I've played with the Crushing Blow ability, reducing it's effect from 200% damage down to 150% damage. I find it to be a much better balance of the weapon, you attempt to wait until the end of the battle before executing the ability. Determining 'when' that end is can sometimes be tricky.

I agree with this 100%.

I also always play with the 'Epic' speed setting and I still find myself going through the tech trees very quickly - it makes the decisions seem less important than they should or could be.

I can't imagine how fast tech progression must be on the other settings.

I don't think we need bigger tech trees (although more technologies is always nice), I just think there should be an option for even 'slower' (less quick) research speeds. A 'Ridiculously Epic' setting for example..

@Op and forth, reducing the tech pace further will either make it required to explore more of the map for most people, or most likely unneccesary features, so I don't think adding it will happen.

However you can both edit and fix this easily yourselves:

Search for this in elementalDefs.xml (in your steam/steamapps/common/FELegendaryHeroes/English/Data folder)

<!-- ** game pacing effects on techs ** -->

<TechPacingMultiplier_Epic>3.0</TechPacingMultiplier_Epic>
<TechPacingMultiplier_Normal>1.0</TechPacingMultiplier_Normal>
<TechPacingMultiplier_Fast>0.5</TechPacingMultiplier_Fast>

Edit the epic speed to whatever you want. If needed increase the turn multiplier below this as well. 

PS! You can always do as me and crank up the AI difficulty as well, tech speed is not fast enough for me when the AI techs 10x my speed

Blunt weapons are very useful in the early game. Once I have a few groups with ranged frost weapons though I can take down hammer-wielders before they're in range to hit my units. It does help to have a mage there casting freeze to slow them down further. On low-metal maps I often bypass all armor and metal weapons and just use ranged magic weapons. Since they ignore armor a 13 damage staff wielded by 6-member parties do a lot of damage but it's useful to boost their initiative with perks, city enchantment and the right fortress since the staffs have -6 initiative.

I would assume not. Attack is physical damage, staffs are elemental damage. I haven't tested to confirm though.

Ok. So +Attack won't increase fire/cold/lightning-staffs, but what about the other way? I think a +1 Fire Attack ring on a Sov adds to both his Sword-attacks and his Fire staff-attacks?  N'est-ce pas?

I think I fought a ghost (not sure about its name) that my Henchmen could damage a little with swords as they had +1 Fire attack equipment.

They stopped boosting elemental damage with +Attack bonuses because elemental damage ignores armor.  Elemental damage is still pretty powerful, even though you can only boost it with elemental trinkets.  And for a neat combo to make your elemental staff-wielding units more versatile, combine ice staffs with the Heart of Fire city enchantment (a 3+ essence city is best for this).  Your attacks will do both ice and fire damage, so even when attacking ice resistant or immune units and it says they are resistant or immune, you can still attack them with the staffs and the fire damage that is rolled as a "hit" will count, plus some of the ice damage if they are only resistant rather than immune to it.