(banner courtesy of /u/Somber99 Hello again! After each balance patch, I've taken it upon myself to track how the balance changes have affected the Nexus. It's become something of a habit for me, and I thought it might be fun to share my data with the community.In case you've forgotten what changed in the last patch, here's a link All data provided in this post was collected from Hotslogs , which is a database of player-submitted games. Data was collected between 3:30 PM and 4:30 PM EST each day, using the special filter "Last 7 Days (Current Build)" and focusing exclusively on Hero League data (with the exception of heroes like Cho'Gall, whose unique nature requires pulling data from Team League). As usual, keep in mind that my numbers may differ slightly from Hotslogs's "official" figures as the site regularly updates older information as more games are added. Therefore, our data may not match up perfectly, but it should give a generally accurate view of how the week progressed. Here is a link to the spreadsheet with the data I've collected. The spreadsheet contains all of my original data, split into two categories: "Composite" (which represents all data across the entire week) and "Daily" (which represents data from each individual day). It also contains a number of graphs showing how each hero is performing in both win rate and popularity. If you'd prefer a summarized report, read on!Remember, only the heroes whose win rates are highlighted blue/orange with white text have exceeded their margin of error.Note that the error column assumes a 95% confidence interval. To put it simply, a 95% confidence interval is a numerical way to measure whether the win rate has changed in any significant way. If the change to a win rate exceeds the error, then we can assume that there is approximately a 95% chance that the win rate has changed.Win rates are shown as a bar indicating their relative distance from 50%. Blue bars shown above the line are win rates that are above 50%, and orange bars below the line show win rates that are below 50%. This gives a visual representation of how the win rate has changed each day. The final column splits the pick rate and ban rate into blue and orange sections, respectively, to show their overall influence on the popularity. The bar above is the original popularity, and the bar below represents the popularity after the designated period.The seven-day analysis is below. Please note that while I try to cover all heroes, not all heroes are in need of in-depth analysis of their changes, so some heroes may have short summaries or may even be omitted entirely. Also, be aware that the contents of this section are primarily my own opinion of the changes, albeit backed with data. If you disagree, feel free to explain why in the comments below.Early indications showed a drop for Brightwing, but as her popularity decreased from its initial height of 44% down to its current level of 33%, her win rate began to climb back up. While it still didn't break the margin of error, this is a relatively positive sign, in that it shows that perhaps the initial problems were simply due to players not utilizing her properly or trying to force her into compositions that didn't work as well. Now that we can finally see her at a more level ground, her kit is looking better, though her future in the pro circuit remains up in the air.This is one of a select few occasions where I get to praise the dev team on a very impressive job with balancing a hero. While our data on this subject is always limited, the data that we do have suggests that her talents are mostly well balanced against each other, and she doesn't have a tremendously outrageous win rate (but don't worry, we'll talk about Kerrigan in a minute). Only a handful of talents seem to be having clear performance issues: Critical Mist is performing well below the other talents at Lvl 7 (45.3% WR, -3.2 p.p. vs next highest talent), and Magic Spit is possibly a tiny bit under par with the other Lvl 4s (46.9% WR, -2 p.p. vs next highest talent). It's also possible we may see further tweaks at Lvl 16 since Critterize remains the top talent there (54.3%, +0.9 p.p. vs next highest talent), but it's only by a small margin, and the fact that the other two options are so competitive in both pick and win rates is a positive sign.If further changes are made, I personally hope to see some tiny tweaks to her base kit. I think giving her back a little bit of her Arcane Flare damage might be wise if only to give her a bit more clear potential (and to increase her stock in pro play). I also feel that the rather lengthy cooldown on her baseline cleanse makes Magic Spit feel a wee bit more mandatory than it probably should, and if they're looking for a small fix, tweaking this cooldown might be a good improvement for more skilled players that doesn't make as big of an impact on lower tiers of play. But honestly, these are relatively minor issues. Overall, I've been really pleased with how Brightwing feels now, and while I do wish she had Gust of Healing back in some form, I think this is a well-trimmed kit that looks particularly more potent than before.It feels bad to give the devs such praise for Brightwing's rework, only to take it right back with Kerrigan. But unfortunately this does feel like one that we all saw coming, and I'm really not sure how she even made it to live like this. Even on PTR, I could tell how much stronger she had become even despite my rustiness with the character, so it's no surprise at all to me that she's jumped this much in win rate. The worst part is that her popularity has continued to climb throughout the week and yet she's still going up in win rate....although to be fair, her popularity increase is largely due to the rise in bans, and not so much that there's more people playing her.And the news only gets worse when we dive into the talent data. Again, while our data talent is limited, all indications suggest that she's pretty much a one-build pony right now. There is pretty much one build right now that dominates the others: Fury of the Swarm (75.2% PR, 60.8% WR, +56.7 p.p. and +8.4 p.p. vs next highest talent), Kinetic Fulmination (57.5% PR, 63.5% WR, +26.1 p.p. and +5.6 p.p. vs next highest talent), and Bladed Momentum (56.4% PR, 61.8% WR, +21.9 p.p. and +6.2 p.p. vs next highest talent) for the pre-10 talents, then Volatile Power (52.5% PR, 63.7% WR, +16.3 p.p. and +6.3 p.p. vs next highest talent) and Painful Spikes (50.5% PR, 66.5% WR, +24.3 p.p. and +5.6 p.p. vs next highest talent) for the later-game talents. Even when filtering for Diamond+ games, this remains the most common set of talents throughout in terms of popularity and overall success on the hero. It goes without saying that the most obvious point of attack for re-balancing is to adjust the significantly higher win rates on these dominant talents, though some care should be taken as not all of them are "OP" on their own. For example, Bladed Momentum's rise is largely due to its innate synergy with Fury of the Swarm, and is likely to come down on its own when Fury is more appropriately balanced. As such, balance needs to be done carefully on these dependent talents to make sure they aren't hit too hard.But I think that there's a problem that goes a tad beyond the raw talent strength, namely the big changes to her base kit that have arguably given her a little too much of everything. I was initially skeptical that adding an explosion onto her Primal Grasp was a good idea, and now after having time to play with it, I honestly can't decide how I feel about it. The explosion hasimproved her ability to wave clear, since minions will never juke the explosion as heroes can, so even if she's not getting value in fights, she still gets value from it in general play. In addition, her trait received a pretty significant buff that provides a HUGE increase in survivability. As a result, it kinda feels like she's currently capable of performing nearly any role you want her to be in: "flexible" main tanking like Xul, off-lane pressure, primary damage dealer, etc. And I feel like that could potentially be a problem that mere talent adjustments might not be enough to solve. I suspect that we'll need to see her in the hands of pros first before we can be sure, but personally, I'm starting to worry about the rise of multi-role heroes such as this. We've seen several such heroes so far this year: Blaze and Yrel became the best heroes in the off-lane, and Fenix was dominating the AA role until the recent rework of Raynor. It's fine to have generalist heroes that can do more than one role, but if they start doing several things while also doing them better than the heroes specifically pinned to only one role, that's an issue. It'll make it hard to keep old heroes competitive with heroes like that, and it'll also increase the difficulty in creating new niche heroes down the road.Looking for more of my work? My last HGC article focuses on Whitemane and how the pros have started using her. That article is located here. Feel free to let me know your thoughts to this article in the comments section below, or on Twitter at my handle @CriticKitten . I look forward to your replies!Hope to see you again next time!