True. I would say this combines into 'you have to be more careful with a PoD than a VQ', but I find this all well and to the good.

Yes, and that has it's cost in points. I think the real consideration is not being careful (but there is a distinct lack of being careful with certain people and their VQ's, I personally see this as a flaw in their playstyle) I think the real consideration is not being surprised

True enough. The Lich and the VQ are now on a much more even keel, comparatively. My only concern here is the one that IW themselves brought up; namely, that very few people play with Liches. It would seem to me that if you balance a Pretender against a Lich, they should be played at about equal frequency. Which means bad things for the VQ. Imagine it this way. Out of 100 Games, 50 people want to play with an Immortal. And out of those 50 People, 25 of them want to play with a Rainbow Mage or a Bless effect while having Immortality. The other 25 Want an Immortal SC. 25 of those people can now choose a Lich, the other 25 can choose a VQ. Previous to 2.12, all 50 chose the VQ because there was no advantage to choosing a Lich for being a Rainbow, the advantage was having a SC that could be a Rainbow.

I'm not saying that those are precise numbers of people who want Immortals, or Rainbows but based on those numbers, it seems that it wasn't the Lich's stats that were holding it back, but rather the VQ's obvious advantage. Along with Autosummoning.

With the removal, it's more of a question of timing. It certainly doesn't _look_ like it was done for thematic reasons. I trust IW, but other, less trusting people probably won't. The way IW works on things is they have a huge list of things to do, they pick the few that they can allot their time to then fix those things and everything they feel needs to be fixed with it, thematic or not. You can't fault them for doing a thorough job on the things that have their attention.

Right. But it does reduce the power of your 'well you can just mod it' argument. Considering the various other improvements in 2.12, I certainly think you'd want to mod 2.12 rather than not patch and stay at 2.11. Not really, you can just mod it if you choose to. Noone is stopping you except your desire to play with people who don't think the same way. One thing about some Dom2 players, what you'd think they would want and what they do can be totally different. Most I believe are crazy in some fashion.