THL Meta Reports: S8/5, Week 2!

Welcome back to rebobson and BitBeaker's take on the THL meta right now, read on to hear their thoughts on what people brought to another eventful week!

Good news, fans of class diversity! Remember last week, when I reported that 76% of all players in the League brought BOTH Priest & Warlock? Well, that number has now increased to 87%! Meanwhile, last week’s 5 dominant classes has very quickly devolved into only 4 dominant classes; Paladin’s bring rate dropped hugely this week by a whopping 29%, with an increase in pickup across the other 4 main classes (Druid, Priest, Rogue & Warlock). In fact, some of the statistics regarding these 4 classes are absolutely mind boggling: the 3 most popular of these (Priest, Warlock & Rogue) were brought by 70% of the entire League, while that exact 4 class lineup was brought by 52% of the League. These 4 classes together made up 84.75% of any class brought across the entire week; Paladin made up 9.5%, Mage 2.75%, Hunter at 2%, and those Shaman and Warrior diehards sticking to their guns, making up their now traditional 0.2% each. The most interesting take from this week has got to be the incredibly sudden decline of Paladin, being brought only just over half as much as it was in Week 1. It appears that Paladin’s fairly limited options in terms of gameplan has made it a lot weaker in many players eyes, with the versatility offered by Druid seemingly being valued a lot more when building a potential lineup; could this be a reflection of the World Championship lineups, where we only saw 3 Paladins brought to the entire tournament? Of course, it is still worth noting that while we are seeing an incredible lack of diversity when it comes to classes, there is still a huge amount of diversity within those 4 classes due to their power level right now. Priest has 4 top tier archetypes, Druid has 2, Rogue has 1 (plus a notable mention in Quest Rogue), and Warlock 3; giving us 24 (or 48) possible permutations of lineup, making this 4 class lineup incredibly hard for an opponent to read, and this looks unlikely to change anytime soon. It will be interesting to see how any possible balance changes could shake up the THL meta. In other news, the week’s biggest loser has to be Hunter: out of 8 people bringing the class, 6 of those lost their match, while another DQ’d. Rexxar cannot be happy with his 12.5% winrate, by any means.

-rebobson

After 2 weeks of play it looks like the Sylvanas League meta has quickly taken shape, with many players settling on very similar lineups. There were 21 total unique lineups this week with 14 of those being played by only 1 or 2 players each. The 2 lineups that exceeded double digits are: Pa, Pr, R, Wlk at 16 players, and D, Pr, R, Wlk at 30 players. The next closest lineup was M, Pr, R, Wlk at 7 players. With those lineups being so prominent we can see a pretty interesting trend starting to develop: the most used lineup in the league as it stands is Pr, R, Wlk with a flex spot. It has been filled primarily with Pa, D, or M but 1 lonely player decided to put H in the flex spot. 67.5% of players in the league brought Pr, R, Wlk, 72.5% brought at least R & Wlk and 81.25% brought at least Pr & Wlk. With lineups like this this it should, in theory, be very difficult to sweep a match. That didn’t stop 20% of the players in the league from doing just that. One interesting thing to point out is that out of the 3 players that banned Mage, 1 of them swept (who just so happened to be a sub). Though there is some diversity in the meta, it is fair to say at this point that the League has pretty much settled on the “best” lineup. I’m excited to see how things shape up over the next few weeks.

-BitBeaker