> The alternative would be to nerf damage spells - Meaning Vangheist and Wind of Death, specifically.

People rarely respond to these, fwiw. I am just a weirdo with time to burn. Yeah, I'll need to play around some more with Lore of Death; I'll prolly try an Elspeth's - Mixu's death mage LL - campaign this month or next, that should force me to form a stronger opinion. Ward save doesn't go in the negatives, btw. AI accidentally manages to stack some occasionally, but it generally doesn't matter.

Yeah, KotD is basically irrelevant in the base game; Vamp Coast has some issues with WoM stacking, Vangheist's is very strong, so trying to rely on frequent use of weaker spells is discouraged.

Your buffed KotD would be really terrible design in multiplayer, but in campaign where you can get 300ish kills per cast of Vangheist, easy - it is about right where it needs to be to force the player to actually consider if they want to blob and Vangheist, or spam spite-tidecall and Mortis Engine the map. The alternative would be to nerf damage spells, imo, and nobody would actually like that.

Thank you all for the comments !

I definitely didn't think about the Kiss of the Deep spam all things considering. I will tune it down a bit (and add dwarf runes) if i ever get around to updating the mod.

As for Lore of Death, i think it's alright ? I has strong debuffs.
Overcasted Soulblight diminishes a good portion of the enemy troops by a decent amount and lasts a while (-30 armor, -25% damage, -15% ward save, -8 morale).
An overcast Aspect of the Dreadknight also inflicts the disrupted effect, which lowers physical defense by 10%.
Combined with the various morale debuffs and fear/terror, there's also potential for serious control.
Maybe the mana costs are too high ?

Actually no, scratch that, I overestimated the damage. Repeatedly Vangheisting/Wind of Death'ing blobs is still superior.

Still, Tidecall/Spiteful Shot spam is a viable-ish alternative at high WoM levels with a lower demand for proper army positioning and enemy blobbing. If you have like, 200~ WoM, you could half-kill an enemy army just by having 2-3 vamps cycle-cast Spiteful Shot on your troops.

BTW, Kiss of the Deep buff is hilarious. Not bad, but definitively gameplay-defining. Wind of Death is more efficient on blobs, but this is braindead guaranteed damage. And you buffed baseline mana reserve and regen by quite a bit, too...

Lore of Death still seems to be pretty mediocre, from what I can see in the excel doc. Is it supposed to be all about -32 sum leadership debuff? I don't get how it is supposed to contend with the other buffed lores. A whole lot of other buffs are very good tho, to the point where choice between buff and direct damage is an actual choice.

THIS IS A GEM ^^

does not work for dwarf runes sadly