Hello guys, I've been stress testing the lancer's ability for a couple of games now, and although I've succeeded in closing 3 locations in 1 turn, it is not without risk and strain to the team. Let me share my experience.
1. The stat composition of Alain does not allow him to acquire all the boons he encounters, probably about 50%, and within 50% of it are already allies and blessings that can be used to explore by anyone, so it is not Alain exclusive as mentioned by philosorapt0r.
2. If Alain recharges every single junk he acquired during the explores, it will be very soon before his hand draw becomes horrible. This has happened to me and there's no point exploring with more than half my hand being junks. You can feel this during mid game.
3. You'll need a horse (Donahan preferably), weapon and armor to be safe. If you begin to recharge them for explore you run into risk. If you bump into a nasty bane you're going to pay for it, and your team mate is going to spend blessings on you which causes strain. So we cannot assume Alain will recharge his hand to explore.
4. Alain can fight well, but if you really want to kill things consistently you'll need to use Donahan, discard weapons or discard a card to use the solo ability. Don't forget banes deals damage too so you'll need armor to mitigate it. All these things drains your deck and reduces the power of the recharge explore. Alain cannot always kill things without cost.
5. These crazy stunts are all done in AP3 where I've decked out to the max, and even so there are banes out there that can give us pause. We should not use AP3 to measure the lancer's strength. Anyway, the solution to this is to bring out banes that will punish you for being reckless. That dragon in AP4 is one of the best examples, it's not terribly powerful, but if you go in unprepared, like recharging your cohort or weapon or any other useful cards to recklessly explore, you're going to pay for it. Bringing in banes like these will not cause problems to other characters. Remember, Alain cannot kill without cost, and the issue here is the explore, not the fighting.
6. If after all this the community still has issues with the lancer, then we can be creative with location and scenario rules. There are things that can stop the lancer from exploring. We have scenarios like 2-5 that constantly knocks Alain off his horse, by force! And also penalty for moving, you can even make the third explore onwards more dangerous. I believe Paizo can be creative in this area. Honestly I'm very impressed to see that AP4 dragon, it really puts a stop to reckless explore. Can we have more of these please?
7. Lastly, please do not nerf or change the ability of any character, especially nerfing or changing something that we have spent months to build. There are other ways to handle this, please don't kill or altar our characters, Paizo put the role cards ahead for us to plan and envision where we will be, changing it at this very last minute when we can finally taste the fruits of our work is really cruel.
