It was less the case before, now it is. KTZ already was a niche hero: he was difficult to draft properly because he can be hard countered easily. Now you need to add a new constraint before picking him.
If Medivh is good, I will still play but might lose the game. If Garrosh is picked I will certainly not pick KTZ… But all of this is fine because they are specific heroes part of the pool able to counter KTZ. The Trinket is not specific to few heroes.
I disagree. He wasn’t picked often, because he was niche as you said, but he is harder to play and need time to do dmg (quest completion) and not like your usual mages (Chromie, Ming, KT, etc.)
Most people tend to pick easier heroes, because it is harder to fail and easier to success for the win.
Lol you don’t pick ktz into garrosh with 0 mobility and weakness to burst? Why?
Don’t know if you are speaking of KTZ or Garrosh about the 0 mobility as well as a weakness to burst. 
I am not telling Garrosh is a hard counter but well play Garrosh just made my life quite hard as a KTZ. Mostly because of his cleanse. Also I need to be more or less in his range to land a combo, it is very dangerous with a good Garrosh who will punish me by a dead sentence if I make a mistake. And if he takes the talent which double his armor he doesn’t care about KTZ burst.
How? I thought armor counters autoattacks, not spells? And I don’t remember that Garrosh has Spellarmor, but rather a shield talent for hitting his Q.
…
Their is 3 types or armor:
Garrosh trait is tagged as an Armor which means he can mitigate both spells and physical armor.
He basically have 1 armor each 2% of health missing. So at 50% he get 25 of armor which will reduce ALL the damages to 25%.
If he takes the talent « double up » level 13 it will double his armor for 3 secs.
So at 50% health the dmg are reduced by 50%. At 30% by 70% etc…
So yes with KTZ, if he takes this talents and activate it at the right moment… he will just laugh while drinking a nice beer gently cooled by KTZ.
It doesn’t matter if he can be powerful, I think his design is bad.
He could be top tier SSS always picked in tournaments, or never seen and considered trash, that doesn’t matter.
Yeah, that’s what he is.
I’ve never seen a KTZ drop all of their spells on the location a missed chain would have pulled an enemy hero, including his heroic.
That’s never happend.
/sarcasm
All he has is a combo, so that’s pretty much all you see from him.
Either he kills 1-2 people, or he runs away.
That’s why he’s garbage.
No one ever said they wanted that.
Oh wait, you’re the one who said Raynor and Zul’Jin are the same.
Like literally the same.
Your opinion doesn’t matter.
Diamond/master SL: KTZ had 53.42% winrate in 2.51 patch (before medallion), 53.33% in 2.52 (after medallion). Yeah, the medallion bumped him down by a whopping 0.09% (that’s within margin of error of course = no observable change at all). What a tragedy. KTZ ruined by medallion for sure.
Not really a “high level play”, rather an ARAM match, but I played KTZ vs Uther and Auriel + randoms.
That was pure hell.
Out of about 25 successful combos I made that match, 23 were cleansed by either Cleanse, Medallion, Divine shield or Aegis. Never felt so helpless in a match.
The problem with medallion is that its very good vs roots and predictable CC and sucks bad vs instant and stacked CC.
Mhhh… what a shame, i totally forget you but look likes you like to hold grudges, friend. It is popcorn time !
Last time you told me you will stop talking about that as i was a noob bronze player (platinum is not exactly bronze though) etc …etc… but apparently you are not able to follow your own worlds.
So to close this topic I never told that they were « literally » the same. I told you that, as per me, they have similars mechanics of gameplay which are AA based with more or less the same range and the same damages. With a gameplay far more similar than Sgt.hammer…
So previously you fought Sgt.hammer was a hero with a bad design who needs to be remove from the game. Now you are telling KTZ have a bad design who also need to be remove from the game.
For example Jaina and KT mechanics are far similar than KTZ mechanics. I don’t want all the heroes with unique mechanics to be remove from the game.
Anyway as you like to mentioned, in some of your past interventions, the owner of the post should be a bronze noob who can only be wrong… ho wait … his rank is master and he has been the best KTZ player few seasons ago…
Let’s end this grudge, move on…
That is quite disingenuous, as it ignores the fact that he went from about a 13% popularity down to about 6.5%. In other words, a hero that was niche but had a semi-decent pick rate became less appealing than Illidan.
Yeah, the medallion didn’t hurt him at all…
Popularity doesn’t mean anything. This thread is just one of the pointers of why that drop happened - unfounded fear of the medallion. Although some ppl shouldn’t have touched ktz with or without medallion, so if medallion pushed them away from the hero - all the better for everyone.
Is medallion a factor? Sure. Is it a big deal? Nah.
The tower armor reduction anomaly had a much bigger impact on the game than the medallion (and that one was just plain annoying and not fun, while medallion actually brings something interesting, even if small).
Um, yeah. They never rework heroes because of their popularity, it always is solely due to their win rate in Diamond+.
/sarcasm
Winrate shows how heroes perform. Popularity (assuming winrate doesn’t indicate a problem) shows how ppl like the heroes and, to a lesser extent, how much drafts they fit.
Obviously if the hero didn’t win, it would also have a lower popularity too, as nobody likes weak heroes, by default (although fun factor can still overcome a lot of that).
OP said medallion made ktz bad - that’s just not true, as he clearly performs exactly as well. Ppl like him less, but he still performs just as fine.
Or, he was forced from being a niche hero into being one only picked by the rare KTZ mains in rare situations.
Genji has a far worse win rate, but is picked more frequently. Jaina has a terrible win rate compared to KTZ after this patch, but still has almost double the pick rate.
If popularity doesn’t matter, only win rate, I guess this means the medallion ruined her?
Medallion has not ruined or noticeably affected any hero. It’s a non-issue.
P.S. I don’t think it’s an anomaly that should stay forever, I’m for having different anomalies every season, not for stacking them until we have a million buttons and 100 things happening at once.
And how would you know? What metrics are you using, or is this just your opinion?
When they changed the towers as part of an earlier anomaly, I tried all of the tanks on the PTR to see if and how any of them were affected. Most felt OK, but but not great, especially those that relied on armor, such as Garrosh. Anub’arak, however, felt like he became absolutely useless in a team fight anywhere near an enemy structure, as hero damage from beetles would immediately draw tower shots, and between the armor shred and the fact that he is designed to be vulnerable to AA damage, which is how tower shots are classified, he would just vanish.
Sure enough, once the change went live, his win rate dropped by more than 6% in Diamond+, and his popularity, which was already low, plummeted with it.
While I agree that stats in a vacuum are meaningless, changes are important, but you have to look at all the changes to determine what impact something has had on various heroes. Just looking at one number and using that as a basis to claim that they are fine is, as I said, disingenuous at best.
Why should every hero be easy to play or be a generalist? Why can’t we have different type of heroes? For me it is totally fine to have niche, combo and high-risk, high reward heroes… not every hero should be generalist, who is good for every comp.
Where before beetles would tank the tower shots allowing the team to push forward. Anub’arak really got the short end of the stick with that one.
Popularity gives context to winrate.
Like if a Hero has 0.1% pop but 65% winrate… is that Hero op? Does he needs nerfs? Surely a winrate that high would indicate overperformance, but the given context from pop tells us that the Hero is prob only played when the stars seemingly aligned in draft and basically only by its masters. That shows a Hero that is weak outside of a few rare scenarios.
I admit that this example is heavily exaggerated for clarity, but the point is valid nontheless: popularity and winrate are both required to know how strong a Hero is, how well it performs.