I think the paralysis spell was designed with CoE in mind. In CoE a paralyzed unit was removed from battle and if you won you got it back. If you lost the paralyzed unit was also lost. Paralysis is supposed to remove a unit from the battle for the remainder of the battle. A poor-mans soul slay so to speak.
Being of lower paths than soul slay it can become quite powerful/accessible, but primarily as a SC-counter. I'm quite fond of SC-counters
On the other hand I'm fond of scaled effects. I'm not entirely fond of MR-or-die effects (at least in RPG's). That's JK's cup of tea. Since people tend to get emotionally attached to their SC's you might call dom3 a SC-RPG and I understand that people get frustrated when puny mages paralyze their Great God.