There's definitely a reason to play them now.

Now it's time to buff Mancers, Urxen and Tarth.

I'm only a couple hours into it my game, the dodge on the sov is nice - I'm still getting hit, but he can tank quite a bit. 

so far

20 for wraith

5 for lucky

5 for weathered shield

6 for evade w/no air shards

Its working well, will occasionally die to a nasty crit but my 2nd champ was another wraith so I have those 2 running around on horses and they can usually ping pong most small and occasional medium mobs by themselves.  I have one of those tears of cyndrum (+3 health on kill), which stacks with the wraith ability - so each kill is +6 so far - which really helps.

Might be OP when I start churning out some dodge monks, but really... that's ok

Depends on how you play.  I can't remember the last time my sovereign did not get to above level 20, and I often have level 30+ heroes.

Using a Warg as a hero mount adds 10 dodge as well, so consider that as a combat option.  You can always keep a horse (in your backpack) for long distance moves on the strategic map but you're usually limited to the speed of slower troops in your stack so a warg is good enough in most situations.

JJ

Oh, I wonder what happan with "lucky" in create faction? I wonder if it's gave 2 to 3 more of dodge?

I am of the camp that it is not necessary to nerf everything.  With that said it can be argued that a choice that is so overwhelmingly obvious doesn't necessarily need a nerf for the sake of OP - but for the idea that no other choices make sense.    Again, i haven't got a lot of troops yet so I'm not sure.  Sov with 20+ is a fun option.

+20 constant is better -- +1/level is weak initially, and becomes overpowered later when you do not need it (i often get into the level 30-40 range)

Anyways, i think the wraiths and resoln deserve some play, to find out the things that really need fixing -- it's usually a bad idea to change gameplay purely based on how the numbers sound instead of how the game plays.

Note also that if dodge on wraiths is too much, it might be that other effects which benefit dodge need to be nerfed, or perhaps some rare accuracy boosting skills are needed for champions. 

If you are looking to win through attrition, try getting some spell mastery and using dirge!

You need to select Death Worship for your factions to have the Dirge of Ceresa, but that is just a souped up Contagion spell which costs 40 mana (for a Mage) and can be cast in 1 turn rather than the 2 turns Contagion takes.  Instant casting is very useful and does a lot of damage before the enemy move if you have a high initiative Sovereign.  The damage of both spells depends on how many death shards you have but carries on for 10 turns.

A similar mass damage spell based on Death and Water magic is Horrific Wail.  That depends only on the level of the caster and not the number of death shards so is good later on once your champions get higher level.

I'm not sure how useful your high dodge monk type units will be as they won't do much damage if armed only with a staff.  Perhaps you could give them some extra damage with amulet flames and amulet of frost but then they start getting expensive.

JJ

Armies that are only good against trash can be fine if you have a high powered champion to go out and conqueror cities.  But with this strategy you need some way of keeping the pace up, because your only real defense is the spearhead offense of your champion.

(But this is a surprisingly good defense, in part because of the resource limitations involved in building good units, and also the lack of an ability in the AI to form useful situational goals.)

My current OP wraith unit is my level 22 sovereign, with:

6 moves, 3 attack, 5 defense, 42 hit points, 22 initiative, 97 accuracy, 26 dodge, 8 crit chance, 0 cold resist, 50 fire resist, 0 lightning resist, 0 poison resist, 40 spell resist, 144 spell mastery.

Of course, this intimidates no one, not even the AI.

And, ironically, my most dangerous opponent has been a custom pariden sovereign I built, which the AI is totally underusing.  (With only 144 spell mastery on my part, that sovereign's 76 spell resist -- in part thanks to discipline -- means my spells sometimes fail, and both sovereigns are impulsive, and that one has a significantly higher initiative than this one... but for example, the proper approach should be to flame dart me, since I do not have the health to survive a half-strength flame dart, and no one has ever flame darted me.)

Also, when I have played pariden, I have made significant use of strategic map spells, but not once have I been frozen, or tremored or pillar of flamed, or fire stormed, or tornado'd or tidal waved or howled...  and these are all useful for rescheduling a battle so that appropriately strong units can take action, or cancelling it so that they do not have to.  I suspect that a part of the problem, though, is that the AI knows that I liked using destiny's gift a lot in 1.02 and using that in 1.1 would be a serious mana drain -- in 1.1 I think I would stick to celerity for a caster (if you do your battles right, and have sufficient initiative you almost never get hit) and stick to a "10% of gross mana" rule for permanent buffs (except in a rare situation where the permanent buffs would put me over some kind of threshold needed to survive and win a critical battle).

Or a war that has a greater number of fronts than you have death mages that can cast dirge...

Note also that only some of your shards will be inside cities with essences, so a human player faced with resoln would have on their list of priorities "destroy death altars/shrines/temples" (with the usual "cost/benefit" thing that we use to pick our opportunities). And you only need 1 attack and 1 hp to take an unprotected outpost or resource (I do not think pioneers can take outposts, can they? I mean if you have not imbued them with any attack...)

Also, note that shadow bolt is relatively cheap (in terms of mana cost for a death mage), so you need to make sure that you arrange your battles such that they cannot be won by shadow bolt, and you need to arrange for them to be over quickly because some other spells can also be devastating in a prolonged battle.

But all of the above assumes a warlock resoln, and a summoning resoln poses a different set of problems. Remember that summoning bonuses apply to your entire faction. Also, keep in mind that those grave elementals love to snack on pioneers. Also, some of the most powerful resoln spells (like wither/blood sigil) do not care about spell resistances, and of course death magic can get really bad in a prolonged battle (but it's life that can prolong battles, so during early game, before resoln has gotten a sovereign with life magic to surrender, this might not be such a big deal).