| Shurano |
Hmm definitely seems better offensively. Only thing is casting shield, blur, mirror image is a lot of turns, even if they are minutes per level. The AC from ablative armor doesn't stack with mage armor.
Also, I've found when fighting intelligent monsters, they will often give up faster and ignore something that has blur/mirror image on it, as it's signally they are hard to hit. My goal here is to eat a bunch of attacks for the party early in combat since I appear super weak, and even with an intelligent monster it takes a little bit for them to realize.
I just find in reality we don't always get to do all our buffs before combat. I tried to keep it to just one min/level spell in combat, so I can cast it while getting into position. After that the additional AC bonuses just come from fighting defensively.