YAWP: Vanilla HE Paladin

[Pete Mack]

Yeah, it's an easy combo. But I wanted to play paladin without quite so much of the things I dislike about the class. (The bad stealth, the endless traps, and the long time to 5 blows compared to other melee classes.)
I also played with randarts for an change: as usual, I found it much easier than standarts (though part of that was ridiculously early +5 and then +10 boots of speed, around 2500'.) I also wore blue DSM of speed (+4) for much of the game, including against Morgoth. Morgoth alone was difficult, because I found only 2 each of ? Banishment and ? Destruction and no ?Mass Banishment (not counting one of each lost to use testing.) I spent nearly 1000 player turns in the fight, most of it cleaning up summons between multiple bouts with M. He summoned SO many higher undead, along with Omarax, Kronos, Q, and assorted lesser uniques (including one very lost hill orc unique.) As is often the case with randarts, I used a MoD of *Slay Evil*, getting 570 damage per turn nominal, in the last two fights. Prior to that, I was using a Randart with all three big *Slays*, doing 650 per turn against most monsters.

[Estie]

High elf is my favourite paladin; happy to see someone else play that combo.

As for difficulty, my previous paladin upgraded his magic dagger at about clvl 25, which is only slightly unlucky. With standarts, an early *thanc is commonplace.

Later it is not uncommon that a high based damage weapon with useful brands/slays turns up and you end up dealing more damage in the late game; however, if my life was on the line I would play standarts for sure.

[Pete Mack]

I bought a rapier(HA) fairly early, which I used for quite a while. I briefly used a +2 attacks Halberd, after which I started seeing a whole bunch of near endgame randart weapons. But it's hard to beat a MoD with Slay Evil for pure damage against the bosses, even with standarts.

[Estie]

Tho opposite of HE paladin is half-troll rogue.

[Pete Mack]

Estie---not sure about opposite. Complement, maybe. HT Rogue is a pretty survivable combination, just like HE Paladin. In this case, the weaknesses of the race are balanced by the strengths of the class (and Regen makes up for bad INT.)

Opposite is probably elf mage: terrible survivability despite excellent spell-casting.

As for the fact I used a ln ego item weapon: it has very little to do with randarts and very much to do with MoDs. I went into the last fight with triple buffing, doing 589 damage per turn, nominal. The base weapon damage was 68 damage per blow, exclusive of the +17 to_d bonus; add that, and the weapon does 85 damage per blow all by itself.
There are only a handful of standard artifacts that can compete with that. It's no surprise that Ive used a *slay evil*/HA MoD against Morgoth nearly every time I found one, whether with standarts or randarts. It's an extraordinarily good weapon.

[Estie]

Opposite in the sense that you balance class weakness with race strength or vice versa. Both combinations provide excellent melee with decent spells and not horrible sneaky skills (traps/stealth).

Standarts have a few weapons that are slightly better than the slay evil MoD, while randarts can end up with nothing that compares or something substantially better. More spread; the percentage of times you end up with the ego weapon is similar though.

[Pete Mack]

Like I said: complement rather thanopposite. But that's really a matter of terminology, not actual disagreement.