Undocumented Zul'jin nerf?

General Discussion
1

So Zul’jin took a hit to his winrates a couple months back, and I wasn’t sure why. He hadn’t received any patches recently, but his ~52% winrate dropped to around 48% (4% is a pretty sizeable drop) and has remained there since. I guessed it may have just been a shift in the meta, but that’s all I could think of.

Well, I think I may have just figured out why that happened.

When I was doing some math for another thread, I noticed that the HotS wiki now states that Grievous Throw’s bonus damage stacks additively with other attack damage modifiers applied to Zul’jin.
Previously, Grievous Throw seemed to act much like a negative armor effect, causing the target to take 50% more damage from Zul’jin’s AAs even as Zul’jin’s AA damage remained the same. This meant that Zul’jin’s self-applied +25% damage from Berserker stacked multiplicatively with Grievous Throw’s +50% bonus damage, totaling an 87.5% damage bonus.
Apparently, Grievous Throw’s damage modifier is now considered “self-applied,” meaning it now works like a damage boost to Zul’jin himself rather than a “vulnerability” effect on the target. This despite the fact that the ability’s tooltip still reads, “Marked enemies take 50% more damage,” which would imply the effect is applied to enemies rather than Zul’jin.

This means they no longer stack multiplicatively, only additively, reducing the damage bonus from pairing them together from 87.5% to only 75%.

In the past I confirmed that Berserker and Grievous Throw stacked multiplicatively using Try-Mode, back before his winrate drop.
When I tested it out today, I confirmed that they no longer do.

Perhaps this was a “bug” the devs fixed at some point but didn’t include in the patchnotes?
Regardless, it’s quite annoying, because that removes most of the synergy between Berserker and Grievous Throw and undermines one of my best tips for playing Zul’jin, which is to always have Berserker on while attacking someone marked by Grievous Throw.

Fortunately, I’ve confirmed that YWA? still does stack multiplicatively with Berserker and Grievous Throw.

Tl;dr: Grievous Throw and Berserker’s active effect used to stack multiplicatively with each other, and now they don’t. I’m a little annoyed by that, and suspect that may be the culprit for his ~4% winrate drop a while back.

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2

Most bug fixes are not put into patch notes, so this seems the most likely.
If this was a bug fix, it means it was meant to always function as it now does.

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I’m aware.

I definitely don’t think it should, though.

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I mean, I personally think they should just get rid of multiplicative stuff altogether.

So, yeah. :man_shrugging:

Just if you “bug fix” in a way that changes power noticeably, it probably should come with a small offset buff at least.

I also really doubt that is why his WR dropped 4%. Most of that is likely Variance in replays uploaded.

5

That change was 2 years ago and heroeprofile doesn’t go that far.

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Zul’jin’s winrate drop was much more recent that that, definitely within the past year, and I confirmed back in early-mid 2020 that it did scale multiplicatively.

You can’t really do that.

For example, the way armor, both negative and positive, functions would prevent that without a complete overhaul to how armor works.

Otherwise, all bonus damage would ignore armor, and only the initial flat value would be increased or reduced.

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7

A conditional ~7% DPS drop isn’t going to drop any hero 4% win rate, over any reasonable sample size.

In real games, I would guess that it is overall a net <1% less damage.

I forgot about armor. But everything else, make of additive only. Balance around that.

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8

It might not seem like it, but you should also note that Zul’jin’s Q build actually went from statistically being his best build to his worst at the same time as his winrate dropped. His other builds only dropped a little bit.

This is because it removed the multiplicative scaling from Vicious Assault as well, which scaled even more with Berserker.
Baseline Grievous Throw is +50%, which stacked with Berserker to total +87.5%.
Vicious Assault increased the damage bonus to +85%, which stacked with Berserker to total +131.25%.
Suddenly, that +12.5% damage lost becomes +21.25%.

Combine that with Boneslicer removing the 3-AA cap and Vicious Assault increasing the GA’s duration to match its cooldown, and that build lost over 10% of its standard DPS.
Considering that Zul’jin is a high-risk/high-reward hero, taking even a bit of that reward away can have significant impacts on his performance.

That cuts out a LOT of synergy from the game, something I think we need more of rather than less.

Also, attack speed, level stats, healing reduction and amplification, etc, all stack multiplicatively with each other and other stats. Multiplicative scaling is everywhere.

3 Likes
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okay, let me spell it out:
All the stuff that is actually actively a black box, talents and interaction between heroes with spell power boosts and such, SHOULD BE ADDATIVE.

I thought it was pretty obvious what I meant.
You’re either trolling (haha Zul’jin and trolling, haha, ha. ha?), are not nearly as smart as I believed you are, or are deliberately being obtuse/acting in bad faith. Or some option D which is like, you’re not even thinking about what is being written, or something like that.

And yes, deliberately being obtuse here isn’t necessarily trolling. Although it can be trolling.

Again, if you think that a 7% conditional damage nerf overall dropped his winrate by 4%, you’re crazy.

Let’s use numbers that are meaningful and not abstracted.
he lost ~6.66% of his damage output in the original scenario you talked about, and is losing about 9.8% in that second scenario.

These are not the most common scenarios, and for most people playing ZJ, they likely aren’t pulling these things off perfectly and the actual damage lost over the course of many games is likely half of that, or lower.

There is going to be a sub-set of ZJ players who actually actively made sure to combo these all together who will have their winrate negatively impacted a noticeable amount. But that isn’t going to be large enough for what is his most niche build to globally impact it 4%.

A “Q build” (which looks to have about 12% popularity right now) would have to have lost ~33% of it’s winrate, in order to cause as global 4% drop in DPS. Call it 17%, generously, if we assume outside of that build, these changes nerfed ZJ’s overall winrate by 2%.

That 33/17% is Absolute winate if it is not clear. So a 17% shift would be like from 60% WR to 43% WR.

Which would mean that either it’s winrate would have had to be absurdly high previously, which would cause people to pick it, or would be absurdly low now, and it wouldn’t be viable. IF neither of these statements are true, than the change you suggest is not what has drastically altered his winrate.

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Didn’t Cassia get reworked around that time?

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I think you misunderstand how Grievous Throw used to work, or at least what I’m saying about it.

Self- and ally-applied effects either don’t stack (i.e. armor) or only stack additively (i.e. spell power), and I’m perfectly fine with that. Stacking armor was one of the biggest widespread balance problems this game ever faced.

But Grievous Throw wasn’t a self- or ally-applied effect.
Grievous Throw caused the target to take more damage. It was similar to how negative armor works, in that it was applied to the target, not to the caster or an ally.

The tooltip still says as much. Since these kinds of effects always stack multiplicatively with self-applied effects, to my knowledge, then either the tooltip needs to be changed to reflect that it is now a self-applied damage bonus, rather than a target-applied bonus, or this should be reverted.

I would prefer the latter, simply because that had good synergy and added a bit more depth to playing Zul’jin.

Smaller nerfs have caused larger changes in winrate before, especially in conjunction with meta-shifts. I don’t see why it’d be so hard to believe that this would be one of those situations.

I was assuming the intellectual level of the reader would have grasped that “+12.5 bonus damage” was not actually 12.5% of his total damage. Not trying to misrepresent, just assuming you’d already understand that.

I did, in fact, mention that his actual DPS drop was closer to 10% here.

I am aware that the hit to his Q build alone would not account for his overall winrate drop, and I didn’t mean to imply that.

My point was that the timing of the larger hit to his Q build corresponds to the drop in his overall winrate. So whatever hit him overall hit specifically his Q build harder, which would indicate a change was made to Grievous Throw.

This is a good point.

I checked, and it seems that Zul’jin’s winrate had dropped from ~52-50% just before her rework, but then dropped further to 48% after she got buffed.

This is probably the meta-shift that accompanied the change to Grievous Throw to depress his winrate a bit further.

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12

Heroes may drop winrate or even increase in winrate without any changes to them, but just based on other heroes changes.

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I know, and that’s what I assumed happened here until I noticed this interaction was changed. Now I suspect that this change played a role (I’m not certain, but it seems unlikely it wouldn’t have).

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If a hero takes a 4% winrate drop from a single talent nerf I think it’s deserved :sunglasses:

15

Okay, but neither Grievous Throw nor Berserker are talents?

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Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t, I can’t really tell. But from 52 to 48% isn’t that bad. Most heroes should fluctuate between these percentages.

Btw, in diamond/masters SL he still has 50.99% winrate.

Just gotta see if this change really happened.

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It’s not mentioned in any patchnotes, but back in early 2020 (February or March, I believe) I was posting in a thread about Zul’jin and went into Try Mode to test it out. I confirmed that Grievous Throw did stack multiplicatively with Berserker, for a bonus of 87.5%.

Then, yesterday, I noticed that the HotS wiki had added a detail to Grievous Throw that says it stacks additively with other effects modifying Zul’jin’s Basic Attack damage.
Since that language implies that it stacks additively with Berserker and YWA?, I checked it in Try Mode, and yup, it now stacks additively with Berserker, for a total bonus of 75%. It still stacks multiplicatively with YWA?, thankfully, but that’s another inconsistency.

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18

i remember reading in an ama on reddit, mind think this was years ago. it was asked y some things were additives and other mutli(skills and such). the dev said they wanted everything to be additive. maybe it was they just slowly working on it? btw i have no idea where it was or how long ago it was. it just poped in my head as i was reading this thread.

3 Likes
19

Its a sign zuljin is a lesser jimmy

20

More likely was due to the addition of Mia who is anti-auto attack due to her ready access to blind.

I also assume that ARAM stats are being ignored since Zuljin has always had a very high win rate in ARAM since his auto attack damage was made to scale infinitely.