It's been a while since I've done newbie, to be honest, but from what I remember, WITHOUT getting some buffs, you're pretty much screwed against mobiles. Breezing through the first fifty levels is generally easy because of the experience tnl rate. It's low, so it's alright. But without sanctuary, you're often taking too much damage to mitigate, and potions simply don't have the mitigation you need because you get full on them. You'll often have to sleep after two or three kills, or recall and heal altogether.
Prewipe, you could actually survive quite well with -just- a vampiric weapon, nowadays, vampiric is more of a, "does this even do anything"? If you're lucky and have good physical resists, you're pretty much set against most mobiles, but without customs/decent resists/heal shield/a good heal spell, you're pretty much going to struggle from level 150 onward. And by then it's often too late to quest and fix the problem and you're stuck with muddling through being able to do one out of three or four quests, or recreate.
Or, you've got access to half decent heals to give you the sustain you need to actually push through those later levels.
Without healshield, I can only survive against mobiles that I'm not immune too, with power heal. And that's 500 spirit a pop(250 when spellcasting or sorcery procs), so it runs dry awful quick if I have to cast powerheal every seven or eight rounds. Mana regen isn't enough to sustain on powerheals.
And Arthie is a good example, Fuzzbutt, because most of us that fight him can solo him as is >P
I'm probably the only one who can survive him without healshield, though.