All right. Best thing you can do early on is get yourself a good shield and an Aloe Rod. Anything in at least the first six dungeons can be dispatched by deflecting its attack with a shield, then blowing it away with one of those slow-moving destructive shells. I'm punching way over my weight with this technique.
Also, I figured out a couple things about the Magic Circle which aren't intuitive or which, at the very least, I didn't understand from the tutorials.
- In the slots for Ability artifacts, you'll see numbers 1, 2, and 3. Those correspond to your three equipped ability/magic slots. So if you equip the "M/A Lv +100%," that makes your level 20 spell into a level 40 spell. That's a pretty damn potent artifact. Unfortunately, if you pair it with Widen, it doesn't turn into a level 80 spell. Anyway, it only works on the slot you equip it to. So if you want to buff up the level of two abilities at once, you need two of them and you need two slots.
- Swordmage's "Pent-Up Power" circle has a cryptic space called "Fix Space Seal." What this means is, when it's triggered by an artifact, all of the other effects on the board - Fatemate, Mana 2X, Won't Heal, etc. - are all turned off. This also means, unfortunately, that you can't use any of the artifact spaces that are trapped behind those fixed spaces unless you turn them back on, and take the bad with the good.
- You can mix and match different kinds of artifacts to get the 2X effect from the Joint title. You can do up or down and left or right at the same time; just make sure the flow follows the arrows.