Just a few little quibbles. The h1 priests are actually still useful over the h2 and h3 priests because heal the dead is pretty much the only thing they can cast. When the stronger priests go off script they'll tend to spam death spells and things like the national spell resilience. Acolytes have practically no choice but to cast heal the dead every turn. Which can be quite handy for keeping your units alive, especially if you have any undead thugs present in a battle with them.
Also, tomb priests have a higher research to gold ratio than high priests do, and if you have magic one it gets even better. The tomb kings are a really expensive nation, and it is certainly worth considering using tomb priests as your main researchers instead of high priests. High priests are definitely very useful though.
And you didn't mention bone scorpions! Those things rock, man.
I don't know about anyone else, but I for one would be interested in seeing you post your build from tourmaline here and discuss what worked and didn't work for you in that game
