>I've only played one AP and it was in Entropy when I was
>still new to the game. At this point every time I consider AP
>class I'm just overwhelmed by all the stuff they have and the
>different race/class setups. Seems to be tons of tactics so
>reading about them is nice. Summon bash seems to be the most
>effective but I really think I'd be more lowbie
>sleep/vault/buildweapon/hero/delete type.

Definitely what race you pick and what weapons you tend to focus on decides a lot in which way you'll go more often, but I really believe there is a time for a d-elf A-P to bash and there is a time for a fire A-P to win with spells.

I think human is the best A-P to learn with because it isn't too pigeonholed in one direction or another -- if all you've played is smart A-P or fire A-P or felar A-P or whatever I think it's harder to have that sense of, "Okay, THIS is the match-up where I need to try to win with Vault/CripplingStrike/Faceslash/whatever instead of what I usually do."

>At the end of the day I haven't rolled one because I can't
>think of a decent counter to disarm at level 36, especially
>when it takes around 750 gold to get 10 spiderhand potions.

Yeah, I generally don't think it's worth it. Exactly once I got lucky enough with an A-P to PK somebody that had a sack of like 20 or 30 of them (and I have no idea why, I think they were midlevel warrior or something like that, not A-P) and that was nice.

Mostly I try to keep my opponents in that range from disarming me, whether that's command denial, blinding/dirting early, or making sure I'm ready to grab the weapon if it's disarmed (not fighting around crowds, 1 round spells only, etc.) You can get unlucky but usually at that stage I'm more focused on re-feeling my way around PKing with the class at that level range or working towards a control than building a super weapon exactly.