Why devs decided to nerf an ALREADY underpowered plant? Lightning Reed, that is.
Out of all plants that are in game, some of which are obviously dominant and overemphasized (winter melon), some of the pay2win plants that makes pretty much their spiritual ancestor like: Cherry Bomb compared to Grapeshot\Bombegranate, Snapdragon compared to Cold Snapdragon absolutelly inferiour and irrelevant to use EVER if you have pay2win ones, yet they decided to nerf the ONLY plant that was ALREADY underpowered as it is. Like, what the hell?? Have the devs just went batnut freaking insane?? The Lightning Reed was so awful, that it never really had it's use even where it supposed to be good at (cheap way to kill chickens\weasells, but I'd rather use anything else). I'd even go as far to say that it IS was the most underpowered plant in the game, because plants like aloe, snapdragon and magnet shroom have at least some use and in some situations are worhy, even though they are generally underpowered too. But now Lightning Reed is so bad that even TWO lines of lightning reed (10 plants in total) can barely deal even with a weasel hoarder zombie and his weasels. But along the nerf, they didn't even bring any compisation or anything to it, it still have at best 4 MAXIMUM chain-lightning damage, which only happens if zombies are way too close, and fire rate is still same slow as back then so it still hardly can deal even with chicken wranglers. But 0.25 damage per hit, for a plant that cost 125 sun, yet can only hit AT BEST 4 zombies at once which not always even happens, are you crazy??? It supposed to be a horde control plant, i.e. plant that used to have great massive aoe\multiple damage to horde of zombies when used in multiple ammount, yet it's literally THE WORST plant for that, even before the nerf the normal peashooter was far superiour than it. Yet it's an really interesting and beautiful plant, the only offensive plant that can zap enemies to death aside from Electric Blueberry; and just because it's so interesting and fun plant compared to others, I see it's a really bad excuse to nerf it to ground just force people use it less and use more stale boring dps plants just because they are best overall. Before it did 0.5 damage and 0.25 for each next zombie the lightning has chain to, now it just does 0.25 damage to all; it would make much more sense if instead of nerfing the initial hit, they buff the each chain damage to 0.5 damage, resulting plant to have 0.5 damage for both initial hit and each chain. It would still remain sort of weak or perhaps even underpowered, but at least not insanely irrationally underpowered like now.
And yet, all the already overpowered and overemphasized plants get even more overpowered with new upgrade system, where even peashooter does about more than whole 5 damage per shot resulting two-shot the basic zombie and killing conehead zombies in about 4-5 shots. Man, I'd be sooo mad if the Maximum level of Lightning Reed won't be doing at least 3 or more damage for each direct hit and lightning chain to each zombies it hit; Lightning Reed needs some love too, come on!!!
Afterall, if you want a horde control\aoe damage plant, you could always use either one of the melon plants, or ol' good Laser Bean that is superior by tons, does damage a whoping 8 times more per shot, have pretty much ULIMITED amount of zombies it can hit, yet not really that more expensive than lightning reed.
Sorry for my english, but I just had to make this rant.