Is it me, or is Ephemeral Shield a better defensive ploy than Daemonic Resilience, particularly for Ghartok and Zharkus? It puts everybody on a minimum of two defence dice - sure, you might still get hit for full damage, but you're much more likely to roll a successful defence and then trigger the reaction attack.
Similarly, Invisible Walls looks way better than Bloodslick Ground - the latter is only superior if you're playing against Undead/Dwarves, otherwise max movement 1 is much more of a penalty than -2.