Flip Ghost's Passive

@DeNappa: Her turning invisible is not actually helpful most of the time. It doesn't reduce the damage coming in, it just shifts it away from her onto someone else. Unless that someone else has true healing, or a damage-reduction passive (and I can't think of any such character that synergizes with Ghost enough for me to care) it just means someone else needs a health pack eventually. As mentioned, if you're running her with someone like America who allows you to leverage Ghost's passive damage, the loss of match damage for those 3 turns could easily add up to more lost damage than firing her red a few turns early (which itself will reduce Ghost's damage for 3 more turns, causing more lost damage).

At the end of the day, if you're firing her abilities at all you're reducing her most consistent, abusable damage, which is her match damage. Either you're running her in a team that doesn't leverage her match damage (which is a big mistake IMO) or you're only very infrequently going to want to throw her abilities except in a "kill shot" scenario that negates the downside of her passive AND the benefit of the CD it creates.

@HoundofShadow: You haven't actually made a coherent argument that I can follow. "Using her powers is about timing"- sure, and with Ghost the only time you actually want to use her abilities is as a kill shot, due to the nerf to her match damage. "only 3 turn countdown" well that's 3 more turns than you COULD be giving up for no reason. "Her damage still receives 100% boost" Obviously, but that's 1/3 of the potential boost. "You can match other tiles" Ok, sure, but the point is that you don't HAVE to match other colors if you just hold the AP for the kill shot, etc. "You use her with 2 other characters" What's your point? These other characters are going to have their own abilities that probably don't penalize you for using them, and if you have a team that's built to leverage match damage you STILL won't want to nerf Ghost's match damage until you're ready to killshot.

@Jaedenkaal You're welcome to interpret the movie depiction of Ghost in a different way, but that still doesn't change the fact that Ghost's in-game mechanics discourage actual use of her abilities, making her a non-interactive character. When combined with one of her best partners being America (all passives) you have a team that uses almost no abilities until the final turn when you're ready to throw Ghost's abilities as a kill shot. This makes for very monotonous play, which is just one of the reasons I'd like to see her kit reexamined.

I'm sorry, Hound, but you're not making a coherent argument that I can tell.

1) "There is more than one way to play a character" - sure, and not all ways to play a character are equally good or powerful. Ghost is a great example- her red functionally costs 20 AP  (10 purple and 10 red) to do 10.2k damage at level 277. Sure she goes invisible and heals if she matches her invisibility tiles (which presumably you want to try to avoid doing to keep her invisible?) but defense doesn't win games, and this game is all about speed. Nightcrawler (not a top-tier character) does nearly as much damage in a similar situation (9 Red AP, but you have to have 10 AP in another color, does 8.6k) but he doesn't actually cost the AP in another color. For 11 red AP Valkyrie does similar damage (8.6k) but in multiple small chunks that work well with strike tiles (that she herself can create) which can finish a low-health target and do the remainder to the next kill target, and she self-accelerates with Bounty while denying them AP. These are just some of the 5s with direct damage reds that I happen to have champed, and they're all at least in the ballpark of effective damage vs an ability that costs, functionally, 20 AP.

Simply put, if you're using Ghost for her purple and red (and not planning heavily to leverage her blue) you're using her badly. Meanwhile, as I have mentioned multiple times, you can get full mileage out of Ghost's passive by saving up the purple and red AP and firing at the end as a kill shot, but this does not in any way incentivize interactive play or create the "waxing and waning" power effect that seems to be the design intent for Ghost.

2) I'm not super healthpack-conscious; I used to be but I have largely gotten past that. My point is that Ghost's purple as a defensive ability just falls flat, because it has very little impact on the actual damage taken by the team, it just reduces the proportion of that damage going to Ghost. This irrelevantly small reduction of damage to Ghost herself plus the damage nerf that you unnecessarily give yourself if you fire Ghost's purple or Red before the final turn of the game does not add up to any kind of useful "tanking" strategy, and once again- defense doesn't win games, offense wins games.

3) "you will be matching other coloured tiles during the game" - If you're running Ghost, and you're not heavily prioritizing purple/red/blue matches specifically because of her passive match damage buff, I seriously question why you're bringing Ghost at all. Other characters have comparable nukes to her red, and more useful offensive abilities than her purple, and if you're not planning to prioritize her colors then you won't be farming up the AP for them either! Yes, you'll occasionally have to match other colors due to the board configuration, but you'll be making those matches anyway, and Ghost will already not tank those colors anyway. Trying to "save up" those matches for after you fire Ghost's purple or red early (for very little gain as pointed out above) is an unnecessary complication for a very straightforward character.

4) "Instead of playing Ghost as an offensive character or making other team complement her, flip her around and use her as a tank or turn her into a support character.
Play around and be more creative with how you use her." - this is one of the silliest things I've ever heard. You're talking about a character that has 3 abilities:
     1) Go invisible and minor self-heal (no tanking or support, purely a self-survival tool)
     2) Red ability: does damage (that's all it does, purely offensive tool)
     3) Blue passive: increases match damage and feeds red (but also costs red, or purple, and takes 3 turns to refund red) - either this is the slowest, least efficient purple-to-red AP generator I've ever seen... or it's a straight-up offense tool for her own abilities.