It’s been almost a week since the Ragnaros patch hit NA. There’s plenty to talk about, from Ragnaros dominating Quick Match, to the resurgence in tanks, to some of the challenges that were caused by restructuring the ranked modes. Without further ado, let’s get to it!

Is Ragnaros OP?

The answer is an unequivocal yes. However, it’s not certain if his basic abilities themselves are broken. Aside from Lava Wave, his abilities and talents all seem fairly balanced on the surface. The numbers are far too high and make him a monster at all points in the game right now, but that can easily be fixed with tuning.

Lava Wave, however, is definitely a problem. The implementation was a cool idea from Blizzard, but it often single-handedly wins teamfights or prevents a team from properly pushing or defending. There’s a lot of balance-related complaints and counter-complaints going around in community discussion, but it’s undeniable that Lava Wave prevents counterplay in many circumstances.

Previously, sieging a keep was a viable strategy, but it’s utterly impossible if Ragnaros has either Lava Wave or his trait up; staying too long or pushing in too hard can result in an instant team wipe. Lava Wave near the Core gives a team zero response time, so it’s often too risky to commit to a Core rush.

In addition to preventing sieges, Lava Wave also instantly clears all minion waves in a lane, preventing any sort of split push from ever working. Some Ragnaros players can just clear waves with Lava Surge and win with their own split push pressure. Having a global presence might be justified by a poor team fighting, but Ragnaros shines there too. The level 20 talent Lava Surge makes the problem even worse by effectively reducing the cooldown to 50 seconds.

His trait is fairly balanced so far. Because of its long cooldown, Molten Core forces players to make interesting choices on when and how to use it. Being able to siege some objectives like those on Cursed Hollow or Infernal Shrines also makes his trait useful for offense and creates an interesting dynamic that we’ve never seen before.

Double tank meta is back in vogue

In the latest patch, some of the weaker tanks got huge boosts. In particular, Dehaka and Diablo came out way ahead of the pack after their reworks. Right now they are the tankiest, highest damage dealing tanks  in the game. For reference, Diablo has around 8000 health with a nearly permanent 25% damage reduction and almost 400 DPS at level 20.

In any case, their rise to prominence has put double-tank compositions back on the map. Along with Muradin, ETC, and Johanna, a host of off-tanks as well as tank killers such as Leoric and Tychus have burst back into the meta.

Meanwhile, despite receiving huge buffs in the previous patch, melee assassins have fallen off quite a bit due to the increased amounts of crowd control and tankiness. Zeratul, Tracer, and Kerrigan have also dropped in priority quite a lot. Tankier ranged DPS characters like Raynor and Nazeebo are also taking the place of glass cannon Heroes from the previous patch and limiting the power of melee assassins even more.

Team League changes cause new problems

As noted in our patch preview, Hero League and Team League underwent some changes. It’s important to note that this is an experiment, not necessarily a solution to properly balancing matchmaking. As such, the changes have both positive and negative aspects.

First of all, solo queue only in Hero League is a 100% improvement. While there are some reservations about a soft MMR reset influencing early GM rankings, matchmaking overall is a lot more balanced now. Previously, it was nearly impossible to rank up in solo queue, and duo queues often had the advantage against solo players queuing up for a game. All of that is gone now, and rank has become much more representative of individual skill.

On the flip side, however, Team League has become largely unbalanced. Five stack teams with comms will always have an advantage over mixed groups of 3’s and 2’s. This imbalance makes matchmaking more difficult and particularly one-sided at the highest levels of play.

Nonetheless, the Team League changes have encouraged more players to get small groups together and queue up for a ranked game. For a game that’s built on teamwork, this is a huge development.

A dynamic queue plus a separate five-man only Team League would be ideal, but it’s unlikely that Blizzard can afford to split the player base even more and potentially raise queue times across the board.