Introduction

League Win Rate Popularity Bronze / Silver 46.8% (56th) 84.3% (14.0% pick, 70.3% ban) Gold / Platinum 48.3% (31st) 48.3% (14.3% pick, 34.0% ban) Diamond / Master 51.0% (34th) 86.7% (14.4% pick, 72.3% ban) Overall 48.9% (42nd) 78.3% (14.4% pick, 63.9% ban)

The Ragnaros Effect

Wait, Weren't We Talking About Garrosh?

Conclusion (TL;DR):

Hello there! I'm CriticKitten. You may know me from my more popular segment, 7 Days Later, in which I keep track of how heroes are performing after recent balance patches. Here is a link to my most recent edition of that series. However, today's segment focuses on a different subject matter: Garrosh. Recent posts have pointed out that he is currently getting banned really often . Far more often than he's being picked, in fact. Yet his win rate doesn't seem to suggest anything is wrong. So what's the deal? Is he truly "broken", as some recent Reddit posts have suggested? Or is there something else going on?Garrosh is a relatively new addition to the Nexus, joining the game on August 8th, 2017. Since his release, his ban rate has steadily grown, and he is now ranked as the most popular hero by virtue of his ban rate alone.Here are his current stats:As you can see, Garrosh's win rate is relatively average, performing in about the middle of the pack overall. He ranks roughly 8th among Warriors, even at the highest levels of Hero League play.As far as professional performance goes, his win rate has continued to sink since he first premiered in the HGC. According to Masterleague.net , Garrosh started out at a 51% win rate (with a 34% pick rate and a 12% ban rate), he's sunk patch after patch, and now only has a 41% win rate across all patches to date (with roughly an 18.6% pick rate and a 8.4% ban rate). However, it is worth noting that his ban frequency increased in the HGC very recently, due to his strength as a counter against double support compositions. However, his win rate has not improved, nor has it ever reached a point where it could be deemed too excessive.So if he's so broken, why is he seemingly performing so....average? To understand this, we need to talk about something I like to call "The Ragnaros Effect".Let's go back in time to the start of 2017. Ragnaros has only been in the Nexus for a few weeks at this point, and yet, he has managed to do something that most new heroes have not: he's managed to achieve a ban rate so high that his overall popularity is near 90%! Here's a graph of Ragnaros's popularity over the course of 2017, running from January through September. This data was retrieved from my Hero Data Sheet for 2017 , which you are welcome to review for yourself.The green sections represent the percentage of matches that Ragnaros was picked and won the match, the yellow sections are matches which Ragnaros was picked and lost, and the red sections are matches in which Ragnaros was banned. As you can see, Ragnaros's ban rate at that time was, accounting for over 76% of his total popularity rating at the start of the year. Gradually, this ban rate continued to fade away as he received multiple nerfs over the course of the following months, with the final decline starting with the March 28th nerf (which took 5% of his basic attack damage, 5% of his Empower Sulfuras damage, and increased the cooldown on Sulfuras Smash by 33%).So naturally, when a hero experiences multiple nerfs of this sort, you would expect that the hero's win rate was rather high, or at least trended highly. And yet, when you look at his win rate during this same time period, an interesting realization occurs:....wait, huh? His overall win rate for each given week during this same time period doesn't seem to be that high at all. In fact, he never seems to have broken 54% across this entire period of time. So why was he so constantly banned?Well, there were multiple reasons for this:He was never perhaps the "best" choice for any map, but he was also never really bad on any map, either. His kit granted him a ton of damage, strong sustain, and a lot of flexibility to act as a wave-clearer (and in some aspects, a split-pusher, if taking Lava Wave), on top of a trait that grants him excellent reach to poke at objectives which require channeling, or to protect structures from objective-based damage and pushes. As a result, his kit was pretty much a perfect choice on every map.During the Zul'jin patch (the one that immediately followed Ragnaros's release), Ragnaros exploded onto the pro scene with an 85% popularity rate (58.9% pick rate, 26.1% ban rate) while maintaining a 51% win rate. While this is not a particularly high win rate, a hero that experiences that much exposure usually sees some changes eventually. And of course, when a hero experiences high popularity in the pros, this often inspires people who watch the pros to go out and try to practice with the heroes and techniques that they've seen the pros use when they get into Hero League. This often leads to a shift in win rates and/or an increase in the hero's ban rate. Following the release of the Probius patch on March 14th (and the subsequent balance patch that gave Ragnaros his "fatal" nerfs on March 28th), Ragnaros's pick rate in the professional scene declined dramatically, and his ban rate in Hero League quickly followed suit. This is not the first, nor last, time that a hero's premiere in the pros has led to a corresponding shift in the Hero League meta. Genji and Malthael are also recent examples of heroes whose frequent use in the pros led to a similarly high ban rate in Hero League, and subsequent nerfs to reduce their frequency of use.As previously established, Ragnaros's kit was relatively flexible to begin with, making it a workable solution for just about any composition to begin with. But as Blizzard typically likes to do, Ragnaros was released during a different meta than the one we face today. Back in these days, double support was much more limited, and when it did appear, it was typically Tassadar (who was a top draft pick) with another support, rather than the mixture of supports we see today. Malfurion was the primary choice of solo healer in the draft, and heroes like Tychus saw a lot of use to counteract the rather common use of double tank. Most typically, these comps had a mixture of ranged assassins like Valla, Tychus, Li-Ming, and Falstad who would hide behind the front line bruisers and tanks while pouring out their damage. Because of this, heroes that could get into the back line and dish out damage (such as Zeratul) were clear favorites in order to reach those squishy ranged assassins quickly. At this time, Ragnaros's "Q build" was also his strongest, making it possible for him to deal lots of AoE damage to a vulnerable back line while still providing a good front line bruiser-type build. Add this onto his decently ranged stun from Sulfuras Smash and the incredible reach of Molten Core as a deterrent against pushes, and you had a winning combination that worked well in the meta at that time.This perfect storm of having a universal kit, appearing in a favorable meta, and seeing plenty of HGC action led to a scenario in which Ragnaros was performing relatively "normally" in Hero League, yet he was still in need of adjustments in order to bring him down to a level where he wasn't constantly showing up everywhere. This is a scenario which I like to call "the Ragnaros Effect". It's not unique to Rag himself, nor is he the first or last hero to be in this particularly odd situation, but he's certainly the most pronounced example of this scenario that I've seen in the time that I've played Heroes of the Storm. Other recent heroes (including Genji and Malthael) have seen similar issues, but not nearly as massive as the ones that Rag saw in his heyday.So then, why did I just go off on a rant about how Ragnaros worked back in the "old days"? No, I haven't suddenly turned nostalgic, nor have I forgotten the topic at hand. I'm laying the groundwork to help explain what's going on with Garrosh. Garrosh is yet another victim of this so-called "Ragnaros Effect". When you merely look at his stats, by all accounts, there's absolutely nothing visible "wrong" with him. He's maintaining a steady win rate, he's seeing healthy professional use....and yet, beneath the statistics, there's a clear similarly between his situation and that of Ragnaros, even if it's not nearly as massive as Ragnaros's was.How do I figure? Consider the following:He has both Physical and Magic Armor, allowing him to reduce damage from any source as his health continues to drop, and he has a form of self-sustain when his health gets lower that can help keep him in the fight. He has multiple abilities which can enable him to isolate an enemy hero from his team. All of these are baseline effects in his kit, and all of them are strong elements for a tank to have available to them. In addition, he can choose to pick up other universally strong tools, like a self-Cleanse, an ability that throws an ally (and also Cleanses them), a variety of slows and stuns, and an AoE Taunt. It's really no big surprise that a kit with as many options as Garrosh has can be used on pretty much any map. Perhaps his only true weakness is his inherent lack of wave clear, but with the utility he brings to team fights, what he lacks in the macro game doesn't tend to hurt him badly if he's used well.While it's nothing compared to Ragnaros's old numbers, he's currently at a 54% on the most recent patch of HGC play, primarily due to his bans. While there isn't much data on the recent patch, this is still a reasonable enough increase in play that it's possible that this is influencing his exposure in Hero League, as it has for many other heroes before him.There's, of course, the obvious point of him being able to isolate single targets from the rest of the team, thus making it harder to sustain them with healing (or allowing him to drag an enemy support into his own team's ranks for an easier kill). But "Body Check" is also a factor. At Lvl 7, "Body Check" can be built to reduce enemy healing, giving Garrosh a powerful tool against enemy sustain for when he wants to help his team focus down a target. He's also relatively strong against double tank compositions, too.There's also another angle to consider, which is also factoring into his ban rate: the level of frustration that one can experience in playing against Garrosh. Garrosh's primary pull combo can sometimes feel more "cheap" than a Stitches hook, which is a long and semi-slow skill shot that has approximately 14.7 range baseline, and 19.7 with "Fishing Hook". By comparison, Q + E on Garrosh grants him a 7.25 range pull in a 45° arc which can pull multiple heroes, and then he can throw one of them (two at Lvl 20) backwards at a range of 5.5 (6.88 with "Unrivaled Strength"). In other words, while the Stitches hook is longer in range, it's also generally a bit more difficult to land, and it doesn't necessarily isolate the targeted enemy nearly as much as a Q + E combo can. Of course, there's room to argue that a two-skill combo ought to be more rewarding than a one-skill move, but we'll see that aside for now. The point is this: a Garrosh landing these combos consistently can definitely start to feel "unfair" and difficult to counter. There's also the "troll" element to consider from "Into The Fray". Some players in the first few weeks of picking Garrosh would use "Into The Fray" to troll their allies rather than saving them, leading to a lot of frustration with the hero that has no doubt contributed to the ban rate.So how do you fix these things? For that matter, does he really need to be fixed at all? Well....yes and no. He doesn't need the sort of heavy nerfs that the mobs seem to be calling for. If his win rate were to decline too significantly from where it is now, forget pro usage, you would very likely weaken him too severely for Hero League play in general. He should still be rewarding to play when you're landing his combos correctly, and I think that any significant alterations to his kit will hamper that goal. I, for one, am not entirely certain as of yet that he needs any major adjustments, and I think at least part of his high ban rate can be attributed to players harping what they've seen in the HGC, rather than anything in his kit that creates a true demand for the ban. That said, in his present form, I think it is very likely that he remains a priority ban for some time unless something is changed. But how do you change a hero like Garrosh to reduce the effectiveness of his "pulling" kit without crippling him completely?My suggestions are as follows:The buff to this talent increased its range (+20% to +25%) and damage boost (+100% to +125%). This buff was a tad excessive at the time as it was an overreaction to his early numbers on that talent being a tad low, and as such, it has been a leading cause in the ever-increasing popularity of the "throw build". I'm proposing that the range increase be reduced back down to +20%. This would give his combo a max range of 7.25 + 5.5*1.2 = 14.1, instead of its current range of 14.38. This is still a fairly large range and shouldn't hurt the win rate on the talent too severely, while driving down its overall popularity.This is a "throw build" talent which has always been popular, and for a very obvious reason. Being able to use throw targets as stuns completely changes the dynamic of the ability. It's no longer necessary to save your throw for isolating targets, because this talent makes it also quite useful for a group-wide AoE stun when throwing an enemy at the feet of their fellow team mates. This talent has a fairly strong win rate while maintaining the highest overall popularity, so it's likely fair to reduce the effectiveness of the stun at this point.As of right now, "Groundbreaker" has a range of 7.25, and is designed to pull any target between 6.25 and 7.25. My suggestion is to reduce that range slightly, making it only pull heroes from 6.5 to 7.25. This reduction will not change things much (if at all) for skilled Garrosh players, but still increases the skill demands necessary to achieve a full combo. The hitbox should still be plenty large enough to catch heroes just as often as you could before, if you were already good with the hero.The goal of these changes is to make very, very minor adjustments to Garrosh's overall "pull" strength, without changing much of the character's core strength. Remember, by all accounts, his true strength isn't measurable in the same way as other heroes right now because of how frequently he's banned. So, given that his win rate isn't above 50% right now, any changes should be made small and slow, to bring down his ban rate more gradually so that his strength can be more accurately gauged. If Blizzard instead makes a snap judgment and nerfs him more severely, it might please folks in the short term, but it risks putting him in a situation similar to what Ragnaros experienced after his multiple nerfs: a decline that essentially forced Blizzard to revisit him later on and give him back some strength to make him more viable. I'd rather not see a hero who isn't dominating the pro scene or Hero League by any stretch of the imagination become the victim of an overreaction.Garrosh is a very interesting warrior who relies rather heavily on his "pulls" to make him useful in combat. While his win rate currently does not suggest that he is particularly broken, it is hard to adequately measure where he really sits because he is being banned so frequently. This is due to the "Ragnaros Effect", a term meant to indicate that he has a universally useful kit in a meta that generally favors his presence, combined with decent usage in the pros, which has led to a lot of people banning him out of play. Numerous heroes in the past have been in similar situations in which their ban rates often exceeded their pick rates, making it really hard to be sure just how strong the hero really is until those bans dropped off.In order to combat this behavior and get a better sense of where Garrosh belongs, the best choice is a very gradual reduction of his strength, starting with small changes to his most popular "throwing" talents and a slight reduction in the pulling region of "Groundbreaker". These changes should not impact the hero's strength too significantly, but should still help to reduce his effectiveness on players that are not very good with Garrosh and make it harder for them to land easy combos. This, combined with the passage of time, should lead to a slow and steady decline in his ban rate as people start to move on to other heroes. Once his ban rate has dropped off, we can get a better idea where he really sits and make further adjustments as needed. But right now, the absolute worst thing Blizzard could do is overreact to the increased frequency of Reddit posts on the subject and nerf Garrosh too heavily, which could cripple his effectiveness for weeks or even months.But of course, this is only my take on the situation. How do you feel about Garrosh's current state? Is he too strong, too weak, or is it too difficult to tell right now? What changes do you feel he needs in order to bring down his ban rate? Or should Blizzard wait it out for a few more weeks/months to see if it'll come down naturally? Let me know in the comments below! Finally, I'd like to offer special thanks to Lord 'Boo , who requested a post on this topic. If you have a topic you'd like to see me discuss, please feel free to send me a message on Reddit or on HeroesHearth and I'll be happy to take a look at it!