Don't throw in special spells to that, you have to take Resolin or make a special faction to get Dirge and some other spells.  And I don't share your assessment at all on those spells.  There are few spells that compete with a pure melee.  And then there is the cost in mana for a lot of those that are pretty huge.  The cost of Wither is pretty steep for the effect.  

I would say that, relative to the other damage spells in the game, the damage spells from Death Magic are more or less on par.

Generally speaking, though, if I wanted to get a damage spell I'd go for Fire, get Flame Dart, and never look back, since it is the only spell in the game that does not rely exclusively on shards (or, often, even mostly on shards) for its damage, and I can boost its damage simply by getting a bunch of conclaves to level four and taking the Pyre of Annelium.

I take Death Magic primarily for its cursing spells. Of these, Blind is the best for disabling a single, strong target and I would hate to see that ability lost. Curse and Graveseal are essentially the same spell, as they accelerate the rate at which the target dies, but Graveseal tends to work better unless the target's defense is high enough that I'm not doing much damage to it anyway - mainly because Graveseal sticks on the target until it is dead, and I usually don't bring enough troops to a battle to kill a Cursed target in three turns anyway.

I would rather Blind did not get significantly weaker, because to me spells like Curse and Mass Curse are only marginally useful - kill one or two units quickly, but only if you can do it in three turns, unless you're almost guaranteed to be able to reapply the curse, Graveseal only matters if I can actually deal reasonably large amounts of damage to start with, and I can find equivalent or better ways to directly deal damage to an enemy elsewhere, many of which cost me no manna (i.e., troops, a hero with one of the better weapons that can be looted, etc).

Also, to the person who said that checking each turn would slow down the game: yes, making a spell resistance check every turn while Blind was active would slow down the game, but this involves only the generation of two random numbers and a comparison, a process that should take only microseconds on any almost any computer built in the last ten years. You wouldn't notice the difference.

I really don't like the spell effects that last the entire battle. I think that all spells should have a turn limit of of 10 turns or less. I'm not in the business of nerfing the gameplay as it stands, but after 10 actions by the opponent that obviously speaks to making a battle more dynamic.

I don't mind watching my 30 turn battle play out...

cast blind... blinded

get blind cast on me... blinded.

try to attack... miss

getting attacked... miss

try to attack... miss

getting attacked... miss

try to attack... miss

getting attacked... 1 point of damage.

try to attack... miss

getting attacked... miss

try to attack... 5 points of damage.

getting attacked... miss

try to attack... miss

getting attacked... miss

etc

This is a very interesting battle that happens without turn limits on some spells like these. I don't think a nerf to the blind spell by adding a turn limit of 10 turns is really a nerf to the spell itself. It forces a tatical battle to progress forward and not get in a stalemate as the one I demonstrated above. Sure there is an auto-resolve function, but that is not the point of the tatical battle. It should always move forward with some stalling. Not complete rounds of stalling. This happened to an enemy that cast shrink on me... I couldn't hurt them and they couldn't hit me. It was a great ping fest... as I took them 1 hitpoint at a time, so after 40 turns later I finally killed the badguys of doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over again. I don't want to nerf spells, but I'd rather nerf a spell to decrease the chance of the above senario of repetition.

Dirge of Ceresa is a spell that requires you to have taken a specific faction trait, and Contagion requires you to have both Death and Water magic at a high level. It isn't unreasonable that these spells are powerful - you have to sacrifice a customization slot that could gain you something more generally useful (Dirge of Ceresa) or you have to sink multiple level-ups into developing two schools of magic on one hero. Somewhat ironically, Ceresa is one of the sovereigns most likely to be able to cast Contagion, since she starts with Death II and Water I, and I have rarely, if ever, seen both Death and Water magic on a recruitable hero (though this may just be due to chance).

Why do I say that getting Dirge of Ceresa causes you to sacrifice a specialization slot that could have been for something more generally useful? Well, if you take Ceresa's spellbook, then all the heroes you have should either be developed into Death mages to take advantage of all the Death Shards you should be making with Corruption, or they should be developed into melee or ranged combatants or governors (though I personally don't believe that Path of the Governor is generally worth taking, since it causes you to stop leveling that hero if you want to actually make use of most of the bonuses from that path), since non-Death magic is going to be severely weakened by the lack of non-Death Shards found within your kingdom (if you can get enough level 4 and 5 conclaves, you can also include Fire and Water magic users among your caster-type champions, since level 4 conclaves give you a fire shard-like building and level 5 conclaves give you a water shard-like building, if I remember correctly).

Maybe they annihilate the battlefield, but then so do many of the other high-end direct damage spells, and so do some spells that can be acquired as random loot scrolls in a monster lair or treasure site (namely, Despair Scrolls). You also need to be playing as one of the Empires in order to use either of these spells, and the Empires need to have the ability to end a battle quickly, because they have no real healing spells available to them (unless you take Betrayers, which allows you to recruit opposite-alignment champions and potentially get a Life mage; or convince a Kingdom sovereign to surrender to you, since most of them have Life magic), so damage to their troops and champions is much worse than it is for Kingdoms, which can heal during the battle and have the ability to accelerate healing after the battle.

Blind, in its present state, is bad because of what Parrotmath endured, but I certainly don't want to see a short duration on the spell (10 turns might be acceptable, but certainly not the three turns that was suggested earlier - you'd end up with a caster who does nothing but waste your mana at that point, trying to keep enemies blinded long enough that the spell was worth casting). A duration that depends on the caster level, or a duration based on the caster's spell mastery, or a chance each turn to remove the effect by passing a spell resistance check would all be better than a fixed duration, in my view.

I think that magic in this game is generally too divorced from the caster, and I would like to see some mechanic somewhere which actually rewards me for really pushing up my spell mastery, or which gives me a reason to want more than about 50 spell resistance on a unit/champion (granted, the Dark Sorcerer gives me a reason for this, but he usually beats anything you can throw at him into a bloody pulp regardless of how much spell resistance you have).

At GFireflyE: that sounds like a really boring battle. I think I would have sooner let the opposition take the city than actually fight that out.

[0.99] Dragon accuracy nerfed in 0.99. For example, Forest Drake has 84 Accuracy. It had 90+ Accuracy before the patch. So Blindness becomes more overpowered.

I think it's accuracy before was a 88, and now its a 84.  Not really a huge difference.  And it wasn't just dragons, it was everything.  So things that are less than level 10 got an accuracy boost, things higher than that got a nerf.  The calculations were changed.

Same with spell mastery, so lower level heroes can fire off blind more easily

Sincerely
~ Kongdej