Any suggestions on building Rush? In previous play throughs I've always made him a mage but not sure if that's optimal. I don't plan on grinding much this time through until necessary...
There's no real optimal way to do it. My suggestion is just to focus on one area by disabling all the Arts that you don't want him using. e.g., if you want to make him a Mage, only have Mystic Arts on. I tend to make Rush a Psionics/Hexes user, as some of those skills are very useful.
Psionics like Addle and Mixed Message can nuke enemy morale (Mixed Message V is basically a guaranteed full-blue morale bar) and
Hexes with the right weapon will eventually let you use Cachexia, which saps enemy AP (i.e., most of them will only be able to do their standard Attack) in addition to dealing enormous damage.
[note: Some of these abilities you won't be able to learn until you get a specific item, which usually happens pretty far into the game. However, in New Game Plus, Rush gets to keep these items, and can use the first-level skills they bestow right from the beginning of the game, giving you a lot more freedom in how you want to develop him.]
Goddammit.
I didn't know that there was a quest that opens up after finishing an event at Darken Forest, but then closes after visiting Undelwalt.
Any chance I had of getting all of the trophies just flew out the window. Unless I want to load one of my previous saves and lose 5 or so hours of progress.
This fucking game sometimes...
It's one of the biggest faults of the game for sure. There's just a TON of missable content, and often the conditions for
not missing them are crazy - killing The Fallen before Undelwalt is probably the worst offender, because the game just puts Undelwalt on your map right away and you're just supposed to instead take this crazy detour for no reason and fight a boss that's an extremely tough fight for most people.
I was really hoping they'd tweak some stuff for this version, just like they did from 360 -> PC way back when, because keeping up with it all is really grating sometimes. (Fun fact:
that anti-missables guide I linked to in the OP was actually something I made many years ago, for myself, just so that I could actually play the game without looking through ten wiki pages at once all the time, and this thread presented me with an opportunity to share it at long last. I only had to make slight adjustments to it, like the spoiler warning, to get it ready for the OT.)