I really hate the “nerf by adding RNG” thing. Makes them less effective to use and every bit as ‘threatening’ when the AI uses them. No, I’m not claiming the AI does any ‘better’ with them, but they do not have the burden of consistency. When you put something with a powerful enough effect that one trigger of it can cause such an overwhelming advantage to a side and make it an RNG event, a player using it needs to build a team around making it work consistently or it is trash. Meanwhile, an AI defense isn’t going to get frustrated and give up. So yeah, while it technically wins less on defense, it is still capable of setting up that same game ending event as it did before, driving people into frustration. It is every bit as “good” on defense because the AI is expected to lose, so just the chance at a game ending event is enough to make it “good”. The faster the better, though (see also, Kerberos/FG/Spider, who also got a similarly unfitting “nerf through RNG”).
Personally, seeing her on defense wasn’t that bad as the team had a much higher mana cost to start killing you than most “meta” teams, so just don’t let it do that. She should have never had stealthy and then shes trivially counterable in PvP, and still pretty counterable in guild wars even if one cast when she isn’t frozen can cause a loop that will end your team - we’ve weathered things like this before, and she had a 14 mana cost. Meanwhile, I know she was fun to use, but she was kinda broken. I’m usually categorically against nerfs, but the troop never should have been released in that state, and should have probably been addressed sooner. And while she is fun to use now, it would get boring. I got bored using her exceedingly quickly for that I had to make up a minigame for myself - use her with any combination of boar rider and goblin rockets and hold the turn for as long as possible. Even this combo could often just loop enemies to death, but at least I was paying attention to how things fell again like I used to have to.
Sadly, I dont know if the reduction to 5 green gems would have been enough on our current engine. I’ve cascaded the team to full with only 3 green gems on the board. The spikes on new boards falling need to be addressed before we have an extra turn mass exploder. In theory, you should be getting mostly stable boards, some cascade matches, a few positive drops (extra turn) and a few negative drops (enemy gets extra turns). The amounts of overwhelming positive and negative boards both have gone up in Unity. To Fizzbang, unless she is frozen, both these are overwhelmingly positive because extra turn. Thus “broken” troop.
I’d be in favor of removing her stat gain or make it a small fixed value (probably shouldnt have been 20+, magic scaling, AND a random stat when she can so readily spam the spell AND a doubling condition that works on herself) and drastically cut her explosions to the point where it is not likely that she will self fill and fill her team (maybe 5, like Infernus) and then maybe we can have what we should have had in the first place. I’m just not sure it is possible currently because of the post explosion boards I’ve been seeing.