The Tavern

Borgnjor's Vile Clutch is still way too powerful imo. Reducing its damage by 25% was nowhere near enough to balance it.

Some ideas (pick one):
1) Raise the spell level.
2) Keep the target area as 3x3, but remove the damage component completely. Level can be adjusted if need be.
3) Keep the damage, but make it target only one square.
4) (My favourite) Remove the spell and add a damage component to Leda's Liquefaction (and make it not slow the player).

I like #2. Synergy with undead allies, miasma, and other attrition tactics for a non-nuke spell school. Adjust level if needed to make it worth casting.

Right now if I get BVC on a character the rest of his kit becomes superfluous for a long time.

Why does Necromancy have spells to do absolutely everything, anyway? It has a bunch of summons, a bunch of direct damage, healing, MP recovery, weapon branding, buffs, and debuffs, many of which don't even have a second school. And it's not a "jack of all trades, master of none" thing - it has some of the best spells in each of these categories. The only school it doesn't intrude on is Translocations.
BVC is a damage spell with a debuff attached, so you'd expect it to be Conjuration/Hexes. But nope, Earth/Necromancy, because we wanted to flavour it as something gross.

Yes, I totally agree that it should not be necromancy and the flavour is far-fetched. If the "zombie hands" would only be raised from actual corpses on the ground, then it would be logical to be a necromantic spell (no, I'm not suggesting that).

I always thought the "lock enemies in place" effect would be more appropriate on, say, Gell's Gravitas. Let's make Warper an actually cool starting class! (This would come with increasing gravitas' level, probably)

And yes, the spell feels hilariously strong imo. The lockdown effect alone rocks, but it's big AoE -and- great damage ontop of that? Even with low spellpower, the damage dealt seems rather large, to the point that I've picked it up on ranged characters with no previous magic training or significant int... and it felt like a game-winning decision. In midgame it just kills mobs all by itself even with low spellpower, the damage never becomes trivial, and the AoE lockdown is amazing all game.

BVC would actually fit in tloc pretty well, it's not *that* dissimilar to Gell's or Singularity