I've always had a fondness for Gemmell -- Legend was one of the first books I read when I was getting into fantasy as a genre. Although I quite recently read Quest for Lost Heroes, a rather later novel in the saga, and found that it does very much adhere to the formula you've laid out above -- which works, as a vehicle for characterization, but (perhaps because Gemmell's done such a good job establishing the formula) if you've read a lot of fantasy you can see things coming a kilometer away...