Ragnaros X - Week 1 Lineup Trends

Welcome to the first installment of “Lineup Trends” for Ragnaros Season 10! This is where I crunch all the numbers, so you don’t have to. If you were a regular reader of this column last season, you know what you’re in for (lots of numbers!). But for anyone that is new to Lineup Trends, let me ‘splain. I take the data provided in the weekly class submission spreadsheet and organize, sort, and analyze all the lineups to identify which lineups were the most popular as well as the success and failure rates of those popular lineups. Ideally, this article presents a pretty thorough snapshot of the meta as it evolves each and every week.


The Boomsday Meta picked up right where the Witchwood meta left off with the same four class lineup that was most popular at the end of season 9, carrying over into season 10. By comparison though, this new Boomsday Week 1 meta was much less diverse with one dominant lineup and about half as much diversity as last season. Last season we continually saw 40 or more unique lineups with the most popular lineups only being used by 10-15 players. But last week one lineup was brought 36 times! After tossing out the few DQ matches, we had 96 qualifying lineups and of those, only 26 were unique, almost half as many as last season. I figured there would be four classes that would dominate the meta when I wrote about it last week in the Preseason article, but I didn’t expect the meta to have such low lineup diversity. However, in looking back to last season, we saw a similar lack of diversity during the first three weeks of the season, and then Blizzard implemented card changes right before Week 4 which violently shook up a well-defined meta. I expect something similar to happen with this meta (looking at you Giggling Inventor). Let’s take a look at the five most popular lineups from Week 1.

Popular Week 1 Lineups
Lineup #1 – Druid, Hunter, Rogue, and Warlock

36 lineups, 20-16 record (56%)
Druid Bans: 8-9, 47%
Hunter Bans: 0-2, 0%
Rogue Bans: 7-3, 70%
Warlock Bans: 5-2, 71%


This was the most popular four-class lineup last week, and it wasn’t particularly close. Brought by 36 different people, it was 4 times as popular as the next most popular lineup. Not only was it popular, it was effective too, winning 56% of it’s matches. When you break it down by ban choices, you can see that the lineup struggled when Druid or Hunter was banned, but thrived when Rogue or Warlock was banned. If we dive further into the stats and look at the lineup by individual games, it was not nearly as effective however, going 74-73 in games, basically 50-50. This suggests that while it pulled out more match wins than losses, many of those wins were of the 3-2 variety suggesting that this lineup had a lot of very close series that might have gone either way. As I’ll show below, the weakness of this lineup may be the Warlock class, which had a sub-500 win rate as a class last week.

Lineup #2 – Druid, Mage, Rogue, and Warlock

9 lineups, 4-5 record (44%)
Druid Bans: 1-5 (17%)
Mage Bans: 1-0 (100%)
Rogue Bans: 1-0 (100%)
Warlock Bans: 1-0 (100%)


This lineup was the second most popular lineup last week, brought by 9 different people. It is very similar to the lineup above, but swaps out Hunter for Mage. On paper, this does seem like it could work out, as Mage had a better overall win rate last week than Hunter (see table below). But in practice, this lineup performed far worse than Lineup #1 one above. In fact, when its opponents banned Druid, this lineup was abysmal. This would seemingly have all the right classes to target Warlock, one of the most popular classes brought last week, but unfortunately, it just didn’t pan out very well.

Lineup #3 – Druid, Rogue, Warlock, Warrior

7 Lineups, 2-5 record (29%)
Druid Bans: 0-2 (0%)
Rogue Bans: 0-1 (0%)
Warlock Bans: 0-1 (0%)
Warrior Bans: 2-1 (67%)
​
This lineup was mildly popular, but was easily the worst performing lineup last week. It is very similar to the Lineup #1, but it swaps out Hunter for Warrior. Like lineup #2, swapping out Hunter results in lower performance. In fact, the only scenario where this lineup was able to win a match was when it's Warrior was banned. Warrior is a very polarizing class, so it’s not too surprising to see this lineup go 0-4 when Warrior was not banned. But digging a little deeper in the stats reveals that it went 13-16 overall in games (45%). There was actually only one series in which this lineup was swept though, and it swept one of it’s matchups too. The rest were all pretty close series, so perhaps this is simply too small of a sample size.. Still, this makes two lineups now where swapping out Hunter was a poor choice, not unlike choosing milk when you go for a jog on a hot day.

Lineup #4 – Druid, Hunter, Paladin, Rogue

5 Lineups, 4-1 record (80%)
Druid Bans: 2-1 (67%)
Hunter Bans: 1-0 (100%)
Paladin Bans: 1-0 (100%)
Rogue: 0-0 (0%)


This lineup was the best performing lineup last week as it dominated its opponents. It is like Lineup #1, except it swaps out Warlock (one of the worst performing classes last week) for Paladin. And that seemed to be a winning formula. None of this lineup’s opponents chose to ban Rogue, but perhaps they should have! None of the other bans seemed to work out. Not only did this lineup dominate in matches, it went 14-4 in games, earning three sweeps in the process. Take all of this with a grain of salt of course, because it was involved in only five matches (small sample size alert!), but still, this lineup would be worth exploring by more people.

Lineup #5 – Druid, Paladin, Rogue, Warlock

5 Lineups, 2-3 record (40%)
Druid Bans: 1-1 (50%)
Paladin Bans: 0-1 (0%)
Rogue Bans: 0-1 (0%)
Warlock Bans: 1-0 (100%)


The final popular lineup last week again takes elements of Lineup #1 but swapping out Hunter for something else…this time Paladin. While swapping in Paladin helped Lineup #4 achieve the best win-rate, unfortunately getting rid of Hunter seems to be a recurring theme that isn’t working out for these various popular lineups. That said, when Warlock is banned, this lineup was able to achieve a sweep win! Still, it ended up with an 8-10 record overall in games (44%), which just isn’t very competitive.

Week 1 Class Breakdown

We have four very clear front-runners for “most popular classes”, and I don’t know if my Preseason Lineup Trends article influenced that (in a kind of “wag the dog” scenario), or if everyone just happened to be reading the meta the same way I did. But whatever the reason, Druid, Hunter, Rogue and Warlock were the four most popular classes and it wasn’t close. As you can see in the list below, Priest was a forgotten about class (and for good reason based on its stats). The other four classes, Mage, Paladin, Shaman and Warrior all saw mild usage, but were not nearly as popular as the top four classes. In terms of popularity, the classes were ranked as follows last week:


1. Druid (85 Lineups)
2. Warlock (84 Lineups)
3. Rogue (74 Lineups)
4. Hunter (59 Lineups)
5. Mage (23 Lineups)
6. Paladin (22 Lineups)
7. Shaman (14 Lineups)
8. Warrior (14 Lineups)
9. Priest (3 Lineups)


The table below shows class win rates in matches and overall games. Take the first class Mage for example, this table is showing how many matches and games every lineup that had Mage in it won and lost. I have ranked them in order of match win rate. As you can see, Mage comes out on top with the best match win rate, despite being part of one of the worst “popular” lineups above. That popular lineup above accounts for 9 of the Mage lineups, but there were 14 other lineups that used Mage, and overall, lineups with Mage performed very well. On the flipside, those three lineups that used Priest performed very poorly. It’s a small sample size to be sure, but Warrior and Shaman didn’t fare much better and they were used nearly 5 times as much. ​

Conclusion

It was no surprise to me to see Druid, Hunter, Rogue and Warlock start out as the four most popular classes. But it was a surprise to see Warlock perform so poorly as a class. Warlock had a 45% win rate in matches and a 47% win rate in overall games, which is pretty bad for the 2nd most popular class. Mage’s win rate might be taking advantage of having great matchups against Warlock, which in turn might be pushing the Warlock win rate down a bit. While I didn’t expect to see Shaman, Warrior or Priest perform all that well, I did not expect to see them under 40%. We didn’t see a class below 40% in any given week last season, so that is pretty shocking. Based on the overall class popularity and win rates, this meta is very unbalanced with low diversity. I would be shocked if we don’t see Blizzard institute some balance changes soon.


With the most popular lineup performing decently last week, I would expect to see it continue to be popular, but I would also expect some counters to creep up as well. And speaking of, here is a list of the other lineups that were brought by at least 2 people, but that were not quite as popular as the lineups above. Perhaps there’s a diamond in the rough down there. Until next week, good luck and have fun!

-Altenberg