[Valerius]

I think the reason you so frequently see EN blesses is that they are the best for commanders (both thugs and spellcasters) and commanders provide utility further into the game than sacred troops since you can swap out their gear, they usually have magic, and when not fighting they can research/site search/forge or even just preach instead of just adding to your upkeep. When it comes to combat, almost every thuggable commander can use reinvigoration, regeneration and (if you go to E9) an armor bonus. The offensive blesses don't have the same utility. Adding magic weapons to troops (F9/D9) is a big plus but not much of a selling point for thugs when you'll likely be forging magic weapons. The same thing applies to the minor blood bless - you can accomplish the same thing for a thug by forging a high damage or armor piercing weapon. The offensive bless that is most appealing to thugs is W9. This can be a real plus, especially if you don't have W mages to cast quickness but it also means that fatigue will be even more of an issue which leads you right back to an E bless. So even here you are probably better off with an E bless and eventually forging quickness gear when needed. The minor F/W blesses are useful but would you really choose +2 attack over an EN bless that saves you from having to forge gear for those purposes?

Then there's the troop side of things. Mictlan is the perfect offensive bless nation: sacreds that are cheap, easily massable, recruit everywhere, with multiple attacks (up to 6 per square), and low encumbrance and armor. Sure, you can toss on S9 (which is of course useful in the late game anyway) but otherwise they are perfect for offensive blesses. But how many other nations have these types of units? Frequently sacred troops are expensive and cap only - you will have limited numbers of them and probably would like to keep them alive rather than have them be glass cannons. And generally speaking you'll get the best return by taking a troop's strongest attributes and pushing them further. In terms of number of attacks the best case scenario is sacred cavalry with 4 attacks per square. That's not bad and you might be inclined to build on that with an FW bless, but again how many of those units will you have and how much will they cost you? Giants have even less reason to take a major offensive bless since they have so few attacks per square to begin with and they already hit hard (though a minor F bless could be useful and fit into a rainbow build).

So the way I see it EN blesses are best for commanders and can also be the best choice for many troops and I think that's why you see them so frequently. If you wanted to see more offensive blesses the easiest way would be to give more nations Mictlan-style sacreds. For instance, if you made Pan's revelers sacred I'd definitely consider an offensive bless. Of course you'd have to also have an offsetting nerf or you'd just end up with a lot of OP nations.

Btw, I don't think the E9 bless needs to be nerfed. More than ever, I think the optimal pretender build under CBM is a scales build with some key magic diversity and a light bless if appropriate. You can certainly play with an E9 bless but I don't think you'll necessarily get better results with it than you would with great scales.