Royal thorns, have they been mentioned?

[Danielsan2000]

I have been scouting through the forums for various tips on how to make a third runthrough more fun, however I have failed to see anyone mention the enourmous power of the royal thorns.

They were somewhat limited in my game but I had enough to make most fights ridiculously easy. I just avoided using them against other heroes and dragonstacks.

I had the item which gives them 100% to damage+ 50% slower rage reduction after battle... my companion held a +1 to poison damage dagger and I was weilding a +20% to critical hit sword.

In Elon I got dryads to produce more thorns and I sometimes used the time scroll to renew another summon with the Royal thorns. Each stack of the small thorns were often making crits for 20k damage wiping out any stack + another 1k thorns on the dead body using the paladins "extra turn" if available in the same round.

Against Baal I had so many thorns up that there was barely space to move.

As for keeping the Royal thorns alive I used demonologists and sacrificed paladins to keep up their numbers.