(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!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, and lies somewhere within the range given in the right-most column.Win rates are shown as a bar indicating their relative distance from 50%. Green bars shown above the line are win rates that are above 50%, and red 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 green and red 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.Diablo's win rate seems to have started the week fairly low, but rebounded in the days that followed. It took some time for players to get used to his lack of guaranteed armor, which was one of the elements that made him such a strong dive tank. Without it, he feels considerably squishier now, and this is likely a big factor in his failure to perform to date. Looking over the other tanks, the only clear beneficiary to his fall was E.T.C, who gained 3.3 p.p. over the course of the week (breaking the error margin of ±1.58%). Other tanks were too close to the margin of error to declare as having gained anything from Diablo's lack of success. In any case, it is clear that Diablo will need some additional baseline strength if he's going to climb back up the ladder, and I think they ought to start with Fire Stomp. The nerf to this ability was just far too large, perhaps due to fear of the related talented getting too strong, but it provides him with very little real threat as a result. I also think they should consider returning at least a small portion of his armor on Shadow Charge, if only because it's a large part of why he feels like such a soft target now. And lastly, I feel that this was a big missed opportunity to tamper with his Black Soulstone trait. I would've liked to see him have more control over its use, specifically, the ability to choose when to activate it in exchange for a considerable reduction on his death timer. In this way, if you only have 80 souls and you still want the reduction, you can sacrifice them for a partial reduction instead of the full reduction. This would be a huge boost to his baseline power and give him a great deal more flexibility.To clarify, you'd still lose 100 souls if you die with 100 souls gathered. I'm mostly suggesting that you can also, optionally, use less than 100 souls for a proportional reduction.Diablo's talent diversity is lacking at the moment, with talents significantly under-performing in almost every tier. Feast on Fear is outperforming both of the other choices (47.7% PR, 44.6% WR, +0.1 p.p. and +3.6 p.p. vs next highest talent respectively), so if his base kit is buffed, this talent may end up nerfed. That sounds crazy when both of the other choices are doing so poorly, but considering that one of those choices is Devil's Due (which was previously, and still is, one of the most powerful healing enhancing talents in the game), it's not outside of the realm of possibility that maybe Feast on Fear is just that much better. We may also see nerfs to Malevolence (17.8% PR, 49.3% WR, -16.0 p.p. and +7.2 p.p. vs next highest talent respectively) for similar reasons. Sacrificial Soul at Lvl 4 is also doing poorly (36.4% PR, 40.5% WR), and Devastating Charge seems to have been over-nerfed (58.2% PR, 42.9% WR). And lastly, in terms of heroics, Lightning Breath (31.0% PR, 48.3% WR, -38.0 p.p. and +7.8 p.p. vs next highest talent respectively) is beating the pants off of Apocalypse. We may well see Lightning Breath nerfed accordingly as Diablo's base kit is brought back up.Lunara's win rate is relatively healthy, though her popularity spike is rather massive overall, with a climb of +21.9 p.p. over the last seven days. As her popularity starts to drop back down, it's possible her win rate may push us closer to a nerf, so we'll have to see what happens. For what it's worth, I don't think she'll need the sort of tuneups that Diablo needs. Her kit was already fairly good to begin with, and this change merely increased her build diversity.As far as talents go, only a handful of talents stick out as potentially problematic. Blossom Swell at Lvl 4 (16.8% PR, 45.8% WR, -23.4 p.p. and -6.2 p.p. vs next highest talent respectively) and Choking Pollen at Lvl 7 (12.5% PR, 44.9% WR, -14.4 p.p. and -6.7 p.p. vs next highest talent respectively) seem to be under-performing in their respective tiers, and will likely need buffs. The only other real "problem" is at Lvl 16, where Invigorating Spores (27.3% PR, 56.5% WR) and Unfair Advantage (49.8% PR, 56.8% WR) are doing better than the other two talents at this tier. This could go either way, however, as their win rates are not particularly massive for Lvl 16 talents, and if anything, Accelerated Contamination (7.1% PR, 51.4% WR) and Star Wood Spear (15.8% PR, 52.6% WR) both have win rates that are actually a bit low for that tier. In this sense, however, Lunara is also beating Diablo in talent diversity, as there's a lot of good talents in her kit now and very few of them are actually performing outside of what's "normal". Props to the team that worked on Lunara's rework for what I'd say is a pretty darn good job!Finally, as a last piece of "bonus" material, some criticized my recent Reddit piece on Hotslogs's accuracy by referencing the fact that we were dealing with supports, which (apparently) meant that they should be closer to Blizzard's figures than other heroes. Well, as it turns out, Hotslogs performs similarly well in other areas. Here's the chart I posted to Twitter several days ago showing their results with Blizzard's numbers for melee assassins:It is important, however, not to take these stats out of context. These stats merely indicate that Diamond+ win rates on Hotslogs are reasonably similar to Blizzard's own figures.In fact, a quick check of Varian's win rates on his heroics show that it's entirely possible for a lot more errors to crop up once you start breaking things down into individual talents, builds, etc. So please be careful not to presume that everything on Hotslogs is a flawless recreation of the meta. It's a good gauge for relative factors, but it's not perfect. We must be wary about an overemphasis on stats, too, lest we fall into the trap of reality vs perception that Blizzard's devs mentioned in their recent AMA.Looking for more of my work? I'm currently working on a future article for Valeera. In the meantime, check out my work on covering Fenix's results in the HGC. 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!