[Dragar]

The thing with the affliction bonus is that a lot of the time you expect to be killing targets you hit with damaging battlefield spells, and when you don't and they get an affliction quite often it isn't particularly damaging within that combat - disease for instance.

The creatures you want to afflict are the thugs and SCs for the most part, and typically they aren't going to be hurt much by the big area effect spells you throw down on the battlefield.

I trialled the D9 bless a few times in MP games and I can't think of a single major battle where it made the decisive difference

F9 on the other hand makes a huge difference in a lot of battles - above all due to the +4 attack. It means you hit most of the time against normal troops, and means you have a chance against thugs! When you are trying to swarm a high defence thug or SC with sacred troops the +4 makes a huge difference.