Mid-game crisis :<

[Ryastar]

Two questions before i can help:

1. have you been using your dryads' abilities? Cause they certainly shouldn't be around for their damage-doing skills

2. are you completely dead-set on using target and timeback? The usual solution to a strategy not being as effective as it used to be is to switch tactics.

As for the sprites vs. lake fairies argument:

Lake fairies (known henceforth here as L) have 7 leadership, sprites (S) have 8. This means that if both stacks are equal, you will have 14.28% more L than S.

With 20000 leadership you would have 2500 S, 2857 L
Let's do some damage math. Assuming the ideal enemy, who has no defence and no resistances and a hero with no attack, S 5666 avg damage, L 4714 avg damage. This is based on the average damage for each creature (S is 2 (avg of 1-3), L is 1.5 (avg of 1-2)) and the fact than each point of attack over defence adds 3.33% damage (S has 4 att, L has 3).
No, assuming that the hero has equipped both +1 damage items: S 22666 avg damage, L 10999 avg damage. This is based on the new figures for average damage (S is 4 (avg of 3-5), L is 3.5 (avg of 3-4)).

Clearly, S does more damage despite the slightly higher leadership cost.

Other stats: S has 33.333% more health (S has 8, L has 6). So the 20000 leadership stack from above have this much health: S 20000, 17142.

Again, Sprites have the lead.

The only ways that L is better is init and speed, having one more of each compared to S ( L 6 init/5 speed, S 5 init/4 speed), in defence, having one more point (S has 2, L has 3) and is resistance, not having the -50% fire resistance that S has. But just keep S away from fire units (or use timeback to get all losses back) and S comes out ahead by a huge margin.

Yes, Sprites are my favourite unit, why do you ask?