@spIash_damage Indeed I agree with buffs over nerfs. However, as someone who works with other local amateur board game designers, both to test my own designs and theirs, the goal of balance is to find the baseline and then adjust everyone up or down to that level. If you have a game like Cthulhu Wars with asymmetrical factions, and one faction wins 66% of their games, one wins 34% of their games, and one wins 52% of their games, and the target is 50%, the first one is too good and needs to be brought down, the second is too low and needs to be brought up, the third, being only 2% of the desired target stays where it is. The people that loved the first faction may be unhappy with the changes to bring them in line, but it's for the overall good of the game.
I wanted to note to that often when Paladins (and I think Overwatch did this too, but they've added 3 characters since I played), new champions are often OP and then are brought down later as they want people to play them, and if they're weak, people generally won't so there's no data on their performance. Occasionally they miss that marker and need to buff instead, and often after nerfing they have to buff back up a little, but that's the general pattern.
Now I don't know what the baseline is here, I'm guessing that Peashooter is pretty close, but I'm not PopCap so can't say and my data is all anecdotal, but for the sake of argument, let's say the Peashooter is at the optimal balance point and everyone else needs to be near that point. If we give Peashooter a value of 5, we need everyone else to be, say 4.8-5.2 as that would be a good target range to go with. We want everything to be at 5.0 in this case, but that's really hard to do when characters are so different.
