[lch]

I think the issue here is that unexperienced people suffer extraordinary defeats compared to normal combat unless they develop and use "anti" tactics as somebody said (even if in some cases, it's just: "use magic"), instead of being able to just use a naive "My army is bigger than your army" assessment of the situation like they normally use to do. I don't want to generalize and say that everybody who says that Vans/Hels are unbalanced (hello? earth/nature bless Niefel? Ermor?) is an unexperienced newb, but that's the conclusion that they usually come to and they get exited about here on the forums.