I was around, and it was seriously dull playing PVP at the highest levels. The Silent Goit was in every enemy team - you had to use it to be competitive - whoever cast Hush first was likely to win - pretty easy to recharge him before the enemy recovered. I did feel (and still do) that the changes were a little harsh - the spell change is sound - but the stat changes I feel left him a little too weak. Hilariously, I understand that many players rage-quit the game after this long-expected, and much-needed, balance change. Grow up, guys.
Absolutely, this was a fix to a coding bug that meant skull-spammers could one-shot an entire team - I ran Keeper Of Souls for ages to exploit this. The bug (and it wasn’t little) was that if damage killed the first enemy troop, it didn’t just overflow to the next one but also repeated the damage (or something similarly arithmetically wrong). I’d note also that Sheggra’s mana cost was adjusted after this fix to keep her viable - and she still is a potent threat - but risky to use!
This is partly true, I feel - but slightly mis-states the situation - as the remaining gem-spammer that scales with the Magic stat (along with other hero weapons, but the Orb is the most powerful and flexible), it’s able to reliably get 14 gems onto the board (for example, in a 3x undead team) and that is verging on broken - the 8x8 board doesn’t cope well with that many gems being spawned - over 13 seems the tipping point whereby the likelihood of a 4 or 5 match is disproportionately increased - I looked into the combinatorics behind this, and it’s clearly non-linear (but I stopped as it got too hard for my aged brain, so I don’t have any formulas for it!).
It also feels odd that the hero weapons haven’t (yet) been capped in the same way as all other gem-spammers. I wonder if it’s an oversight, or maybe only a timing issue (most likely) - or a deliberate ploy to keep heroes in use…
Overall, great post. Cheers