Champion Upgrade Paths

Depends on the role, defender or warrior is terrific for melee. For a mage, assassin or mage, for archers go assassin and for the useless heroes you make them governors.

Without a good weapon, assassins only deal good amount of damage when they hit a critical strike. So the best  traits are those wich give more critical strike (and critica strike damage) and the ignore armor (shadow strike I think). Equip them items that improve critical strike are a must too, if you find of those.

They have also other nice traits, like dodge, but for more damage I can only remember those as the preference.

Assassins are in fact the best mages. They can crit spells.

Ah I didn't know that mages can crit spells. That sounds rather nasty. Do the crits make up for the lack of getting evoker traits though? My Sov (custom mage) usually ends up with at least +75% spell damage. Though at least this gives me a reason to give her some crit gear.

As for melee I guess what you're saying is that Assassins end up the best for damage at the late game, whenever everyone is geared out and such? And I'll try an assassin archer, though I've been less than impressed with champ ranged damage compared to just trained archers. (I never find good bows, so having a group of 3+ shoot rather than one hero is better for me thus far.)

When my mage path champion crits, I sometimes seem to get almost 10x damage -- I think this is because of damage reduction mechanics combined with +250% critical hit damage on a weapon.

I agree ...

that´s the main reason why I have given up letting any of my heroes choose the governor path.

Either I let them remain in a city, in this case they are next to useless, due to the fact that they don´t level up and will remain at a low level or the rest of the game,

or I let them go around and kill monsters ... but in this case they level up, but stay outside of cities and don´t support them (and when they´re leveled up high enough, so that they would become a real asset as governor, the game is usually already decided and all that remains are mop up operations, which don´t really require any governors for my cities)

I had a lot of fun making a super-archer in one of my last games by going the Assasin path, then dumping a dozen Destiny's Gift spells on the archer, which 2/3 of the time stengthens the initiative and attack of the archer, which are usually kind of the two big weak points of using bows. She had loads of crit, and cut through Juggs like a hot knife through butter. Of course, that only works if you have loads of mana building up and aren't really using magic much, but it was fun.