If it's not meant to be a combat spell, though, what's it good for? In theory, you could target a powerful enemy and thus soften them up for a future combat; but since the spell has a touch range, it's very hard to pull that off without getting smote.
That's the problem with contagion. As written, it's stupidly overpowered. With the Sage Advice ruling, it's almost useless. A useless spell can simply be ignored, while an overpowered one can wreck games, so the Sage Advice solution is an improvement, but not a great one. That was why I proposed a total rewrite in the other thread, changing contagion into a "spread plague among your enemies" spell*.
[SIZE=-2]*Also, I feel like if a spell is gonna be named contagion, shouldn't it be... you know... contagious?[/SIZE]