What do the Opening Week matches prophesize for BlizzCon?

With the scheduling of the HWC matches being as it is, Blizzard gave us some time to look back at last week's matches in order to predict what might get played again on November 6 and 7. All of the games will be played on the same patch, and so the balance of the game will be the same this weekend as it was last Wednesday. But it is possibly that the teams will be preparing some new special strategies in order to counter the meta that we will showcase below. All of these statistics are based on our intensive coverage of the tournament, and can be found by going to our stats section.

Most contested

Again, we see a familiar pattern for the top 3 contested heroes. Uther, widely considered the best support hero, was again picked or banned in every single draft. Jaina enjoyed a perfect record as well, being prioritized for both her burst potential as well as very valuable slows. Muradin is also particularly strong right now because of his ability to dramatically lower the damage output of any auto-attack focused hero. A surprising absent character from this list is Zeratul, a hero that until recently was first-pick or first-ban in almost all of the competitive drafts. But, since his nerfs to wormhole and Void Prison, it seems he has lost a lot of his potency.

Most banned

We see a fairly different list of heroes when looking specifically at the heroes that were banned the most. You might expect that the most contested heroes would also be some of the most banned, but the case is that some heroes set up very dangerous compositions while others just easily fill up any composition. Because of this, heroes like Abathur and Tyrande are banned significantly more often than heroes like Jaina or Uther. Sonya has been hailed as the most OP hero in the game, ever since her reworks that enabled more auto attacking, while Tassadar is the current MVP after having been gifted the best spammable shielding ability in the game.

Most picked

As shown, even with a warrior pool of 12, a select few warriors are prioritized way higher. Heroes like Muradin, Leoric and Johanna will fit in any composition, while warriors such as ETC, Chen and Stitches need a clearer opportunity to get picked. A big surprise is Sylvanas being in the list, since she has been ignored in favour of heroes like Nazeebo and Zagara for a long, long time. It is good to see the Banshee Queen back in play.

Highest winrate

While some heroes are obviously more popular than others, they are often not the most successful heroes. This title is reserved, in this case, to heroes such as Tyrael (winning 6 out of 6 games using Sanctification in all of them), Kerrigan, Brightwing, Kharazim and Sonya. Sonya can also be seen as the most banned hero, and is quite deserving of that position as well. It is interesting that not one, but two support heroes have made the list while Uther is nowhere to be found in the top 10 (or even the top 20). It seems like teams should be searching for more opportunities to run Brightwing or Kharazim, instead of defaulting into a first-pick Uther.

Most first-picked

The final data that we have available on our stats page, is that of most first-picked. For people wondering if the majority of the list is missing, no! Only 4 heroes were valuable enough to be picked first in the 16 played games, and as shown the vast majority of first-picks only consisted of either Uther or Jaina. We wonder heavily if this pattern will more or less continue on until the grand finals.

These stats were all compiled automatically by our back-end system that is built around our match information pages. For a closer look at the above stats, as well as the possibility to take a look at the lists beyond the top 10, we redirect you to this page.

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QUICKPOLL Will we see a shift in focus from Uther and Jaina to other heroes? Yes, more surprises to come!

Thank you for voting! No, they are just too good.

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