[Renojustin]

I'm thinking I'd rather have the E9 and 6 Astral over Air, just for endgame and Ethereal/Luck. She's a 3 movement flier anyway, and so can be used to cover a very wide area without Trapeze, (not counting Teleport which is the same thing for S3) and yeah Mistform is great but not worth 6 Astral imo.

She's a very tough SC and you don't really want to be sending her against anything TOO hard since she's not immortal, and anything that can give her much of a threat will be taking down the Mistform in short order with a magic weapon anyway... so I think I can forego the Air in favor of the superior Astral magic.

And she can definitely be used awake as well, but you risk an early death, and you get the points which are not insignificant, so I feel that getting a little beauty sleep and waiting for some half-decent equipment isn't so bad at all - Earth and Nature have some really excellent gear, and the Astral equipment isn't to be sneezed at either. A Lucky Pendant (I suppose you can just script in Luck, but the extra turn is pretty nice with the plethora of self-buffs she has at her disposal) and possibly Amulet of Antimagic will go a long way in your miscellaneous slots in the time it takes to find some S1 indies. And you can go right up against players with that without having to count on it.

Lastly, Air 4-6 won't help your sacreds as much as the Astral and Earth. Centaurs can definitely take the extra arrows with their shields, berserk, Earthbless, and regeneration, and the extra MR means quite a bit on top of their already-high resistance. I feel that they're just too vulnerable when berserking without the extra +4 protection.

I like Air for combat casters for the Precision, so maybe I just don't see it gelling as well for a melee type outside of Mistform.