Ragnaros X - Week 3 Lineup Trends

We’ve finally made it past the third week! Do you know why this is so important? Because when analysts attempt to identify a trend, they need at least three occurrences of something to say, “yep, that makes a trend.” If it happens once, it could be meaningless. If it happens twice, it could be coincidence, but if it happens a third time, then we probably have a trend! And now that we have three weeks worth of data, look for Blizzard to announce balance changes to throw an established meta into complete free-fall. But I digress.


Week 3 brings about no significant changes to the meta, but what is significant is the Druid-Warlock-Rogue-Hunter meta. We’ve had three weeks of those four classes dominating the meta, and unless we get balance changes, I don’t foresee that changing. While Week 2 saw a slight increase in lineup diversity, last week that diversity completely disappeared, and we ended up with an even less diverse set up lineups compared to week 1. Week 1 seemed like a “try what looks good” week, then week 2 was an “experimenting week”, and finally week 3 was a “return to what is good” week. I’ll be curious to see what happens next week! In Week 2 we only had 24 unique lineups, compared with 30 the week before and 26 the week before that. Week 3 was the least diverse meta we’ve had so far. What follows below is a breakdown of the six most popular lineups from Week 3.


Popular Week 3 Lineups
Lineup #1 – Druid, Hunter, Rogue, and Warlock

Week 3 Stats
30 lineups, 16-14 record (53%)
Druid Bans: 6-9 (40%)
Hunter Bans: 1-1 (50%)
Rogue Bans: 5-1 (83%)
Warlock Bans: 4-3 (57%)


Season 10 Stats
88 lineups, 47-41 record (53%)
Druid Bans: 19-23, 45%
Hunter Bans: 4-4, 50%
Rogue Bans: 13-7, 65%
Warlock Bans: 11-7, 61%


This lineup continues to be the most popular lineup, and it’s never been close. We’re up to 88 appearances on the season, which is pretty remarkable. No single lineup even came close to that many appearances last season. We saw a bit of a dip from Week 1 to Week 2, but it’s popularity increased heading into Week 3. Overall, this lineup is barely hanging onto a winning record at 53% in matches, but if enough people start to figure out that banning Druid is the way to go to counter this lineup, we could see its performance drop a bit.


Lineup #2 – Druid, Hunter, Mage, Warlock

Week 3 Stats
15 lineups, 9-6 record (60%)
Druid Bans: 3-2 (60%)
Hunter Bans: 4-1 (80%)
Mage Bans: 0-3 (0%)
Rogue Bans??: (1-0) (100%)
Warlock Bans: 1-0 (100%)


Season 10 Stats
25 lineups, 16-9 (64%)
Druid Bans: 4-2 (67%)
Hunter Bans: 5-2 (71%)
Mage Bans: 1-4 (20%)
Warlock Bans: 5-1 (83%)


This was a new entry in Week 2 and had an excellent showing that week. Consequently, the popularity of the lineup exploded heading into Week 3, more than doubling its appearance rate. As its representation increased its performance did dip a little bit, but it still looks like a very strong option. Mage is an interesting addition to replace Rogue above, and it does provide some favorable matchups against Warlock and Rogue, but as I look through the ban data, it does present an interesting problem. When Mage is banned, this lineup has been abysmal, winning only 20% of its matches. When any other class is banned, the lineup does extremely well, perhaps pointing to how well Mage matches up against some of the most popular classes right now. Lastly, whoever banned Rogue…c’mon man.


Lineup #3 – Druid, Rogue, Shaman, Warlock

Week 3 Stats
7 Lineups, 3-4 record (43%)
Druid Bans: 2-3 (40%)
Rogue Bans: 1-0 (100%)
Shaman Bans: 0-0 (0%)
Warlock Bans: 0-1 (0%)


Season 10 Stats
10 Lineups, 4-6 record (40%)
Druid Bans: 3-4 (43%)
Rogue Bans: 1-0 (100%)
Shaman Bans: 0-0 (0%)
Warlock Bans: 0-1 (0%)


This is a brand-new entry for lineup trends, not having made an appearance as a popular lineup yet this season. Unfortunately, this experiment didn’t seem to pan out very well, with it going 3-4 last week. It wasn’t the first time the lineup has ever been brought though as it made two appearances in Week 1 and one appearance last week. But even when you add those other few lineups to the data from last week, on the season, the lineup still looks mediocre at best. Shaman would seem to be a decent option in our format as it’s a flexible class and difficult to predict, but unfortunately as you can see in the class tables below, the Shaman class has not been performing very well this season. And it certainly doesn’t look great in this lineup.


Lineup #4 – Druid, Mage, Rogue, and Warlock

Week 3 Stats
6 lineups, 3-3 record (50%)
Druid Bans: 2-2 (50%)
Mage Bans: 0-0 (0%)
Rogue Bans: 1-1 (50%)
Warlock Bans: 0-0 (0%)


Season 10 Stats
26 lineups, 12-14 record (46%)
Druid Bans: 6-10 (38%)
Mage Bans: 1-0 (100%)
Rogue Bans: 2-3 (40%)
Warlock Bans: 3-1 (75%)


I have spoken the past two weeks about how I didn’t believe in this lineup, and its representation rightly dropped in half in Week 3. But there are still some true believers playing this lineup, and would you look at that…it scored a 50% win rate! It wasn’t a losing lineup last week! Huzzah! Although, I hate to break it to you…but it wasn’t a winning lineup either. It fell into that awful pit of competitive despair called a “tie”. As a Minnesota Vikings fan, I still don’t know how to feel about last week’s tie game against the Packers in Lambeau. But I do know this: ties suck. And I still wouldn’t use this lineup.


Lineup #5 – Druid, Hunter, Mage, Rogue

Week 3 Stats
5 Lineups, 0-5 record (0%)
Druid Bans: 0-4 (0%)
Hunter Bans: 0-0 (0%)
Mage Bans: 0-0 (0%)
Rogue Bans: 0-1 (0%)


Season 10 Stats
15 Lineups, 4-11 (27%)
Druid Bans: 3-9 (38%)
Hunter Bans: 0-1 (0%)
Mage Bans: 0-0 (0%)
Rogue Bans: 1-1 (50%)


In Week 2 this lineup went 25%. Last week, it didn’t win a single match. DO. NOT. USE. THIS. LINEUP. I may not have been doing Lineup Trends very long (really only 12 weeks worth of games going back to last season), but I have never seen a popular lineup go 0% in that amount of time. I can see why it might be tempting to use it, because when you look at the top four win-rates by class, these are the top four classes. But that doesn’t mean they complement each other in a lineup or have the ability to be flexible and target the same kinds of classes. Data on 15 lineups is enough to be able to say that a 27% win rate is simply not good enough. So, please, for all of THL’s sake, don’t use this lineup…unless your name is davpetm…then PLEASE use this lineup this week. :D


Lineup #6 – Druid, Hunter, Paladin, Rogue

Week 3 Stats
5 lineups, 4-1 record (80%)
Druid Bans: 2-0 (100%)
Hunter Bans: 0-0 (0%)
Paladin Bans: 1-0 (100%)
Rogue Bans: 1-1 (50%)


Season 10 Stats
16 Lineups, 12-4 record (75%)
Druid Bans: 6-3 (67%)
Hunter Bans: 2-0 (100%)
Paladin Bans: 2-0 (100%)
Rogue: 2-1 (67%)


The usage of this lineup has held pretty steady each week being brought five, six, and five times through the first three weeks respectively. It has performed very well each and every week. There doesn’t seem to be a good way to ban this lineup, as every choice results in a winning record. Conventional wisdom would suggest that Paladin looks targetable, and that the absence of Warlock would seem to be a hindrance, but conventional wisdom would be wrong in this case. This lineup is worth serious consideration going forward.


Week 3 Class Breakdown
We still have four very clear front-runners for “most popular classes”, and literally nothing has changed in the order of most popular classes. What has changed is the distribution of lineups that has used each class. Hunter has seen a bit of an increase, moving up to tie Rogue for the 3rd most popular class. Mage has been holding steady at #5 and after seeing a small spike in usage in Week 2, it dropped a bit in Week 3. Warlock has seen its usage drop for a 2nd straight week as we have a virtual 3-way tie between Warlock, Rogue and Hunter. Druid, remarkably, saw its usage INCREASE. 95 out of a possible 98 qualifying lineups used Druid last week. If only it were a targetable class! Druid is just too good and does everything well (drawing, health gain, burst, OTK combos, board clears, etc, etc). The rest of the classes all remained within a few lineup totals as last week.


1. Druid (95 Lineups)
2. Warlock (77 Lineups)
3. Rogue (72 Lineups)
4. Hunter (72 Lineups)
5. Mage (30 Lineups)
6. Paladin (15 Lineups)
7. Shaman (15 Lineups)
8. Warrior (12 Lineups)
9. Priest (4 Lineups)


The two tables below show class win rates in matches and overall games from Week 3 and the combined Season totals. Take Warrior for example, this table is showing how many matches and games every lineup that had Warrior in it won and lost. I have ranked them in order of match win rate. As you can see, Warrior comes out on top with the best match win rate in Week 3. But when you look for Warrior in the overall Season table below, it falls to the middle of the pack, because it hasn’t performed very well when you combine weeks one through three. We now have three weeks’ worth of data and th meta continues to look very unbalanced with low diversity. We’ll see if I’m right about Blizzard announcing balance changes…I’ve been calling for them every week.


Week 3 Class Win Rates

Season 10 Class Win Rates

Conclusion
Druid, Rogue and Hunter sit on top of the mountain of class win rates, and rightly so. They are also three of the four most popular classes for a reason. Warlock is the 2nd most popular class, but still sports an overall losing record in matches and games, thanks to a rough showing Week 1. It sits right on the cusp of breaking the 50% threshold and another strong week should push it back over the edge. Mage is holding steady at 50%. After that, we have the “rest of the classes” which pretty much look terrible in this meta, safe for a few isolated examples.


It was a surprise to see a new lineup make an appearance this week, but it just goes to show you that the meta is ever-evolving, even while still having clearly established “top classes.” The last table below is a list of the other lineups (with total season stats), that were brought by at least 2 people in week 3, 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


Week 3 – Other Lineups (Total Season Stats)