So I had done paladin and warrior on impossible; my paladin was ultra lucky and ended up with 30, 35, 28 (attack, defense int); then my warrior had (what I thought was) lousy luck and ended up with 33,24,17 (at the end of the day warrior has it a bit easy at the end due to all the great weapons). Well my mage makes my warrior look lucky and ended up with 7, 26 and 31. Not one uber item loaded but i did manage to get all 103 quests this time. As a comparison my mage on hard had 25, 18, 40 (that's +19 in stats; and plus 1000 in leadership; rage/mana were more or less the same). My other mage on hard ended up with 19 13 43 (but had 1000 more leader ship and 30 more mana than the previus mage on hard).
Anyways - I guess luck plays a big factor in how difficult the game is
I'm done until the expansion comes out or someone does an interesting mod that reworks the map/quests