I'm not going to come out and say that you're wrong, exactly, about any of this; I'm not interested in having that kind of argument.

Rather, I'd like to point out a bunch of things you may not have considered.

>Here are the reasons why you're more powerful if you
>power-rank:
>
>Wearing con gear is also a liability in pk, so if you do get
>jumped you're a softer target.

Eh... sure, but your power-ranking dude probably doesn't have an awesome full set of gear anyway. There's probably some slot where you can stick one of many unlimited +2 con items in which you don't have anything great anyway.

Personally, I tend to just train my con if I need to on the way up. (I understand this is giving up 10 hp in your view.)

Another take on this:

In practice, I've taken characters and I've powerlevelled them as fast as I could, and I've also levelled characters who had already seen a good amount of exploration/RP/PKs/cabalstuff/etc. Almost without exception, the latter group of characters had a much, much higher standard of gear and, even swapping out a piece of it for con gear if I needed to, would still have much better gear than my not-much-more-than-fine-leather powerleveling characters.

Now, maybe you're a transmuter and the quality of your gear isn't a big factor in how you can level (although it could still save you a PK or mob death if something goes wrong, as it so often does). On the other hand, I think we can both agree that a warrior or A-P with an awesome set of gear can potentially level a lot faster/easier than one with just the basics.

>Finally, con is also to some
>extent a pk stat vie rot, saves, etc. Having less of it, or
>needing to gear for it is a disadvantage.

I would say that, while this is technically true, no one's play of CF is so flawless that something this small is something they should give consideration to. Yes, the 4 con guy is going to struggle a lot more with the enemy shaman than the 25 con guy, but...

>Age: The ideal situation is to hit mature exactly when you hit
>hero. This gives you 20hp more than you would've had
>otherwise, unless you choose not to train wis or str at all.
>Fighting a lot sub-hero means less time at the ideal age range
>at hero.

I just don't see this as all that ideal, to be honest. You can make a case for it, but you can as easily make a case that it's more of an advantage to come into hero range as an older character because of any of the many things they can have going for them that a younger character can't to the same degree. Better skills, more edges, cabal advantages, etc.

>Player ability: Fighting at hero and fighting at hero is
>different. The longer you spend at hero the better you'll be
>at fighting at hero, which means having more con and less age.
>Sure, there's some carryover from lower ranks to hero but I
>think you'll agree it's not the same.

Yes and no:

I've been the first to say that I think hero-level PK and low level PK require some different skills, but I think there's more overlap than you think. For example, hardly a day goes by that I don't see a hero-range character successfully evade an enemy by ducking into or moving more quickly through a low level area that they know well and their pursuer doesn't know as well. I could write a whole paragraph about the different kinds of advantages area knowledge can give you in a PK and it's just one thing. Lots of things are honestly pretty universal throughout the levels.

>I would say that for
>anyone who isn't basically their plateau (and as a pretty
>mediocre pker I'm not) that they'll continue to improve at
>being a hero-level character throughout the time they are a
>hero level character.

The question I would put to you there is: do you always basically play the same character, mechanically? I'd assume you don't. You've seized on the differences between hero and lowbie PK, but glossed over the differences between PKing with different characters.

Starting to try to fight and do things with only a fraction of your skill set and slowly leveling up and adding more to it, to me, is a much better way to learn what a character is capable of and how to best capitalize on it. Even if you have, for example, played a half-dozen fire A-Ps, the first time you take your first d-elf A-P into a fight in the teens you'll become acutely aware of all the strengths of a fire A-P that it very much does not have. As you experiment with its skills and spells and limitations, you discover ways to minimize its weaknesses and utilize its strengths. Equally, with your opponents, you'll start out learning how to use your specific character against the subset of skills they have, and learn how to adjust as they too level up and add new abilities. My d-elf A-P that fights on the way up will die more on his way to hero than your straight-to-hero d-elf A-P, true; but I really believe he'll make it up in taking less deaths before hitting his stride at hero.

I've seen a lot of heroes over the years, particularly of classes like invoker that tend to level as fast as they can, who seem to have no idea of when one of their lower or mid-level abilities is the winning move in a fight. I believe that had they seen more action in a level range where maybe these spells were the best they had, they'd have a better sense of their use. To a speed-levelled hero, often their capstone abilities look like a hammer and everything looks like a nail.

>Bashing down people at level 20 doesn't
>contribute a whole lot to that, and takes time away from it.

Without arguing about the skill it does or doesn't take to bash someone down at level 20 -- what if you're not playing a warrior? What if you're a transmuter instead? Would trying to kill your enemies at level 20 teach you anything useful at hero? Why or why not?

>These are reasons why I personally really don't like fighting
>sub-hero, though strictly speaking they aren't ways you are
>made less-powerful by waiting.
>
>Risk of mob death. Maybe I'm retarded, but when I spend time
>wandering around and not ranking, eventually I end up taking a
>mob death that I wouldn't have if I'd just stuck to ranking.
>Sometimes it's a random aggro mob out of its natural place,
>sometimes it's falling into a trap, sometimes it's
>pvp-related, but one way or another, if I wait long enough
>without ranking I'll eventually take a needless mob death.
>This obviously makes ranking take longer, which is just
>unacceptable. Focusing only on ranking pretty much minimizes
>the window in which that can happen.

This may be too there-is-no-spoon for you, but consider:

If you're not trying to race to hero or even really trying to level at all, does a mob death really matter?

>Skills: By racing to hero you spend the least time explicitly
>practicing skills before beginning to pk. If you practice
>before hero you waste all those level gains, imm exp boosts,
>and seemingly endless hours of ranking drudgery that could be
>giving you free skill points. If you pk before you're stuck
>with the crappy choice of either more painfully awful time
>spent practicing or being at a disadvantage. Also skill
>percentages matter less at hero than they do at low levels,
>imho.

I'm not 100% sure I understand what you're saying here, but I think I disagree with you.

At low levels, maybe you haven't worked your skills a whole lot, but most of your range really won't have either. Probably most of your range is just trying to level on through. Up to a point it's a wash.

On the other hand, any long-lived hero character is going to have nearly every skill they actually use at 100. I promise you, the skill gulf between your power-levelled elf warrior and even a 300-500 hour old fire giant warrior hero is going to be at least as immense as the gulf between two level 15 characters, one who's worked his skills for a little while and one who hasn't, ever could be.

>Gear disparity. Gear is more important at lowbie than hero,
>again imho. A sweet set at lowbie is much harder to overcome
>than at hero, or so I have always found. I hate playing
>conservatively so acquiring similarly elite gear for me at low
>levels is a waste of time, which means I'm at a disadvantage
>against people who protect the gear they can't get for
>themselves. Also I'm just not a gear whore so the less impact
>gear has, the better it is for me.

Honestly, if you think this you've never had to deal with a hero with really good gear, or you've never realized the full weight of the difference their gear made.

If I'm a lowbie with basic scrounged gear, I can kill another lowbie with the kind of gear that people freak out about and post to the log board with accusations of cheating is I play my cards right. I promise you that you don't have the same chance as a hero to take down a hero with twenty unique items that you've never heard of.

I mean, is what you're true in the sense that maybe the disparity between a warrior with a 20 dam set and a warrior with a 40 dam set is less at hero than it is at level 20? Sure, I can buy that, but the limitations or lack thereof of a hero character and the things that are going on with their gear are so much bigger than that. In the grand scheme of things it's not very important.

>This is a long post, and more things will probably occur to
>me, but I'm sure this is more than you'll really feel like
>bothering to address anyway.

Hopefully I've addressed it all, although I've largely run out of steam to talk about the advantages the non-race-to-hero character has. (vs. just trying to point out things you might have missed about the advantages you think he's missing.) I'll see if I can work up the energy to do it properly tomorrow.