition and what you need.

Some classes aren't the best on their own or in majority of the game, but they are best in party or on hardest bosses. Those include: 1) single class chanter - simply because most hardest bosses in the game are beasts and their anti-beast chant is worth a char slot and summons are broken good in long fights 2) seer (ranger-cipher) - highest accuracy in game that pays off in hardest fights in the game on potd and all the benefits of cipher

Unless you are roleplaying, your character can swap to melee weapons for a fight. It might not be ideal and damage might be lower than usual, but I don't think being best at every situation is a reasonable expectation.

Chanters His heart Did Fill... but it's much worse than ciphers.

Well all dps is context depended. As an extreme example if there was a fight where there only 1 high hp, high defences mob come one after an another for an hour without break, every class would **** on mage, however most fights are packs of relatively weak (especially end game) mobs with breaks in between them, so being able to just front load all your resources in aoe dps fest will pad your numbers really nicely. If fight would be very long sustained aoe - maybe ciphers would or barbs would win out, if fights where single low deflection mob - classes like rogues or monks would win out, if 1 mob extremely high defences - probably ranger would. It's all context depended.

It seems you are doing really well without any cheese. The only thing I would change - use ydwin for ancestral memory to renew your resources, good luck

Best wizards spells are high tier, you can only get there by being single class and additional power level helps too.

High upfront burst aoe damage with missile salvos, freezing rakes etc. Most "tests" I've seen comes down to who has highest burst aoe at level 20, which is somewhat fair, because somewhere around level 15 most packs dies in 20 seconds or so. However I don't think it paints whole picture, other factors really influence your game experience and generally your dps don't exist in vacuum and is depended on how other team mates synergize, if you are enabled by someone tanking, buffing, healing or not etc. And for me it's kind of irrelevant, because well if murder pack in 20 secs or in 30 seconds it's kind of already meh, process of getting there is more interesting to me.

My favorite is spellblade - you have great dps and mobility of rogue coupled with buffs,debuffs and flexibility of a mage. Spirit lance and minor blights hit in aoe making your guile abilities aoe too. Strong from level 1 to end game. Reminds me a bit of fighter/mage multi in baldur's gate 2, though nowhere near as broken.

Landing your cipher spells more reliably. Look - in fights where you can consistently hit targets - mindstalker will win, in fights with high deflection - seer will. Don't agonize about it - if you are not enjoying it - reroll. Try out multiple builds. Mindstalker is great.