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Originally Posted by Chrisb3  He put his power INTO the ring, so he couldn't make another one. Hence him 'dieing' when it is destroyed. Lots of his powers are described in the books, I think it'd work. |
In the Silmarilion and the Lord of the Rings, Sauron is described as being capable of shape-shifting and is an extremely cunning sorcerer all around, along with a ferocious warrior all rolled into one. Back in Morgoth's era, Sauron was a lieutenant of Morgoth and held the rank of Lord of the Werewolves. Later after Morgoth was banished, Sauron took over his fortress and renamed it Barad-Dür and forged the rings of power and the One Ring. Barad-Dür was made much stronger than its previous incarnation, and in fact the only thing keeping it upright is the power of the One Ring (that's why the tower collapses in the movie when the One Ring is destroyed).
As far as omniscience is concerned, I think Sauron is capable of controlling weak or corrupted minds from a great distance (think Wormtongue or Saruman) but mostly through subtle manipulation, not outright telepathic control. For instance, Sauron can know what is going on in many regions because he manipulates people to let him see through the Palantir, but if there is no one to let him see through it, he can't see anything there. Sauron's physical form is rather impressive, his strength is amazing, but we haven't really gotten a chance to see him use any magic abilities, and though he packs quite a punch with his mace in the movies introduction, I doubt that mace has any particular powers beside being fucking huge.
The Lich King is another deal altogether. He is capable of telepathic control on a planetary scale, and can command millions of undead creatures at the same time doing different things. The downside is that he has an actual physical form (the frozen throne where Ner'Zul's spirit is imprisoned, along with the Helm of Domination and Frostmourne originally). That ice gasket is very vulnerable to attacks as Illidan nearly destroyed it before he was interrupted and actually cracked the ice, draining the powers of the Lich King out (which caused the Forsaken to break free of his telepathic grasp). Now if you're talking about the Lich King posessing Arthas' body, well Arthas is a full-fledged Death Knight who can drain the life out of his foes to resplenish his own, can command armies of the dead, can reanimate corpses to attack his enemies, and he wields Frostmourne, one of the most powerful weapons in the universe.
But raising the dead may not be the advantage of the Lich King only, because if you've read The Hobbit, you know Sauron used to haunt a tower in Mirkwood and was then known as the Necromancer, which implies he has powers over the dead and can probably command corpses just as well as Arthas. Hell, the Naz'gul themslves could be considered undead, and they were created by the One Ring wielded by Sauron.
I think that match would be rather interesting, but until we've seen more about the Lich King's actual powers in physical form (so far all we have seen him do is sit on his frozen ass in the middle of Northrend), or know more about Sauron's magical abilities, it's not very easy to get to any definite conclusions.