I FEEL this in my bones, but I think it’s only been really bad this season.
I don’t think reverting gladiator fixes the problem either. I think the only real solution is speed up the game like in S1/S2 and the first half of S3.
I know that no one likes feeling like they died in a global, but there are different knobs to turn where every game shouldn’t be going into 5+ minute dampeners.
When the game is faster and everyone can punish a mistake or play to a win condition and win, EVERY spec is strong and viable. When we have damp metas like this, the best class becomes the ones that are the tankiest and can slow down the game as much as possible.
I played almost 150 games in the last 2 weeks of the season helping friends get titles and achievements and ~95% of those games were against splay or assa+aff with only a couple melee cleaves, one boomy+assa, and one sp+assa.
The game needs to play faster, or passive tankiness needs to go away from more specs.