I think I anticipated this response with my edit above. Heavier weapons do more damage per blow. You can see this in the weapon's stats. BG spells do a fixed amount of blows without regard to weight. Therefore heavier weapons generally work better with BG spells.

Ok. Well, my latest mage bit the dust, so I figured I'd try another High Elf Blackguard, this time (mostly) prioritizing weapon weight over damage per round, and dropping Dex down a few points and pumping int instead. I actually dropped Dex down as low as I could while still getting 1.3 blows with my starting Tulwar, and pumped Int up to 18. Maybe a bit excessive, but hey, figured why not.

So far at least, things have been going *much* more smoothly, and the character is playing *much* more like a brutal, hard-to-kill berserker. Survived an early Deep Descent quite handily, including killing Lagduf with the help of a wand of stinking cloud, and have been chewing through the orc uniques (including Azog when I accidentally summoned him with a Wand of Summon Monster) like I do with paladin and warrior.

So yeah, dropping Dex and pumping Int made a huge difference. Don't know that weapon weight has mattered all that much (though I did find some heavy weapons early, first a Battle Axe, and then a Lance both of which I used quite effectively), since by the time I hit level 20, I found Forsagil, but even with that I'm only swinging 1.1 times.

So after all of this run around, I think the takeaway is that we should tweak the default point buy for Blackguards when rolling up a character. Dex should be de-prioritized in favor of Int. Those extra points make a *huge* difference in spell failure rate, which seems to me to pretty very critical for Blackguard, since with unreliable spells, they're just a crappier fighter. But with reliable spells they're tougher than Treebeard.

Glad it's going better. I like the suggestion to change the default buy. I hadn't thought of that until you mentioned it a few pages ago. I don't know how to do that, but it's a good idea. Way more people than I would have thought use the default buy.

A couple months ago I was watching someone play a half-troll BG with the default point buy so he had an INT of 6. He's like "I don't find the BG spells that useful!" :D :D :D

Even though you had manipulated AC to be as high as 70, beating Shagrat with 1.3 attack +0+0 Tulwar, should tell people how goddamn strong spell Maim is.

If you REALLY want to have bad times with early orc uniques, try a Necromancer :D

??

I didn't try to manipulate anything. Is the body armor too good?

For your experiment, the character AC was crafted to be 70 by debug commands. I guess 'manipulated' was a wrong choice of word then, if it really sounded rude to you.

I just wanted it to be fair. I conjured up all the XP and the villains as well. But I don't think many CL 15s will be jealous of the equipment.

Thank you David for your tip about Maim Foe. I didn't realized that it was so useful for starting the game. I reached dlvl 20 quite fast with it (half-elf with focus in STR and INT). :)

There's something fishy going on in the default pt buy. This is what it supposedly does:

What actually happens when I test in-game is every class gets 17 str & 18 dex except the pure casters.