35 charges sounds unreal to me..

I will say that the reason I keep bashing my head against the wall with the class isn't the promise of unlimited power. I played another mud with A-P's where there was no unholy blessing and they were similarly not very strong - I just like the class concept.

I'm with you on the rest though - as a charge less A-P you NEED ABS to compete with other classes stock abilities, you're putting in 5 times the work for the same result. And I hear you about the spells, especially on low int races. If they've got more than four points of int on you you're usually better off with kick, and much better of with 'c excis return self'. Melee is horrible, the 'already superb fighting skills' described in the helpfile can see you coming off worse against shamans and thieves, never mind warriors. The balancing factor here would seem to be the maledictions - and they're not as bad as stuff like impale or boneshatter, harder to land, and trivial to cure.

The saving grace is that sleep/vault can be as effective as assassinate, but that only really works for brainy races.

At the end of the day I suppose it's intended to be challenge mode, and I'm just unlucky that it happens to be my preferred class for flavour reasons.