(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)". 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). 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.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.As you can tell from his stats, players have noticed his immense power and responded by banning him in force, with a nearly +26 p.p. spike in bans in HL and a similar +20 p.p. change in TL since the start of the week. There's no question that he's a powerful force in the Nexus right now, and with his early talent data being full of high win rates, this implies that perhaps at least some of the problem lies in his base power. In my own experience playing him, his sheer peel power is genuinely impressive. While his damage isn't exactly powerful, his raw self-healing makes him hard to force out of lane, which could help contribute to his high win rate. It also likely helps that he's got fairly high base health, tied for sixth highest among warriors alongside Johanna. With his high emphasis on self-healing and the baseline armor he has available to him, the higher base health might have been a bit of a mistake. It's possible that we'll see tuning to one or the other (or maybe even both) in the patches to come.In terms of talent balance, he's not too wildly out of place. Only a few real problems seem to stand out. Lvl 16's Frenzied Assault just doesn't stand up to either of the alternatives. But the larger of the two problems by far is the heroic situation: Dark Conversion at Lvl 10 is looking considerably weaker in terms of performance than Carrion Swarm. The tables below shows the two heroics compared in terms of popularity and win rate in Hero League (the first table) and Team League (the second table):Were I to provide a hypothesis on this, my belief is that Dark Conversion falls so short because it's a heroic that isn't actually all that useful most of the time. When you pick Dark Conversion, you're picking it for those rare few occasions when you'll be at 10% health against a near-100% health foe, in which case it's an extremely powerful heroic that can turn the tide of a fight....but those are few and far between, so you're left holding onto the heroic most of the time and getting no value from it. And most of the time, especially if it's another tank, that foe you're dumping it onto has some sort of interrupt they can drop on you to try and prevent the channel. By comparison, Carrion Swarm can work whenever you need it, grants similarly massive healing, and also removes you from play so the healing can't be as easily prevented. Dark Conversion is an amazing idea for a heroic, but it feels relatively weak most of the time, and only really strong some of the time. Whether or not it sees adjustment just depends on how niche the devs feel it ought to be. I suspect it'll see at least a little tweaking, though, as right now its niche is arguably a bit too narrow.While the impact on her win rate isn't quite as measurable thus far, she does feel a lot better with piercing darts in terms of how she functions as a healer. And since she has been on the rise in lieu of the double support meta in the HGC, this could be exactly what she needs to push her up to a more competitive standing. However, there remain a few issues, namely with her talents. As multiple threads on Reddit have confirmed, darts that hit and/or pierce targets that are at full health do not apply the attributes of any talents. We haven't received confirmation about whether this is a bug, but it seems likely, and will need to be corrected before we can call this particular thing finished. If by some chance however it is not a bug, this could be a problematic change, as her Healing Dart talents often provided benefits beyond just healing, and losing them to a pierce would be regrettable to say the least. In either case, in fixing this, it is possible that Ana may need a small compensatory nerf in some fashion to keep her from reaching excessive levels of strength. This would not be too big of a deal, though, as the benefits of piercing would likely far outweigh any minor numerical nerfs, so I strongly support making her talents work with pierced targets (whether a bug or not) and correcting from there if necessary.Looking for more of my work? My last HGC article focuses on Mephisto, the newest mage to enter the Nexus. 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!