[2020] 1/27 PBE Update: TD Senna Prestige Splash & More Tentative Balance Changes

Already tweeted this, but I'll also post here: His ult on live is currently converting only 37.5%. Given his relatively balanced state, we decided to modify his tooltip to be accurate rather than change it to actually be 75%.

TLDR: His ult has been bugged this whole time and the tooltip was lying. Since he's relatively balanced we just updated the tooltip to reflect what the ult was actually doing.

Because he's actually strong is all three farming lanes.

Just because people think he's a support doesn't mean he is one. Top, Mid, and Bot all have higher win rates.

https://lolalytics.com/lol/swain/?lane=support also supports u.gg's high winrate claim.

Couple thousand games for each role. Internal data also has his him as a top performer in Mid/Bot. Pickrate is irrelevant. Sample size is what matters. The sample is large enough to be confident in his performance.

Again, see the first comment I made. Just because people think it's true doesn't mean it is true. There's lots of people who think vaccines are a larger risk than measles. Evidence shows us the opposite is true. Don't be one of those people. Swain is a winning champion.

Then that's a different conversation and one I'm totally down for having. I agree Swain is quite unpopular. That's something worth tackling and should happen.

That is a different discussion from "Swain is [not] strong." And again, the point still stands that he wins. If all he did was last hit pitifully under turret and then become mediocre in mid game he wouldn't win 53% of his games in mid lane.

Hey, so I was interested in your claim about only mains playing him and while this data isn't perfect, let's get into it:

First off, no one's telling me what to write. I'm interested in performance data in general and I had some free time, so I'm talking about what I've got available.

Second, you're wrong about the mastery/power kind of stuff. We'll take Yasuo for example. He has the single highest score for "average games of experience when you see this champion." The mean games of experience on Yasuo is over 100. Now, sure, that technically means you may face nine first-time players for every 1000-game main, as is the nature of using mean as the measurement, but this tends to work pretty well overall. Yasuo has on average 100 games under his belt when he gets played. He has a 49% win rate in solo queue. Katarina is 2nd place. She has 53%, the same as Swain. Zyra is #3. She's at 52%.

What this means is that overall, the mastery rate more or less has to be taken into account. Essentially Yasuo is numerically maybe the weakest champion in the game but so many players are so good at him that he performs fine. To me, this is the right way to balance the game. Otherwise, everyone has to ban Yasuo every game because you're against him every game and everyone's an expert and they're slaying. Thankfully for Katarina and Zyra, they're not terribly popular overall and can get away with high win rates (IMO Swain actually falls into this, too).

Third, let's circle back to Swain. This is where there's a deserved large asterisk: I don't have reliable data from the last six months. My Swain data is from before the most recent remaster. But at that point in time, Swain had an average experience rate below about 65% of other champions, at around 40 games played.

We can at least test for how much this tends to change over time. So for example, I can measure Yasuo game experience from back in 2015 (1.5 years after release) compared to 2019. Overall experience rate doesn't actually shift very much (99 vs 107). I'm making the assumption that this remains relatively true for Swain as well. You don't have to believe this assumption, but I think it's likely accurate.

Finally, we can actually measure Swain pickrate. At a certain point this gets buoyed by support Swain, but here's the graph: https://imgur.com/6JesmTo

Swain is overall about twice as popular post-remaster. His playrate was declining up until it hit and has steadily climbed week over week after the initial hype falloff.

None of this is to say your experience is invalid. Personally I like playing Swain still occasionally. He's my go-to mage bot and one of my go-to midlaners as well. But I'm sorry if you're having less fun with him.

Checked Riot internal data. Looked at both 10.1 and 10.2 separately. Also looked across every MMR band that's worth measuring.

Across all cross-sections he is 50%+ at every MMR bracket in Mid/Bot. (caveat: measuring GM+ is fraudulent because sample size is too low, so that bracket is unusable)

Swain winrate generally decreases slightly with MMR and still ends up above 50% in his two best roles (neither are Support) at every MMR for the last month, including D1+

I'm looking for every source of data I can and honestly cannot find anything to suggest Swain is weak here. You'd have to cherry-pick to find anything sub-50.

To be clear, if the sample size was too small, you'd see wild swings in winrate going patch-to-patch. That only happens in GM+. Everywhere else the deviation is pretty moderate. Even with patch-to-patch variance, they ALL clock in above 50%.

That's specifically the games-on-champion data. Win rates, as you could have read from literally the sentence above, are from 10.1 and 10.2

She's top 10 in the metric.

Interestingly, so are Nami and Sona.