The Giant reduced Durkon's level to prevent him from accessing a specific spell.

[RatElemental]

For 5k XP, "Swinging the tide of a battle in your favor by raising fallen allies to continue fighting" always seemed ridiculously overpowered to me.

Miracle can already happily duplicate raise dead or resurrection. It still costs diamond dust to do it but you can do it without even eating up your entire turn and for no exp cost. Going by the rules on hiring spellcasters to cast spells for you, the 5000 exp you burn on the given miracle is worth 25000 gold, enough to cast raise dead five times or resurrection twice. Getting a party's worth (minus cleric) of corpses back on their feet is actually pretty in line with the cost.