Torchlight

• To make the game more enjoyable, there are three mods you should get: "Potions Stacksize Mod", "Items Always Identified", and "The Total Respec Mod".

• Play on hard even on your first time through. It's an incredibly easy game on Normal and below.

• Skills suffer from not improving fast enough as your weapons and attributes become better. As a Vanquisher, I ignored every skill that had a raw damage increase (it will say something like 50% weapon dps + 100 damage or something like that) and instead took everything that increase via percentages. The first skill I got is the one where you swing your weapon in a wide arc and at level 5 I was doing 1,200+ damage before reaching the first boss.

• If you play on hard be prepared to tear your hair out during the last 7 dungeon levels when you start fighting Dark Zealots. They can hit you with a ray before you even see them and it deals like 1,500 points of damage. They also shoot homing poison bolts and even though my poison resistance was 200+ those things still did like 750 points of damage a pop. The town portal spell became my best friend.

• Everything monsters drop is almost universally garbage but your most powerful items come from enchanting. Find an item you really, really like, sell everything else, then enchant the hell out of it. There's a miniscule chance of completely breaking the item but this literally happened once to me in the entire game and it wasn't really a big deal.

• If you want the most powergamey build, go Vanquisher. Pump explosive shot and anything that bumps up damage done by explosive shot. Find a rifle with a fast firing speed and the highest range and upgrade the hell out of it. If you get short of money, when you've maxed out your barter skill you can buy and sell the basic potions at a profit. Use summon spells as meat shields when things get hairy. Also don't be afraid to use potions as much as possible.