Simply go back to see how popular Minthara was during Early Access here and especially on Reddit when people religiously discussed every miniscule change about her, from her appearance to her lore, especially her hairstyle changes and sex scene angles. Her fandom was as religious back then as Astarion's fans today. How many threads were born since then to literally repeat the same exact complaints word for word about her entire side of the story being so underdeveloped from Early Access up until this very day. More than 3 years of feedback and what has Larian done to address it?
This is the part that still gets me the most. She was so ridiculously popular, and they literally left her for dead when they started the mad dash to prop up Halsin, restructure the Nightsong, and rip out all the incredibly interesting transformation progression scenes from the story. If they never actually talk transparently about what their goal was I'm never going to understand what the core "good idea" they were chasing with these decisions was supposed to be unless it was some kind of mandate from WOTC because they got cold feet on the trajectory Early Access content was still following (which was, I'm gonna say it, definitively better than what we got in the final game).
People didn't have a 35% grove assault pick rate because of the changes to further gamify tradpole powers, it happened because of all the buzz with how Early Access kept on telling us to try evil, and that we would find a unique rewarding story path in the final game for doing so. What we got was just less total content, party members leaving, and Minthara who was supposed to make up for the loss if you even knew you could recruit her being nonfunctional. That statistic probably sank faster than a rock once people realized none of it got followed through on. It's good we'll finally be seeing some more interesting Evil stuff but holy hell why were they so focused on having us try it out in EA if it was going to be the definition of an afterthought.
