Yet people constantly insta select him. People with hundreds or thousands of matches who should know better.
And stop telling me, that you won matches with a Butcher. Everyone did. But the statistics show a different picture. It is one of the worst ARAM heroes. Same with Illidan or Tracer. A Burcher can be shut down easily by so many heroes. People who pick them just troll their team and don’t care about teamplay at all. It is always the same kind of players. People who pick Butcher are the same that pick Illidan.
Over the years, I have been blessed to get the option of Zeratul 20 times in ARAM, and Illidan 19 times. I insta pick them. Not because I think they’ll be good, but because they are my favorite heroes. Since the option is so rare, I won’t skip taking it. I have a 40% win rate with Zeratul and a 68.4% win rate with Illidan. From that, I argue that Illidan is less easily shutdown than Zeratul in ARAM.
I played the Butcher exactly once in ARAM (Heh, and never in any other mode). I hung back most of the match until I got the 200 meat. We won easily. It goes without saying the talents I picked were basically random and to this day, all I know about the Butcher is that you need to not die until you get the meat, but also a couple deaths are not the end of your progress. You are correct that we all have won with the Butcher, but I have never lost with him. 
But yeah, I only picked him because he was the best of the bad options I was given.
Maybe people really like playing the Butcher. Is winning the only way to have fun in ARAM?
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Listen i’m not a butcher glazer, but if you’re not winning with butcher honestly a lot of the time its probably because you aren’t supporting him or giving him proper engages. Butcher has no escape options he’s an all in character. Because he’s an all in character you either need to give him cover fire to discourage them from pouncing on him or you actually need to physically move up with him. A lot of the time people will just let butcher die because he’s out of position, but won’t actually do anything to make sure he gets the meat and liability. I a tank main never struggle with this because if butcher dives in recklessly I will make sure that I get him out and most of the time they generally know when its time to retreat, sometimes they don’t. The big issue of having butcher on your time honestly boils down to your ego. If he’s on your team he probably is going to have to be the team carry and people don’t like that. If you want to start winning with butcher do whatever you can to start prioritizing his stacks. Also don’t forget to remind butcher players that you can cancel his e mid charge because a lot of them don’t know that. When I play butcher rarely I do usually win, but thats also because I forgo his good talents to prioritize not dying so that when I do finally get my stacks I can actually pop off like I’m supposed to. Another big issue is that lamb can be a trap talent. It is the better of the two ults, but not in every situation. Using furnace blast can be really strong, but you gotta know when to draft it
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it’s like driving with bikers on the road, you must adapt, because they’re going to cause problems….it’s all that most of them know
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I share your point of view about Butcher, yet i don’t play Aram so i don’t know how is the situation with him.
I think most players know you can cancel the charge but the problem is often that you are taking talents related to the charge, especially 4 and 7 and cancelling it ruins those 2 bonus, so many butchers are tempted to reach the target to avoid that, which can be dangerous.
Blast furnace can be interresting according to the MM but in my opinion you have to associate it with the right Q spell at level 4 in order to increase the burst. It’s CD is also far shorter than Lamb. In some situations it can help butcher to stack earlier.
Nevertheless i don’t know how it would react in Aram where there is only 1 wave and 5 people always there, i often pick Blast furnace with talents done to clear waves in no time (heal at 7 and cleave at 13), so i don’t think it would be nice in Aram.
note: Blast furnace level 20 is terribly bad, i don’t see any situation where it shines, in my opinion it’s just taken to purely troll =)
Blast furnace level 20 can be useful, but its in a damage peel sense. Its not neccessarily about dealing the extra damage so much as preventing them from wanting to collapse on him right after he uses it. And the reason I mentioned that tip about the canceling E is specifically because the way you have to run butcher is as the decoy. They by nature want to kill him specifically and your team needs to use that to your advantage or he won’t get fed until like lv 16. By 16 in most cases the game is already decided which is why butcher feels so weak. This is furthered by the fact most of them get desperate for stacks so they result in feeding. Which only further hammers the point I was making about Canceling E. Knowing how to do it is a requirement to properly utilize him. If you get really good you can do things like run just close enough to q and slow and then immediately back which gives your tank the engage
Butcher in ARAM is a stomp in either direction. If his enemies die a lot he ends up OP fast and can literally carry. If he fails to build meat he is a very weak assassin pick that might be considered one of the lowest tiers.
In that case you pick TP to get out of that position. And if you really want extra damage Nexus blade is better because it gives you extra AA damage but also reinforce your own Q spell (if you have picked Cheap shot at lvl 4) so you can double your Q spell damage after each AA by yourself, so that means you are sure to do more damage on the foe you are targeting. Those 2 other choices are far better in any way.
I think the lvl 20 Blast Furnace should be buff :
- Either make it able to detonate if butcher dies before exploding (on the 1st or 2nd explosion).
- Or either simply change how it works, like remove the 2nd explosion,but increase it’s aoe size.
And talking about buffing him, if i had the choice, i would also ensure that lvl 16 Blood Frenzy get benefit from lvl 13 Cleaver which is actually not the case (it is the only way i would even consider to pick Blood Frenzy one day lol)
It’s the only 2 small changes i would do on that character.
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if ur losing 9 out of 10 times with different teams it isnt your teammate’s fault, its yours. stop tilting at hero select & learn how to play with a butcher on ur team.
its like a healer screaming at you for being low health, or a tank screaming at u for being CC’d. its your job to feed a butcher, if you can’t do that then that’s a failing of you bc that butcher player probably wouldn’t be scream-crying about it on the HOTS forums if u went Morales and needed him to do dmg for you
TP is great, but it only works so long as you can actually land it. Even if there is an opening to use it to leave there’s no guarentee you don’t get rooted or CCed in some way as soon as you dive in. The second explosion goes off regardless of that so it more effectively peels. Also because TP doesn’t contribute any additional damage to their team if butcher for some reason isn’t stacked by 20 which happens enough to be a problem then TP won’t natter anyways into a high CC comp because you won’t have the damage to kill them. TP is generally better, but not into super high CC comps
Having a chance to win is definitely mandatory (for all game modes) to have a chance at fun. I’ll define chance as "the ability to win without the enemy team having to be …‘minimally exceptional’.
Butcher can do some things to make the game less terrible…beginning with not feeding. But Aram is still a sad place to play butcher.
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We are all not strangers to the fact that other players don’t always pick/think/agree with/do what we would in their situation. We’ve all played matches where that chance at winning was not really ever present. Often times in ARAM it’s a ‘rock paper scissors’ outcome in that we can’t know what they’re going to choose and we pick the losing combination. But also, maybe just as often as that, we just simply get out-played. On paper, that chance to win was there, but the skill gap means that in reality it was never there. People complain about both of those “we had no chance of winning” scenarios on these forums.
The lack of literal magic in this game means that such matches are inevitable. With them as a direct potential consequence of playing ARAM, can you choose to have fun when they happen?
Just like the 0/10 player when told to stop feeding… it might be beyond my skills. Although I’ve tried some things that were pretty fun for me, like watching them feed, my teammates weren’t too happy …
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