Power Rankings 2017

BlizzCon Grand Finals

Once again, BlizzCon approaches and the excitement of competition is in the air again! After a long and rigorous year, 16 teams have emerged as victors of their region, ready to take the stage in a brawl to determine who is the best of the best.

The implementation of HGC in 2017 has had some difficulties here and there, but in the end, it's delivered

Quick Jump

#1	Fnatic
#2	MVP Black
#3	Ballistix
#4	Team Dignitas
#5	Tempest
#6-11	Team expert, Roll20, SPT, CE, Team Freedom, Tempo Storm
#12-16	Soul Torturers, Dark Sided, BTG, Deadly Kittens, RED Canids

all that it promised and more: players are finally getting paid as real professionals, tournament games and content are delivered weekly in bulk, and skill levels across the board have been turned up a notch. It's clear that HGC has had positive effects on Heroes esports, and we're excited to see where that leads us in 2018.

But before we delve into the future, we have to focus on the present. Who are the best teams? Where do they stand relative to one another? What are their strengths and weaknesses? After some discussion and debate, we have put together our power rankings for the 2017 BlizzCon Grand Finals. Some teams had a wide spread of votes, but for the most part, our top 5 teams emerged pretty clearly.

Our "Titans", as we like to call them, are the teams that are most likely to win at BlizzCon and go home with a trophy and hefty sum of money. "Contenders" are just that: teams who could contend with those top 4 spots. And finally, we have the "Knockout" category, a grouping of teams we don't expect to make it out of groups.

Of course, Power Rankings can never be completely accurate. Determining the strength of a team relies on a synthesis of statistics, results, and gut feeling. We could be severely wrong about a few of these teams, but we look forward to being proven wrong.

Share with us where you think these teams should go!

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Titans

1. Fnatic

Quackniix

Breez

Smexystyle
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scHwimpi

Wubby

What can we say? Fnatic has dominated all year long. Their huge wins over Korean teams at the Mid-Season Brawl sent a message that Europe was ready to rock, and in their own region they look unbeatable.

The team has peeled back some of their unbridled aggression from earlier days, but they’re still one of the scariest teams to play against. Whether it’s a dive under towers or a sudden collapse onto a single member, Fnatic’s snap decision making and coordination is off the charts. Anything less than a top 4 finish from the Swedes would be surprising.

2. MVP Black

Sake

Rich

KyoCha

Ttsst

Reset

MVP Black is the oldest and most dominant team in Heroes of the Storm history, but the team we know today is far different than its predecessors. The team was historically known for their macro-oriented play and aggressive shotcalling. Once Rich was thrown into the mix in early 2016, MVP Black earned a reputation as the most feared team on the planet.

However, Phase 1 of 2017 was a different story. With the absence of Rich, Black struggled to find an identity around former Snake Esports players Ttsst and Reset. Though they managed to recapture some of their former glory in Korea, the Mid-Season Brawl revealed some startling weaknesses in the region, and MVP Black plummeted down to earth to become mere mortals.

But they’re on the rise again. Rich is back in action, and looking more decisive than ever. KyoCha changed roles to support, but with the widest hero pool of any player on Earth, it doesn’t seem to be bothering him at all. The rest of the team has fallen in stride, and everyone seems to be in sync with each other. We’re expecting a vastly different performance from MVP Black this time around...but will it be enough to win a world championship?

3. Ballistix (L5)

sCsC

Jeongha

Swoy

Hooligan

SDE

Also known as L5, Ballistix is the reigning BlizzCon champion after their victory over Fnatic last year. They’re back to defend their title, but two crucial pieces of their former team are missing: Noblesse and NaCHoJin. The sudden retirement of Noblesse, the backbone of L5 and perhaps the best overall player in Korea, came as a shock to L5 fans, but the team continued on without him. Picking up Hooligan and SDE, Ballistix has shown that they can take promising players and turn them into a force to be reckoned with.

Ballistix is the Yin to MVP Black’s Yang. Where MVP Black excels in extreme aggression and decisive teamfights, Ballistix is all about macro and map control. They focus incredible attention to controlling the objective, pristine rotations, and indirectly forcing their opponents into bad spots. When behind, they seemingly pull advantages out of thin air. Of course, they also have the mechanics to teamfight. Compared to the snaptrap style of MVP Black, Ballistix prefers a ballet of carefully crafted steps before finding the right target and engaging at the perfect time.

4. Team Dignitas

Bakery

Snitch

JayPL

Ménè

Zaelia

Team Dignitas has had more ups and downs than any other top team in the world, but when it comes to live events, they tend to show up. JayPL’s performance on Stitches at the Mid-Season Brawl changed the global warrior meta and inspired imitators from every region, but a lackluster performance in the beginning of Phase 2 left fans wondering if Dignitas still had it in them to make it to BlizzCon. Despite a rocky start to the split, the team has adjusted well to the double support meta with Mene now backing up Bakery and are once again ready to compete on the world stage.

More than any other player in the league, Mene has been stretched beyond his comfort zone. Instead of relying on the spellcasters and hyper carries he’s used to playing, he’s had to switch over to playing the secondary support. In the first few weeks, things looked shaky as the rest of the team attempted to recreate Mene’s usual wake of destruction, but it seems like things have really started to gel in the last few weeks. With mages starting to show up more often in the metagame again, Mene is back on track to destroy everyone at BlizzCon—except now he’s got a few equally effective back pocket picks.

5. Tempest

Sign

H82

Hide

Lockdown

HongCoNo

An unpredictable storm unto themselves, Tempest is the only team in the world that can convincingly win against L5 and still lose to the worst team in the league. On good days, they look extremely dominant; on bad days, they look like a Hero League team.

The brothers Hide and Lockdown are an aggressive combo, but the return of HongCoNo’s (quite frankly) insane shotcalling has made the team all the more volatile and dangerous. On the aggression scale, Tempest breaks the meter. Their focus is largely on teamfighting, securing kills, and sheer domination of their opponents. However, their style can suffer against more careful teams that are able absorb the impact without losing much.

Tempest was honestly one of the hardest teams to rank properly. In terms of overall results, they rank respectably but nowhere near as domineering as L5 or MVP Black. When compared to other “3rd place teams” in each region such as Team Liquid, Team expert, and Roll20, they have similar win rates, skill levels, and understanding of the game. However, it is their form that convinces us that Tempest deserves a higher rank. Despite the occasional bad day, Tempest’s top form is far superior to any of their rivals’.

Contenders



#6 Team expert #7 Roll20 #8 SPT #9 CE #10 Team Freedom #11 Tempo Storm

The mid-tier BlizzCon contenders have plenty of variety, from the offbeat compositions of Team expert to the ingenious positional play of Roll20 to the steady consistency of Tempo Storm. All of these teams are expected to do fairly well during the group stages and have the potential to make it deep in the bracket as well. To some degree, Team expert stands above the others in this tier purely because of their status as an EU team. They have had to battle it out with some of the best teams in the world. Despite the difficulty of the region, they slowly cemented their status in Europe’s “Top 3” after edging out Team Liquid. With some bracket luck, the team has the potential for a Top 4 finish at BlizzCon. On the other side of the pond are the North American teams: Roll20, Team Freedom, and Tempo Storm. Roll20 has had some trouble finding their identity over the course of 2017, but the core of Glaurung, Justing, and Buds has proven to be a solid combo. If they get a chance to draft their comfort heroes, even the best teams in the world will crumble (see: MVP Black vs Roll20 at the Mid-Season Brawl). Despite Roll20’s strength relative to the rest of NA, their group includes both Dignitas and Tempest, so they will have to pull out all the stops to survive until the bracket stage. Team Freedom and Tempo Storm have both built themselves up from nothing, and as time has gone on, they’ve become more and more stable and consistent in their results. However, both teams tend to struggle on the international stage, due to nerves or because they can’t adapt to their opponents (or both). In any case, it’ll be up to these two teams to shore up their weaknesses and show a strong performance this time around. In this group, we also have two of our three Chinese teams, SPT and CE. Once again, China will not be fully represented due to visa issues, which is a real shame. China as a region has such a rich metagame and tons of individually talented players, and it’s unfortunate that they have never been able to show off that skill to the rest of the world outside of the Gold Club World Championship. However, in terms of substitutions, SPT and CE are better off than other teams in the past have been. SPT has the heart and soul of the team, misaka, this time around. Although CE did lose a valuable player in Xuyu, they retain their flexible melee core through the rest of the team. We don’t expect either of these teams to make a deep run, but they’re certainly not to be underestimated.

Knockouts



#12 Soul Torturers #13 Dark Sided #14 BTG #15 Deadly Kittens #16 RED Canids

At the bottom of our rankings are five teams that are unlikely to make it out of the group stages, and unfortunately, almost all of them are from minor regions. As much as we love to cheer for our favorite players on these teams, it’s clear that the infrastructure of HGC has helped major regions pull even further ahead of their minor region competitors. When we originally did our power rankings, BTG was right up there with the other Chinese teams, but disastrous luck with visas has created a mish-mash of random players from other teams instead of the full BTG. They went from contenders to last place finishers within a span of minutes. We hope the guys playing for BTG have a good time in Anaheim, but we’re not expecting anything big out of them.