With less than 50 days away till the Heroes of the Storm World Championships at BlizzCon, the stakes are getting higher and higher for the Road to BlizzCon tournaments. Last weekend the most important American event to date took place in Las Vegas: The Americas Championship. With two tickets to BlizzCon on the line, the eight qualified teams brought their best strategies to the table. Let's take a look at what that resulted in. In this article we take a look at the statistics of the Americas Championship, compiled and shared by @Dthehunter2510.

Battlefield stats

All 9 maps were available for play this weekend, and only one of those was not picked at least once this weekend: Garden of Terror. Dragon Shire was the most popular map, accounting for 22.58% of all games. Cursed Hollow was played 1 game less and thus saw play in 19.35% of the 31 total games. Sky Temple and Tomb of the Spider Queen both took the third place spot in popularity with a pick percentage of 16.13%. These four maps combined were played in 3/4th of all games.

This weekend's event saw about a 50/50 split in First Pick versus Second Pick wins. Nearly 55% of all games were won by the First Picking team, while we previously reported a slight favour to the SP teams in Enter the Storm #3.

Something we also mentioned in the previous Enter the Stats was that teams had a lot to gain from picking less popular maps. Maps like Battlefield of Eternity and Haunted Mines favoured the teams that picked those maps (the SP teams) immensely. This weekend however we observed the complete opposite. Out of all games played on less popular maps (maps being picked in less than 10% of all games), only 1 game was won by the team that picked it.
 

Hero stats

A certain Assassin had an involvement rate of 100% this past weekend; Jaina was either picked or banned in all games. Zeratul and Kael'thas were the other most popular Assassins by far, being involved in respectively 96.77% and 93.55% of all drafts.
Kerrigan was perhaps the biggest surprise in terms of popularity, having an involvement rate of 45.16%. Not only that, but Kerrigan had the second highest win rate of all Assassins at 66.67%. Raynor took the title of most succesful Assassin, winning 5 of the 6 games he played in. The only Heroes in this category that weren't picked were Nova, Tychus and Falstad.

Uther was again by far the most popular Support Hero, having access to a very solid and versatile kit of abilities. Uther had an involvement rate of 100%, showing a respectable but not crazy win rate of 60%. Suprisingly enough, Tyrande was banned more often than Uther. This is justified after realizing that she had the highest win rate of all Support heroes at 69.23%. The worst performing Support heroes were Kharazim (20% winrate in 5 games) and Rehgar (37.50% winrate in 16 games). Li Li was the only Support hero that was not picked up even once.

The Americas Championship again showed the value of Leoric and Johanna. Leoric was picked/banned in every single draft, and Johanna can also be found in 87.10% of all drafts. Sonya is here to stay for the time being, being considered a counter to Leoric by many and seeing play in 11 out of the 31 games. The most successful Warrior however was Muradin, having a very impressive win rate of 84.62% (at least 20 percentage points higher than any other Warrior). Rexxar, as new as he is, was played a total of 4 times and won 50% of those games. It might take some time (and some help from Blizzard) before players start seeing more value in Rexxar. Chen, Diablo, E.T.C and Stitches were not part of any draft at Las Vegas. We did get news recently that Stitches will be seeing some buffs in the next patch, so this might have been the last major tournament without his involvement.

Abathur was the most popular Specialist last weekend, being involved in more than half of all drafts. He was also the only Specialist that was first banned on several occasions, but in the end only enjoyed a 22.22% winrate. Zagara was only slightly less popular, seeing an involvement rate of 48.39%, he was however by far the most banned Specialist (banned in 26% of all drafts).
Azmodan enjoyed a perfect record for the Championships, winning both of his played games with very different builds. Tempo Storm played him in the Taste for Blood stacking style, while compLexity Gaming succesfully played him to counter Illidan while also dealing massive damage to structures with a focus on All Shall Burn. 
Gazlowe, Murky and Sgt. Hammer were not involved last weekend at all.

Similar to the Enter the Storm #3 Tournament, 30 of the available 41 Heroes were played at least once last weekend. The Heroes who received no love were: Chen, Diablo, E.T.C, Fallstad, Gazlowe, Li Li, Murky, Nova, Sgt. Hammer, Stitches, Tychus.

Finally, we can take a look at the Heroes with the highest winrates. Only Azmodan managed to achieve a 100% winrate this time around, but only played 2 games. When we only look at Heroes that played 5 times or more, we get the following top performers:

  • Muradin - 84.62%
  • Raynor - 83.33%
  • Tyrande - 69.23%
  • Kerrigan - 66.67%
  • Tassadar - 66.67%
  • Leoric - 62.50%
  • Uther - 60.00%
  • Zeratul - 60.00%
  • Sylvanas - 60.00%
  • Malfurion - 58.33%
  • Kael'thas - 54.55%
  • Valla - 52.94%
  • Arthas - 52.94%
         

In closing

All of these stats were compiled by @Dthehunter2510, and made public by him on Reddit. Many more interesting things can be deduced by taking a look at the complete set of numbers. You can find his sheet on overall stats here, his sheet on Team stats here. Sadly no replays from the matches were available, and so no Talent Choices were analysed.

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