lamentation for a queen

[WraithLord]

"
Shed a tear with me
oh heartless creatures of the night
for the queen of vampires
reduced from former glory
now a pathetic mite
"

Now seriously (since my poetry suxxs), why oh why was the V. queen punished so?
Yeah, she was over-popular back in the day when dom-II was released. I can understand nerfing her a bit (though I might have preferred a different route towards balancing her) but this?- Her cost increased, her etherealness removed (together with all poor, now worthless, vamps).

So I thought, there must some niche she could be good for and set out to experiment on different SP settings. But, for the life of me, I couldn't find any role she could fill that wasn't much better covered by an existing pretender.

Awake SC - she's an immensely expensive joke. Even with forged armor and weapons she dies quite easily to indies.
Rainbow - too expensive.
Bless - same
and so on and so forth, I tried dormant and imprisoned scales pretender, its workable but the immobiles are much better at it and less expensive and VQ doesn't really bring and worthwhile bonus even when she does wake/break free.

I suggest to return etherealness to her and to all vamps. If not etherealness then something else to make the big bad scary thingis they should be. A slight decrease to VQ price may also go well.

I wonder if CB mode has any stance on this issue.