Hero Pick/Ban and Win Rate - The Raw Data

Fenix's Priority in the Draft

Head-to-Head: Who Can Beat Fenix?

Duo-Queue: Who Do You Pair Up With Fenix?

The Final Word

Hello again, everyone! Today, I'd like to talk about Fenix. The Steward of the Templar was released on March 27, 2018, and has now been used across both Week 9 and Week 10. I'd like to take a look at the new hero's standing so far in professional play, including some head-to-head matchups and heroes that have paired well with them. Keep in mind that, as is always true of HGC games, some of this data will be skewed due to the differences in skill between teams. No hero has yet managed to completely overcome a skill deficit between teams or regions. I will try to take this into account in my writings.Here are Fenix's hero stats at a glance:So far in these three regions, Fenix has seen a fairly large priority, even after the balance changes on April 11th took effect during Week 10. He hasn't been prioritized nearly as much as Maiev was in her opening weeks, most likely due to the fact that he is considerably more fragile and isn't quite as universal in terms of overall utility. However, he still achieved an 81% popularity rate during Week 9. Obviously, this dropped off in Week 10, in part due to some of the matches being taken....a bit less seriously than others. His ban rate is also lower than Maiev's, suggesting that teams are more willing to allow him through the draft and are more confident in their ability to counter what he brings to the table. NA has put the most emphasis on Fenix of any region, with an 80% popularity rate overall.Fenix's Week 9 win rate sat at a 48%, and has since nudged upwards just a little bit to reach a flat 50%. Europe has seen the most success with him to date at 11-7. It is, of course, important to consider who is playing him when looking at this win rate, so I looked a bit deeper into the figures. On the North American side of things, both LFM Esports and No Tomorrow played Fenix 5 times, and they held records of 2-3 and 1-4 respectively on the hero, which accounts for about half of his overall losses in NA. In Europe, Method and Tricked Esport have both achieved impressive records on the hero, sitting at 3-0 and 3-1 respectively, which accounts for just over half of his European wins. However, most of the top ranked teams in either region did not bother much with Fenix. Team Dignitas, Fnatic, HeroesHearth Esports only played him 1 game each. Tempo Storm played him twice, and lost both games during a dramatic upset against HHE in Week 9.Here's a look at where Fenix is prioritized in the draft:Fenix saw a very mixed priority in the draft by comparison to Maiev. While Maiev was, and continues to be, a high draft priority that is virtually always selected in the first few picks (or banned out in the first wave), Fenix has been picked or banned in numerous slots, though he still tends to favor either a first ban or first pick slot more than most other categories. Again, this is likely due to Maiev's greater overall utility that made her a very strong priority and her favorability in the dive meta, whereas Fenix requires a team better suited to protecting him and isn't as suited to diving with his fellow heroes. He saw respectable success when drafted early (50% WR as a first pick, and 63% WR as a second pick), and considerably less success when drafted late (27% WR as the last pick). Most of the other categories have pick/ban rates too small to draw any meaningful conclusions.Interestingly enough, Fenix saw 17 bans in the first wave, and the team that banned him was often the team that won, sporting a 13-4 record when banning out Fenix. This stat gets even more interesting when you consider that virtually none of the top teams in any of these three regions bothered with banning him out. Tempest, Ballistix, and HeroesHearth Esports each only banned him one time (and won the subsequent game), and Team Dignitas, Fnatic, KSV Black, and Tempo Storm didn't ban him out even once. This means that the other 14 bans on Fenix led to those teams having a 10-4 win rate in those games. While this is most likely just an amusing stat oddity, it is at least an interesting situation. Perhaps the teams which aren't top-tier in their respective regions are getting better mileage out of a Fenix ban due to being less equipped to guard against his kit? In any case, we aren't likely to get much of an answer in the weeks to come, as the top teams place considerably lower priority in him, meaning that the Mid-Season Brawl is likely to feature less of the famed dragoon.Here's a table of some of the most popular heroes to be selected against Fenix.Fenix, being a hero that is somewhat susceptible to dive, has performed somewhat poorly against heroes designed to lock him in place or isolate him from his team. Heroes such as Maiev (who has a 62% WR against Fenix) and Garrosh (70% WR) are naturally good against him because of their displacement capabilities. They can pull or throw him into the enemy team, and with his relatively low health, he doesn't stand much of a chance of survival at that point. Other heroes like Blaze (58% WR), Anub'arak (60% WR), and Malfurion (61% WR) provide additional combo potential onto heroes like Fenix with their stuns and roots, both of which prevent him from escaping with his Warp. Interestingly, other dive-oriented heroes that lack hard CC of their own, such as Genji (27% WR) or Sonya (30% WR) have actually fared rather poorly against him, suggesting that dive itself may not necessarily be his weakness, but rather a combination of dive and coordinated stun chains.Of course, his other potential weakness is when facing heroes who can exceed his reach. In that respect, Hanzo (59% WR) has been quite successful against Fenix because of his extended AA range and his Scatter Arrow, which allow him to continue poking Fenix after he's begun to retreat and thus keep his shields from regenerating. This, in turn, keeps him out of the fight for longer periods of time. Unfortunately, we don't have enough data to verify if this is true with other long-range poke heroes, such as Chromie, so we will have to wait and see if more teams try to deploy this sort of tactic against him in the Playoffs and in the Mid-Season Brawl.Here's a table of some of the most popular heroes to be selected alongside Fenix.The most logical combo with Fenix would be to select him alongside a hero that can provide reliable slows, such as Jaina or Stukov, and use them to combo with Fenix's Purification Salvo to deal a large amount of damage in team fights. However, Fenix actually tended to fare rather poorly with these allies in tow in HGC play so far, with Stukov only having a 39% WR with Fenix and Jaina at a 29% WR with Fenix (too low to make the chart, though she had an equal duo-queue pick rate to Dehaka or Medivh). This could merely boil down to poor execution of this synergy, but it is an interesting situation, considering that expectations placed a great deal more value in Purification Salvo and creating combos with it.Instead, what we're seeing is that Fenix tends to perform marginally better when combined with many of the heroes that he struggles to face off against: the kind that displace, isolate, and lock enemies into a stun combo. His generally higher win rates with Garrosh (44% WR), Blaze (54% WR), E.T.C. (56% WR), and Malfurion (64% WR) suggest that he is working better when paired with allies who can lock down his targets for him to finish off, which implies that perhaps Planet Cracker hasn't been given its due. Multiple times in these two weekends, Planet Cracker was selected and used with some degree of efficiency as a means to secure kills against fleeing opponents, usually in combination with some of these heroes to help restrict the enemy team's ability to escape its damage.HeroesHearth Esports gave us perhaps the best demonstration of Planet Cracker's potency in one of their games against LFM Esports by combining it with Blaze and Jaina, using a narrow corridor to dish out incredible and unavoidable damage. You can find a clip of that fight here. Of course, there were many factors that went into making this play work out so well, including some incredibly clutch heals by Chase "BBJ" Dixon, but I think it's perhaps the best example in recent weeks of how Planet Cracker can be used well to completely turn the tables on a fight. As far as records go, Planet Cracker has the better record (4-2) against Purification Salvo (20-22), though obviously with the much lower data validity, it's hard to draw any true conclusions from this. If nothing else, the HGC has showcased that both of Fenix's heroic choices are fairly good ones under the proper conditions and in the right hands.Fenix has proven to be a fairly versatile auto-attack damage dealer. Even after his nerfs, he still sees a fairly high, but relatively healthy level of priority, with most of the stronger teams in each region playing him very little. He seems to pair best with heroes that can keep his targets pinned down for him, but also struggles against many of those same heroes due to his inability to escape from them reliably. Both of his heroics have seen some degree of success in professional play, leaving it mostly up to execution to determine which heroic is best in any given composition.Looking for more of my work? I just released a huge new article detailing mobility creep and my thoughts about how to combat it! 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!