Trying to avoid Paladins. Like the plague. Too cheesy for me. As for ghosts and black knights, same problem as always. No ressing them.

They cna be ressed by evlin spell .. i killed ktahu and baal on hard without even one black lost

Only problem being you need a full undead army for that I think, otherwise it will hit your own (living) troops as well.

Well not at all., it attracts for a nearby unit so just dont spawn evlin next to your living trooops.

Or just cast Stone Skin on especially vulnerable units. That can easily halve the damage they take.

Well Slippery cuiras seems as exclusive rare item to me i played several games and looked several scansaves and i never had even one ...
stoneskin help but if you have more units without ph resistance you wont protect them all .. and for example against ktahu he starts first so first damage will be always very high without items

That's right. The last part of the dragon exp formula is enemy total leadership divided by your total leadership. Zag-Zag's total leadership (sum of all stacks) is well above 50k while my total leadership is 1100. My mage's dragon is always several levels ahead of Amelie because of all the 1-troll fights I did.

In terms of Zag-zag, I generally find on Impossible that there are about 4-5 fights on Rusty Anchor that are too difficult to do with zero losses until you have spent some time in Verona/Montero etc. I just kicked Zag-zag's ass at level 25, even though he cast Geyser four times. I play a very 'vanilla' gamestyle involving Paladins and Inquisitors for resurrection. Works well here.

It's all luck. I've gotten the slippery cuirass on every playthrough in KB:L and I have it in my current AP playthrough.

However, there is also the scale set with scale armor, scale shield, and scale bracelet that gives 20% physical resistance. You can get up to 45% resistance without any repeated items. 60% if you can get another twinkling boot.

yes there is .. but gwtting set is even more luck ...