[Nagot Gick Fel]

Alneyan said:
Wouldn't your avatar be at a very high temperature? Ah, that doesn't qualify?

Ahem, do you really think firing a flamethrower at a nuclear bLast will raise its temperature significantly?

Slightly more on topic, would the Fiends of Darkness be helpful for early defence? Their flying might be helpful to bring down these SCs depending on their buffs to survive in melee;

Fiends are great for many things:

(1) their claws are magic weapons, thus they're better than Devils vs ethereal targets.

(2) they're highly stealthy, thus hardly spotted even in mid-sized Groups, thus great raiders - give a Spectre flying boots and a dozen of Fiends, and give your enemies headaches.

(3) for the same reason, they're (with Hordes from Hell) the best tool in Mictlan's arsenal to capture fortresses - it's hard to reinforce one that seemed safe at some point, and gets besieged by 2 or 3 scores of Fiends the turn after.

or is the current trend on strong combattants, with little magic support?

Depends on how you define 'little'. Titan-sized pretenders with 2-4 levels in 2-3 magic paths - that's what you can expect from me, usually (not always), like it's always been.

I have some embarrassing memories of a Virtue being taken down by a handful of Fiends, as she wasn't that strong without her handy spells, so my view is probably quite biased.

Virtues are awesome early againts indeps. They're quite terrible at dealing with demons, undead, or berserk troops.