I don't quite grasp the benefits or high Ratings of death blessing effect. To me, unless playing a nation with undead sacred troops, death blessing is probably the worst one. At death 4, your troops get lesser fear -4, which means that they influence one square out of 8 that surround them, and force morale check with +1 bonus for the opponent. Now, unless the sacred unit is completely surrounded, the chance of fear actually influencing the square that contains an enemy unit is pretty slim. And if you're surrounded, it won't matter anyway. Even if there are three sacred units in the square, their chance of actually scaring someone wouldn't be too good. The only thing that might help is that in prolonged battles the fear effect might begin to build up on the enemy units that Last long. Either that or you have to be really lucky with where the aura influence falls every turn.
To add to that, many other paths have much better combat spells than death if you're planning on using your pretender for combat. Summoning a couple of skeletons and dropping from exhaustion doesn't really compare with other things like blade winds and mistform. The only thing I can think of is adding it to the existing fear aura on a pretender, such as LoD or cyclops.
In short, unless your sacred units are already fearful, such as wailing ladies, or you go very high with death so as to get a significant size fear aura, which is hard, I don't see what would the benefit of fear 4 be. But, of course, I'm always open to learn something new.
[ November 28, 2003, 06:18: Message edited by: HJ ]