[Norfleet]

Well, the primary drawback of touch spells is that they tend to accomplish nothing you can't already do by braining somebody with an actual weapon: The touch spells are very hard to script, due to lack of conditional scripting for use, so to get any mileage out of them deliberately, you have to actually get a mage into close combat with opponents. This tends to be rather suicidal for mage-mages, and fighter mages tend to script buffs, then attack normally, rather than scripting unreliable touch spells that probably won't be cast due to range.

This is obviously why they're not very high level spells. Occasionally, a mage will manage to spontaneously use one to good effect, but most of the time, you get what you pay for.