To be quite honest, i liked this chapter just because it gave Lucy a bit more of a time to shine. She showed uses her head and though she's not the strongest, she has a unique skill set to get the job done, in this case tricking him to use Gemini. It was a nice twist that Natsu was holding back to not destroy the guild, i mean he trained hard for a year and melted the grand magic games arena, it would be a waste to nerf it back down now. As for Makarov throwing them out of the guild like that it was priceless. This was bound to happen though, the spriggan's true power in this case was sneaking and using FT's loved ones against each other, take that out of the equation so he can't use spacial techniques and he's open for a full on attack from Natsu, which he couldn't avoid. Was a nice set up and intriguing.
If all the spriggan just wiped out most of FT, it would be a pointless war, and in that case you'd all complain about an "asspull" when fairy tail makes it out of it. Atleast so far in this war we've seen Laxus pretty much on the verge of death, three of the wizard saints were taken out by one of the spriggan 12, what more could you want when it comes to displaying their power? Although achnologia one shot him, but this is the guy that wiped out all the dragons lol. What we have left will be fun to watch play out, i want to see what August can do and i wonder who will be killed by Achnologia? Maybe Cobra if he's working with jellal? xd