I'm probably in the minority, but I find champions to be pretty week overall, and these wounds just make weak units weaker. They have a hard time surviving battles to get levels ups, and are pretty weak until you find powerful magic weapons and are able to buy them champions gear. They pretty much just sit back and debufff with magic, or do nothing at all. I really wish Kael would have went in a different direction with how champions, armies, and monster combat numbers work. Most champions start with around 7 str, and with some luck and leveling, you might get to 15. With a pretty good weapon and some gear you might get a 30 attack score. Pretty much crap still. Now, you might get lucky and get a Titan's Maul, or something similar, but how many of these are we going to find for 6 champions? Well, maybe they can use attack spells? Pretty good against groups of enemies if you have fireball, but against monsters, its fairly useless. Even at the start of the game, there will be champions to hire, but they are often weak even to the lowest monsters.
Agree with most of this. I think they over-nerfed them in .86, what with experience slowdown when stacking champs and the limit of 4 magic items. (Paragon spell is of course the exception, once you have the ability to cast it a LOT of times).
I'm not much of a modder, but does anybody know an *easy* way to increase the magic-item limit to something more than 4 ?? I have it on good authority that 8, for example, is a bigger number than 4 
