The Garen emote will probably powercreep Braum right out of the meta entirely.
Which is actually great, imo. I don't mind the Garen emote - doesn't bother me for some reason. Maybe it's just too new. Or maybe it's the fact that it's obviously meant to be rude, so I'm fine with people being rude with it.
Maybe what bothers me so much about Braum-wave at the end of a match is that Braum is nice and he's supposed to used as a kind greeting at the beginning of a match, not as a smug game-ender.
Just have a look at Paladin on hsreplay. Go to the part where it lists classes by winrate, click on Paladin.
Try to find ANY list that is below 50% winrate among the named archetypes.
Actually, I'll just save you the trouble. There aren't any - and the vast majority of ALL paladin decks right now are 60+% winrate. You have to go all the way to page 5 out of 6 before you get to a list that is less than 60% winrate.
I'm fairly sure this is unprecedented - a single class with 5 different named archetypes that are all successful ... it's almost like you can just open Paladin in your deck builder, throw in any 30 cards that are good, and win games (yes this is obviously exaggerating ... but by a LOT less than it should be).
I feel like what duckling did and what runeterra.ar did are two completely different things. What he did was a post-match review and remembering what to watch out for. What runeterra.ar does is give you the review during a match. The difference is like reading your notes after an exam and reading your notes during your exam, so I'm not exactly sure what the point of comparing the two is.
If I had to take a guess, I don't think anyone is torn up over the Fiora nerf.
Though I will say, I don't think I've seen any Fiora decks on ladder since the nerf patch. I HAVE seen her in best-of-three gauntlet decks though. My favorite decks happen to be pretty weak to Fiora, so I'm immeasurably relieved that she is no longer terrorizing the ladder. She was way too strong.
I checked mobalytics just before the nerf, and the top 4 champions for overall winrate were: 1. Shen, 2. Draven, 3. Fiora, 4. Fizz. Twisted Fate was way down at 14 because people were meme-ing with him a ton (like playing him in decks with Concurrent Timelines for some inexplicable reason) and also playing him in inferior decks like Go Hard. So, his winrate was being dragged down by the sub-optimal decks. Fizz had no such problem, so he's the real measure of the power level of the old TF/Fizz deck.
Anyways, yeah, Fiora/Shen and TF/Fizz were absolutely the correct targets for the nerf bat. Riot got it exactly correct. Fiora is not supposed to be a top-of-the-meta champion. Her gameplay is just too toxic to be so dominant. Almost no champ feels worse to lose to. And I'd say probably at least half of my losses to Fiora would be a situation where I'm open attacking with unstoppable lethal, still have like 15+ health, but Fiora is on 3/4 and she has a single combat or concerted strike. *Braumwave*
Well I’m in gold now, and I just gotta say that one extra card to level him up really made the difference. ( extreme sarcasm). The Nerf to wiggly at least slows the steamrolling down but damn he is just so efficient when I have the stuff that should kill him he blocks it and then manages to level himself in the next turn. I silenced him 3 times. This card still needs an adjustment.
Anyone able to think of a more valuable champ
Once he levels, yes, he's very strong. But the TF/Fizz deck got hit with three separate nerfs ... it should be very beatable now. I haven't had any issues with it since the patch.
I even faced one in my final gauntlet game, and absolutely destroyed him twice, once with each of my decks, for the easiest 2-0 match I've ever had.
In the stream, they actually complained a couple times at the beginning about how painful it was going to be playing this way (required to put all items on Taliyah).
I was just dipping back into the Hearthstone water a bit and ran into this absurdly busted garbage - peace out from me again. I don't need this crap in my life lol.
How the heck did they think it was going to turn out when they introduced mana replenishment into this game, in the form of a turn 4 draw 2 spells for free and then do other things still, in a class that has absolutely no problem just going full spells?
Imagine if this card had existed when Spell Hunter was a thing, and they had put in hunter instead? Utterly broken.
Same thing with Secret Passage in Rogue as well - 1-mana draw 4 ... OK, sure, that's completely fine, no problems at all. All they have to do is wait until turn 6 to play it, and they will be able to use basically everything they draw ... and then get back all the cards they set aside.
Yeah, this kind of shenanigans was why I stopped playing in the first place. And it's clearly only gotten way worse than it was before.
I took a screen capture of a Kranich stream that I was watching briefly, and this card seemed to do some extremely broken things. I've never seen it before. Can anyone tell me what it is? I can't even seem to find it here on the site.
Edit - I cannot get the image code to work, so there's a link instead.
By "extremely broken" I mean this. It had rush, and it dealt 3 damage to two different units. Unless there was some other thing on the board that it was interacting with, but I didn't see anything that would have done either of those things.
Also rework LeBlanc maybe so that she actually feels like ya know, LeBlanc?
There are other champions that don't really feel special alone, but their support cards make them feel more special. This is what they did with LeBlanc as well. Why do people have such a big problem with that?
But you know that Riot has access to much broader data than Mobalytics can hold? Mobalytics only holds data for people who use the deck tracker.
This may be true (though I've seen people saying they can get data for all the matches of any user who has signed up on mobalytics with their Riot ID), but as I mentioned in my comment, the TF data was for 267,000 games. That seems like a large enough sample size to make very meaningful conclusions.
But yes, I agree that Riot has access to much broader data than Mobalytics. For example, they have Expedition data, casual data, and even AI data. But think about this - according to the same guy who was talking in this interview, TF/Fizz is about 10-11 percent playrate with a really good winrate. But TF "overall" is less than 50% winrate. And he doesn't give a playrate for TF/Aphelios, but let's just be generous and call it an even 15% total playrate for TF/Fizz and TF/Aphelios combined, the only "strong" TF decks, according to the dev.
Now, in order for TF "overall" to be "less than 50% winrate," you would need another 15% of the playerbase to be playing abysmally bad TF decks in order to pull the winrate below 50%. That's at least a 15% playrate of really bad TF decks, not just mediocre ones. And you know there are people playing mediocre ones, but that just makes it even harder to pull the winrate below 50%, because even most mediocre TF decks are still above 50% winrate. So, you'd need the 15% to be losing BAD in order to pull the winrate down so far. (And incidentally, this little math scenario already pushes the overall playrate of TF to more than 30% of all decks in the game, just to make the dev's math work.)
How likely do you guys think it is that 15%+ of ranked players are just hard losing with TF for the fun of it?
Conclusion - that dev is doing some funky tricks with his data to make TF sound less problematic, for some bizarre reason. And the data from mobalytics backs up that conclusion - 51.8% winrate for TF across all decks that anyone on mobalytics is playing. And yes, mobalytics players definitely are playing some bad TF decks - just nowhere near enough of them to pull the winrate below 50%.
Edit - On a final note, Mobalytics does actually show Aphelios being just a tiny shade under 50% winrate currently. So maybe the dev got mixed up and accidentally quoted the overall winrate for Aphelios as being TF's overall winrate? This is definitely possible.
Thanks for the massive write-up. This must have taken you a VERY long time. We appreciate the effort.
As a response to one of the devs actual points, regarding TF/Fizz, I have to say that they are completely missing the mark with their evaluation of that deck, and of TF in general. "Only a 10-11% playrate" ... yeah, because people are fed up with it and many of them are refusing to play it, on principle, not because they don't think it's good. It has a super negative stigma, so a huge percentage of players are just flat refusing to touch it. The playrate metric doesn't account for this.
About TF specifically - they insist he wasn't a problem and was just "flexible" - so how do they explain the fact that probably about half of the nerfs in the game since Rising Tides have been targeted at TF's decks? If he has been OK all this time, how does he keep finding his way into the decks that end up needing to be nerfed?
*holds up his hands* "Not my fault - it was those other guys ..." *sneaks off to find another deck to force into being nerfed a couple months later*
Edit: And just to call out the dev on his stats, I just checked mobalytics - yes, some people are meme-ing with TF, which is pulling down his overall numbers. I saw one list that has Concurrent Timelines in a TF/Fizz deck - ok, yeah. Let's include those stats in an argument that TF isn't that bad. But anyways, back to the point: Mobalytics has data for 267,000+ games right now with TF. His overall winrate is 51.8%, which is not less than 50%, obviously.
Edit #2 - I overstated his playrate, because I did not read the fine print of playrate on mobalytics. He's 48% of all bilgewater decks, not of all decks. That's still noteworthy, but not insane.
Being a bit more supportive of the sentiment that was being echoed by the community when Riot decided to not release a balance patch this week.
Maybe we can talk about how to nerf it instead, maybe it's Tf but maybe it's burblefish.
I hope they don't absolutely gut TF because he's really good in a wide variety of lists.
This is exactly why I want to see him gutted. Lots of people claim it's not his fault ... and yet, somehow, tier 1 decks featuring TF just keep getting nerfed for some reason. What a coincidence that this champ who isn't a problem keeps being involved in nerfs! Over, and over, and over ....
At some point you have to realize that he actually IS the problem. Let's be serious here - TF has NEVER been less than Tier 1 since he was released. Every time his deck gets nerfed, he finds a new tier 1 home. Every. Single. Time.
Enough is enough. It's time to give him the Katarina treatment, and give some other champs a chance in the spotlight.
I've also seen them say this ... but the fact is that they used to do a lot more balancing a lot more often. I got pretty persuaded by a Twitter thread detailing all of the history of balance changes, and there is a VERY noticeable change when they started tournaments.
Definitely no shame in taking a break. If it's not fun, no point playing it.
But I'll throw this in there - I find it stunning that TF has dodged a nerf this long. The dude has literally NEVER been less than tier 1 ever since he was first released.
TF/Swain, TF/Elise, TF/Fizz, and probably at least 1-2 decks that I'm forgetting about. His decks keep getting nerfed around him, so he keeps having to find a new Tier 1 home, but he always manages to find it - because HE IS THE PROBLEM. Ok, end rant.
Funny side note: Now that Vlad/Braum/Scargrounds is fairly viable with the two new cards (the 1 drop Crimson and Ice Shard), it was absolutely hilarious to see a TF/Fizz player try to figure out how he can avoid dying with a leveled TF on his board, a Scargrounds on my board, and 1-2 Crimson Disciples in play. Truly, no better way in the entire game to punish TF's Red Card harder than that. Make all my dudes bigger, do no damage to them, and ping down your own nexus, all in one single effect, which he is required to activate just by playing cards.
But five out of those nine decks have new cards in them. Trundle Lissandra is, in fact, a new deck. Ashe midrange has incorporated LeBlanc and a couple of other new cards. LeBlanc Sivir is obviously a very new deck. Azir scouts and Nasus endure are also both using new champions and some other new cards as well.
And if you look to the region popularity at the bottom, Shurima is tied with Shadow Isles as the most popular region, at 19% of all decks.
Apparently you're getting unlucky with your matchups, but the objective fact is that a significant portion of the meta actually IS using new cards.
The Garen emote will probably powercreep Braum right out of the meta entirely.
Which is actually great, imo. I don't mind the Garen emote - doesn't bother me for some reason. Maybe it's just too new. Or maybe it's the fact that it's obviously meant to be rude, so I'm fine with people being rude with it.
Maybe what bothers me so much about Braum-wave at the end of a match is that Braum is nice and he's supposed to used as a kind greeting at the beginning of a match, not as a smug game-ender.
Why even have Go Hard at all if you're only including one copy?
Just have a look at Paladin on hsreplay. Go to the part where it lists classes by winrate, click on Paladin.
Try to find ANY list that is below 50% winrate among the named archetypes.
Actually, I'll just save you the trouble. There aren't any - and the vast majority of ALL paladin decks right now are 60+% winrate. You have to go all the way to page 5 out of 6 before you get to a list that is less than 60% winrate.
I'm fairly sure this is unprecedented - a single class with 5 different named archetypes that are all successful ... it's almost like you can just open Paladin in your deck builder, throw in any 30 cards that are good, and win games (yes this is obviously exaggerating ... but by a LOT less than it should be).
*Edited a bit after original posting.
I completely agree with this.
If I had to take a guess, I don't think anyone is torn up over the Fiora nerf.
Though I will say, I don't think I've seen any Fiora decks on ladder since the nerf patch. I HAVE seen her in best-of-three gauntlet decks though. My favorite decks happen to be pretty weak to Fiora, so I'm immeasurably relieved that she is no longer terrorizing the ladder. She was way too strong.
I checked mobalytics just before the nerf, and the top 4 champions for overall winrate were: 1. Shen, 2. Draven, 3. Fiora, 4. Fizz. Twisted Fate was way down at 14 because people were meme-ing with him a ton (like playing him in decks with Concurrent Timelines for some inexplicable reason) and also playing him in inferior decks like Go Hard. So, his winrate was being dragged down by the sub-optimal decks. Fizz had no such problem, so he's the real measure of the power level of the old TF/Fizz deck.
Anyways, yeah, Fiora/Shen and TF/Fizz were absolutely the correct targets for the nerf bat. Riot got it exactly correct. Fiora is not supposed to be a top-of-the-meta champion. Her gameplay is just too toxic to be so dominant. Almost no champ feels worse to lose to. And I'd say probably at least half of my losses to Fiora would be a situation where I'm open attacking with unstoppable lethal, still have like 15+ health, but Fiora is on 3/4 and she has a single combat or concerted strike. *Braumwave*
So. Toxic.
This is a great summary of some quite interesting information. Thanks for posting it!
Once he levels, yes, he's very strong. But the TF/Fizz deck got hit with three separate nerfs ... it should be very beatable now. I haven't had any issues with it since the patch.
I even faced one in my final gauntlet game, and absolutely destroyed him twice, once with each of my decks, for the easiest 2-0 match I've ever had.
In the stream, they actually complained a couple times at the beginning about how painful it was going to be playing this way (required to put all items on Taliyah).
I was just dipping back into the Hearthstone water a bit and ran into this absurdly busted garbage - peace out from me again. I don't need this crap in my life lol.
How the heck did they think it was going to turn out when they introduced mana replenishment into this game, in the form of a turn 4 draw 2 spells for free and then do other things still, in a class that has absolutely no problem just going full spells?
Imagine if this card had existed when Spell Hunter was a thing, and they had put in hunter instead? Utterly broken.
Same thing with Secret Passage in Rogue as well - 1-mana draw 4 ... OK, sure, that's completely fine, no problems at all. All they have to do is wait until turn 6 to play it, and they will be able to use basically everything they draw ... and then get back all the cards they set aside.
Yeah, this kind of shenanigans was why I stopped playing in the first place. And it's clearly only gotten way worse than it was before.
I tried out the Guff token deck also, and it seemed pretty good.
Awesome, thank you
I took a screen capture of a Kranich stream that I was watching briefly, and this card seemed to do some extremely broken things. I've never seen it before. Can anyone tell me what it is? I can't even seem to find it here on the site.
https://imgur.com/iSU0No4
Edit - I cannot get the image code to work, so there's a link instead.
By "extremely broken" I mean this. It had rush, and it dealt 3 damage to two different units. Unless there was some other thing on the board that it was interacting with, but I didn't see anything that would have done either of those things.
There are other champions that don't really feel special alone, but their support cards make them feel more special. This is what they did with LeBlanc as well. Why do people have such a big problem with that?
This may be true (though I've seen people saying they can get data for all the matches of any user who has signed up on mobalytics with their Riot ID), but as I mentioned in my comment, the TF data was for 267,000 games. That seems like a large enough sample size to make very meaningful conclusions.
But yes, I agree that Riot has access to much broader data than Mobalytics. For example, they have Expedition data, casual data, and even AI data. But think about this - according to the same guy who was talking in this interview, TF/Fizz is about 10-11 percent playrate with a really good winrate. But TF "overall" is less than 50% winrate. And he doesn't give a playrate for TF/Aphelios, but let's just be generous and call it an even 15% total playrate for TF/Fizz and TF/Aphelios combined, the only "strong" TF decks, according to the dev.
Now, in order for TF "overall" to be "less than 50% winrate," you would need another 15% of the playerbase to be playing abysmally bad TF decks in order to pull the winrate below 50%. That's at least a 15% playrate of really bad TF decks, not just mediocre ones. And you know there are people playing mediocre ones, but that just makes it even harder to pull the winrate below 50%, because even most mediocre TF decks are still above 50% winrate. So, you'd need the 15% to be losing BAD in order to pull the winrate down so far. (And incidentally, this little math scenario already pushes the overall playrate of TF to more than 30% of all decks in the game, just to make the dev's math work.)
How likely do you guys think it is that 15%+ of ranked players are just hard losing with TF for the fun of it?
Conclusion - that dev is doing some funky tricks with his data to make TF sound less problematic, for some bizarre reason. And the data from mobalytics backs up that conclusion - 51.8% winrate for TF across all decks that anyone on mobalytics is playing. And yes, mobalytics players definitely are playing some bad TF decks - just nowhere near enough of them to pull the winrate below 50%.
Edit - On a final note, Mobalytics does actually show Aphelios being just a tiny shade under 50% winrate currently. So maybe the dev got mixed up and accidentally quoted the overall winrate for Aphelios as being TF's overall winrate? This is definitely possible.
Thanks for the massive write-up. This must have taken you a VERY long time. We appreciate the effort.
As a response to one of the devs actual points, regarding TF/Fizz, I have to say that they are completely missing the mark with their evaluation of that deck, and of TF in general. "Only a 10-11% playrate" ... yeah, because people are fed up with it and many of them are refusing to play it, on principle, not because they don't think it's good. It has a super negative stigma, so a huge percentage of players are just flat refusing to touch it. The playrate metric doesn't account for this.
About TF specifically - they insist he wasn't a problem and was just "flexible" - so how do they explain the fact that probably about half of the nerfs in the game since Rising Tides have been targeted at TF's decks? If he has been OK all this time, how does he keep finding his way into the decks that end up needing to be nerfed?
*holds up his hands* "Not my fault - it was those other guys ..." *sneaks off to find another deck to force into being nerfed a couple months later*
Edit: And just to call out the dev on his stats, I just checked mobalytics - yes, some people are meme-ing with TF, which is pulling down his overall numbers. I saw one list that has Concurrent Timelines in a TF/Fizz deck - ok, yeah. Let's include those stats in an argument that TF isn't that bad. But anyways, back to the point: Mobalytics has data for 267,000+ games right now with TF. His overall winrate is 51.8%, which is not less than 50%, obviously.
Edit #2 - I overstated his playrate, because I did not read the fine print of playrate on mobalytics. He's 48% of all bilgewater decks, not of all decks. That's still noteworthy, but not insane.
This is exactly why I want to see him gutted. Lots of people claim it's not his fault ... and yet, somehow, tier 1 decks featuring TF just keep getting nerfed for some reason. What a coincidence that this champ who isn't a problem keeps being involved in nerfs! Over, and over, and over ....
At some point you have to realize that he actually IS the problem. Let's be serious here - TF has NEVER been less than Tier 1 since he was released. Every time his deck gets nerfed, he finds a new tier 1 home. Every. Single. Time.
Enough is enough. It's time to give him the Katarina treatment, and give some other champs a chance in the spotlight.
I've also seen them say this ... but the fact is that they used to do a lot more balancing a lot more often. I got pretty persuaded by a Twitter thread detailing all of the history of balance changes, and there is a VERY noticeable change when they started tournaments.
Definitely no shame in taking a break. If it's not fun, no point playing it.
But I'll throw this in there - I find it stunning that TF has dodged a nerf this long. The dude has literally NEVER been less than tier 1 ever since he was first released.
TF/Swain, TF/Elise, TF/Fizz, and probably at least 1-2 decks that I'm forgetting about. His decks keep getting nerfed around him, so he keeps having to find a new Tier 1 home, but he always manages to find it - because HE IS THE PROBLEM. Ok, end rant.
Funny side note: Now that Vlad/Braum/Scargrounds is fairly viable with the two new cards (the 1 drop Crimson and Ice Shard), it was absolutely hilarious to see a TF/Fizz player try to figure out how he can avoid dying with a leveled TF on his board, a Scargrounds on my board, and 1-2 Crimson Disciples in play. Truly, no better way in the entire game to punish TF's Red Card harder than that. Make all my dudes bigger, do no damage to them, and ping down your own nexus, all in one single effect, which he is required to activate just by playing cards.
Here's the most recent Mobalytics meta report, posted to reddit. Yes, it has Fiora and TF/Fizz among others.
But five out of those nine decks have new cards in them. Trundle Lissandra is, in fact, a new deck. Ashe midrange has incorporated LeBlanc and a couple of other new cards. LeBlanc Sivir is obviously a very new deck. Azir scouts and Nasus endure are also both using new champions and some other new cards as well.
And if you look to the region popularity at the bottom, Shurima is tied with Shadow Isles as the most popular region, at 19% of all decks.
Apparently you're getting unlucky with your matchups, but the objective fact is that a significant portion of the meta actually IS using new cards.
To add to Minuano28, we should notice something. This is a list of all decks from the top 4 players in the tournament.
There are 4 TF/Fizz decks there. Every player in the top 4 had TF/Fizz.
I wonder which deck is still too strong?