Comp 227

[Gwarl]

Congratulations to Ingwe for the last minute victory and bron for beating Morgoth.

Lots of dead with this one, human paladins are underpowered, but maybe that's because they're humans rather than because they're paladins?

[bron]

I think humans are a challenge (human paladins start with only two blows, instead of three for example), but I also think that the 4.2 changes have made paladins harder to play. In previous versions, the paladin Heal spell was cheaper and easier to cast. The standard paladin style (or at least, *my* standard style) was to stand and fight for awhile, then Heal (or possibly Phase Door and then Heal). The newer version doesn't really let you do that, or at least not until right at the very end. Since Paladins have at best a 5% fail rate, you can't wait until you're severely damaged before using it (since it might fail), so you have to try to use it when you're only moderately damaged. So the fact that it heals huge amounts of damage is usually wasted. So I'm often reduced to doing the Warrior thing of using Phase Door and then hoping to get in multiple small heals before the bad guy comes back. This mostly works, but just means that your playing like a bad Warrior with a lot of Cure Wounds potions. And the removal of Orb of Draining from the Paladin's set of prayers means that a lot of the time you don't really have anything useful to do with your aura.

Single Combat is a very powerful thing, but in my (admittedly limited) experience, it doesn't really start to make a difference until right towards the end, when you can dispatch some troublesome monsters without allowing them to summon. This is really handy, except that the existence of Single Combat means that you don't particularly need to dispatch them, since you can face Sauron and Morgoth in Single Combat and so don't need to worry about those troublesome monsters being summoned. While canon pretty much dictates you need to be able to face Morgoth in Single Combat (like Fingolfin), I think probably Sauron should always refuse.

I think reverting Heal to its previous form (less effective, but lower level and cheaper) would go a long way.

[wobbly]

Half-orcs are also good. 3 starting blows, +str & no -dex. They don't start with as many blows as half-trolls but they do have an easier time crossing the dex thresholds later. I also like the kobold paladin which starts a lot weaker then a human but does have its perks. Human/Elf/Gnome are probably the challenge versions of paladin with Half-Elf being a slightly improved version of human here.

Some of the sea of blood might be comp conditions too, paladins are the best class to grind a win & human paladin is terrible at diving.