Good point, CyanPile. Healing doesn't scale and was even nerfed recently. Certainly Life Magic has some good spells further on in the progression, but healing should be upgradeable (let's say I want a priest-type character).

* remember the spell vampirism of Vagrant Story *

Yes. Ranged spell. And then the visual effects - from a magician flies line piercing the enemy, and returning with captured health.

Wellspring. It's a Life IV spell. Heal does get better with more life shards, but they seem to be more rare than the others.

I dislike ranged life-drain type spells.  They taste cheesy.  Wellspring is brutally effective on high difficulties (x2 and x3 monster hps)

I wish there was a melee life drain buff, though.  (death shards + 1)% of damage given to attacker, with 1 as the minimum. Actually, that may be too powerful, scratch the minimum, if the engine can do fractional hit points.

Oh, and I agree 100% with the original poster.  Heal should scale with mage power.   All X% to magic damage should be X% to magic effects.

I find that the tactical spells I use the most are at the disciple level. I've noticed that the spells (including heal) get more powerful as my heroes level up and selecting level up traits like evoker make a big difference but I haven't noticed a correlation between the power of a spell and my level within a school of magic so there isn't much incentive to advance beyond disciple. To me, it would make more sense to determine spell strength using the heroes level within a school of magic rather than introducing a separate trait like evoker - additional modifiers like path, overall level and available shards make sense and having a "center of expertise" structure that can be built in conclaves to boost spell mastery would add some interest if the effect was enough to be noticeable.

In order to get healing traits we would need more healing spells, especially for Death, as Empire have no real healing spells.

Some examples are:

-Gift of Blood: Caster loses 10% of health and heals target unit for 3+1 per Death Shard times the amount of health lost.

-Vampiric Mark: For their next attack the target unit gains 2+1 attack per Death Shard, and health equal to damage done.

-Frenzied Resilience: Target Unit gains 12+3 per Death shard health, at end of combat the health gained from this spell is lost.