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You sure you want your players to have a belt of battle? White Raven Tactics through martial study or a level of Crusader might be better.

Thanx for the clarification. So basically your problem is challenging a very variable group of players, not just the sheer size of them.

How do you manage PCs from absent players? Do they just disappear into the void, reappearing when the player joins a session? Do you end each session in a populated area? Is it an option to let players play PCs form absent players as cohorts? That way the powerlevel of the group is more predictable.

On swarms. You are aware that things like shocking and flaming do max damage against swarms?

From your description they seem to be a very specialised lot. Geared to one kind of threat. It shouldn't be to hard to find out where their vulnerabilities lie. Saves and AC are good you say. How about touch AC? Are saves good across the board? Maybe for the Paladin. For others not so much. Can they handle flying enemies? Simple Gargoyles with improved flyby can be very annoying.

Still not sure what kind of advice you're looking for.

Contingent spells?  Cheaper...

One thing I like adding to my bad guys is a belt of battle. It's come in handy a few times.

A Cleric with access to Divine Power does well when the buff is up.  Having the Strength domain would of course make things better.  If it wasn't for the fact that I don't think any deity has a favored weapon with reach, I'd say War domain would be the second option to get a reach weapon other than the longspear.

Not having access to spells/psionics of course makes things more difficult.  Still, even two levels of Fighter can get a Knock-Down build going.

As a casual Magic gamer, I have been using card sleeves and rubber bands, but I find myself disliking the bending the rubber bands inflict on the sleeves. I am considering getting some boxes, but at the same time, I'd rather not since I'd need 13 of them, and rubber bands are cheaper.

Thoughts? Should I buy a bunch of boxes or just suck it up and learn to live with some bent sleeves?

Ah, thats where large numbers of enemies vs powerful solos help again, you can remove some to make the numbers even more easily than depowering a single powerful solo.

As an added idea, for fighting really powerful solo enemies, one trick I used before is to give the enemy multiple initiatives. On a sufficiently tough opponent(high hp, saves and AC, relatively low attack, lots of status effect attacks), it can be pretty hard to deal with. Only used it once, on the depowered remains of a god my players got to beat up.

Would you need to use a full-round action the gain these extra benefits?  Would there exist a way to attack multiple enemies in one round?  This seems to really screw over sneak attack. 

I think brazilian death squad tops most stories we could tell