Archery is a viable option for the initial onslaught. The mastery skill speeds up it to being a machine gun, and bows tend to have higher damage potential initially. Finally, you can poison them using level 1 poison weapon which is amazingly broken.
Poison works like this -- after you poison your weapon you have a limited number of 'charges'. Each shot/hit counts as a charge being used up. Each time a charged hit lands on an enemy they will be poisoned and take a large amount of damage over time that also hit-locks them a bit.
Damn near everything can be killed as poison is very powerful.
Meteorstrike is super spammable and can be used to empty out a few mana bars on stronger enemies (like melee guardians).
You get less mana as a warrior than you would as a mage per point in int, and vice versa. So your class determines your derived stats, but there's no real penalty to multi-classing and I personally would suggest it to some extent (especially for healing, bless, and some other neat spells). Keep in mind, I am referring to skills and not stats. I would not suggest getting int as a warrior -- for mana, you can get a ton of mana using charms for specialized gear.
Even if you plan to go melee I would honestly suggest maxing bow mastery and getting a decent bow -- you'll have enough skill points (spell books can be bought from stores, and are random so you will find some eventually) to go around.
Thanks for the tips bros.
My completionist syndrome forces me to explore every inch of the map, meaning this game is shaping up to be *very* long... unless I burn myself out before I finish it.
You're in for some very nice moments -- the game has some reallllly good encounters and quests that won't happen unless you go exploring. It's one of my favorite games to just explore.