yeah, kensai is one mean slicing machine, by ToB his THAC0 goes down to about -20, -25 and he has 9 attacks / 2 rounds (dual-wielding). the only problem is, his AC sucks big time. on normal or core difficulty that isn't much of a problem, but once you crank difficulty up to hard or insane tougher monsters start dealing out damage by the 50's. and with his bad AC he get's hit A LOT. this becomes a big problem once you start ToB, since even goblins seem to have negative THAC0 and wield +3 weapons there
. that means a kensai is totaly dependant on mages and clerics to improve his AC with spells. and I for one don't have the patience to go through all the protective spellcasting before every battle.
I played through SoA and ToB with a kensai/mage, dualed at 13, and in the beggining I had to cast Barskin on him before every incounter with anything tougher than a goblin. and a couple Defensive Harmonies before tougher fights. all the casting becamy quite annoying... however, once I reached lvl 14 as a mage and got all the abilities back, the game became laughingly easy. way too easy, dispite playing on insane difficulty. the rest of SoA was a joke, but ToB was still very interesting because I installed all the patches to make the bosses in ToB a lot harder. that, combined with the fact that my party consisted of me and Vicky, made the boss fights VERY challenging.
a kensai/thief is also insanely powerful, with backstabs in the 150+ range. and in ToB, thanks to a certain high-level special ability it gets even worse (worse for the enemies that is
).
it's hard making the game difficult enough to remain interesting when playing with a kensai/mage or kensai/thief. or with a pure kensai which has a good support of protective spells from the mages and clerics of the party... at least in ToB you have the tougher boss fights to keep you going, but SoA is just too easy
[This message has been edited by frudi_x (edited 10-21-2001).]