Since entering heroleague, my results have been pretty bad. I started off with a rather large loss chain which placed my hotslogs heroleague MMR at 577. My quickmatch MMR was in vaguely similar shape. I responded by reading lots of strategy articles, and after months of games my MMR finally got up to a less atrocious 1600 in heroleague and around 2200 in quickmatch. This blog is going to just be a recording of my latest organized attempt to fix the disparity between my MMRs: I feel like my quickmatch MMR says my execution is good, and my heroleague MMR says my drafting is terrible. My current hotslogs winrate is EXACTLY 50%, so it is very likely I belong at this MMR in my opinion.
October 17- October 20
Starting with an anchor character
Looking at my heroleague data currently, I strongly favor a support role, but rarely do well in that role in terms of converting wins in games. When I am not support, my picks are all over the place and not very well structured at all. So I have started something very simple: since I am familiar with and own every hero in the game, I started picking Abathur every game. This character was chosen for a number of reasons:
* I am ranked around 34-35, so it feels like teammates contribute to throws a lot. Abathur allows me to have a global presence so I can help out teammates who are scattered to the four winds.
* Abathur has a very strong endgame, so if the teams just stall out we should win the game when I simply disintegrate their base with locusts.
* I've been on a winning streak in quickmatch with Abathur, so he feels good.
Results: mixed
On many maps, the Abathur pick brings forth rage from teammates. This includes Infernal Shrines, Dragonshire, Haunted Mines, and Battlefield of Eternity. I think that putting teammates on tilt is a bad thing for improving my gameplay, so I dug in a bit to my win statistics. I have good winrates with Jaina, and she is probably a good blind draft pick for a number of reasons:
* She has good waveclear
* She is good in team fights
* She has good merc clear
So starting on October 19thish I started following these rules:
The New Plan
Pick Abathur on Sky Temple, Cursed Hollow, Tomb of the Spider Queen, Garden of Terror, Blackheart's Bay
Pick Jaina on Haunted Mines, Dragonshire, Infernal Shrines, and Battlefield of Eternity.
Pick support when team needs it (Either Malf, Uther, or lili)
Pick warrior when team needs it (Johanna or Leoric)
This simple plan was good enough to quickly raise my rank from rank 35 to rank 29. I've made more progress since then, and I'll highlight further changes I made in the next post.