Yes, Death magic is probably a little more powerful than Life. But that's purely because of a handful of powerful spells:

- Blind: cheap and great vs big monsters. You don't start with it, btw

- Shadowbolt: kills weaker units outright

- Horrific Wail: this spell is overpowered. Kill the caster in that 1 turn delay or die! Note, however, that you need Water Magic too. It could use a mana increase.

All the other spells are average at best: I'll take Inspiration or Enchanted Hammers over Oppression, Wither and Kill are too expensive, Curse has a very short duration, Drain Life hardly does any damage, etc etc.

So I basically agree with you, but like many other Spellbooks, Death has a lot of spells that will never be used...

Life...

courage only needs to be useful in early game to be useful, death ward effectively doubles the hp of your champions, shrink effectively halves the damage of your opponents, growth effectively doubles the damage of your troops (unless they are dodge based and fragile), city growth can be amazing if you have enough food, heal is great for long battles where you would be outmatched eventually, or for "topping off" a unit during the opening moves of one, for example when facing a stack of doom, nature's call is outrageously powerful against the elemental damage forms, especially when combined with city growth, which can give you fire shards (and 1.1 makes it even better), call to arms complements a growth based strategy (emphasizing heavy research into civilization and magic, neglecting military, using city buffs on a high essence conclave to replace the fortress buffs -- these units become available late, and quite possibly when you are in the process of losing your cities), wellspring can be cast on the strategic map so you can heal any army to full if you have the mana, I have never used glory.

Anyways, I've played pariden a lot and I've won a lot of battles using life spells -- for example, in my experience, pariden has a much easier time dealing with magic immune opponents, than resoln.

And then there's combined-school spells like mantle of oceans.  40% reduction in mana costs, when combined with the other mana cost reductions means that life+water mages have a superior ability to use the elemental magic schools.

Well, the old topic is that Death is traditionally offensive, while Life is defensive. Changing roles is not good, imo.

I'm not very user of magic, but some things I've seen are related with Life, that needs to be more deffensive and usefull. A quick example: Heal should replenish a number of HP depending on the caster level, not a constant number. I find that kind of balance better than making Life offensive.

A question apart is if Death is much better than not only Life, but all the rest of schools...or not.

About Heal and Wellspring:

Heal is great if you have enough troops (and mana) that you can keep rotating out the ones getting damaged and heal them up a bit then throw them back into the fight. It's also great if you have good enough armor that enemies are only dealing small amounts of damage with each attack (generally the case for trained unit vs trained unit battles where your armor technology has kept pace with or outpaced your enemy's weapon technology). Wellspring is excellent if you can arrange things so that large numbers of units take light damage (e.g., by having all your units pile up on the enemy in a line or something like that, then pull the one or two units that the AI concentrates on back, and do that until most of your units have taken light damage, then cast wellspring and see them mostly restored).

Certainly I wouldn't mind seeing the healing spells scale with caster level or scale more with shards, but they aren't that bad currently.

It's my opinion that, were it not for a few good spells like Blind and Horrific Wail (which requires Water II in addition to Death II, and has a two turn casting time), Life Magic would be simply superior to Death Magic as far as battle magic goes. Wither is good in the early game, great if you find (or create) lots of Death Shards, and decent if your defense rating is about equal to the enemy's attack rating. Death Magic is fine for supporting an army by cursing the enemy army, or for keeping the caster alive, but it can do nothing to restore and enhance your own units. Battle Cry is great for a large army with a good caster in it; Shrink will usually do more to curse your enemy than Wither will (unless there are lots of Death Shards floating around); Growth is about as good as Curse for increasing the damage you deal, except that Growth lasts the whole battle and doesn't take an extra turn to cast.

While the turn order displayed in Tactical Battles may not be the best at showing it, casting Horrific Wail costs you three of the caster's turns. If you have a high-initiative caster, this doesn't matter as much (especially since the AI isn't usually bright enough to make a great effort to kill your caster or disrupt the spell casting in that window of opportunity), but if you for some reason have a low initiative caster your army can suffer a great deal of damage in the time it takes to get the spell off - especially if the battle map is one of the smaller ones that show up.

Horrific Wail is also one of the few spells in the game that really gives you a feeling of "wow! I've got an amazing wizard here!", so I'd really rather it not be nerfed much. If anything about it is changed, I would rather it be the level at which you can get the spell (e.g. make it require a higher degree of magical mastery) than having the mana cost increase. Contagion can be found at the same level as Horrific Wail if you've got a caster with Air and Death Magic, and if you're decently lucky with shards or have the Corruption spell it can be about as powerful (and maybe a bit more powerful, depending on how much you're willing to use Corruption and the level of the caster you have).

Great post, Joeball (and others). I fully agree Life can be pretty useful. Healing is hard to come by and + city growth is prob the best bonus out there. I also wouldn't like radical changes to Horrific Wail, as it's an awesome spell. Your suggestion to move the requirements up makes a lot of sense.

@Vallu751: yeah, if you have that many death shards Too bad converting costs 50 mana. Only some spells profit from it, so it's a hefty investment. And to climb back on my high horse: Horrific Wail would have killed all those units...