Hello, Heirs.

This is Epic Seven.

In continuation of the previous Conviction Season’s infographic announcement, we would like to present to you the Resolution Season’s infographics and an update on the direction of World Arena adjustments.

The data that we used for today’s infographic comes from the Resolution and Conviction Seasons.

With the latest changes to the pre-ban rules, which allowed players to pre-ban 2 Heroes when both players were in at least Champion League or above, we have expanded the information analysis to battles to include those of the Champion League and above and have adjusted our calculations accordingly. In comparison to the previous Conviction Season’s infographic that covered analyses from a fixed, and relatively restricted, pool of players from Legend and Emperor only, we felt that expanding the scale of where we source our information to a larger player pool would provide a more accurate insight into the actual current meta.

However, due to the expansion of the scale of where we source our information, please be aware that there will be some discrepancies between the numbers seen here for the Conviction Season and those seen in the previous infographic. As we work to improve the clarity and precision of the data analysis process, please accept our sincerest apologies for any frustrations this may cause.

1) Hero Pick Rate

For starters, here are the Hero Pick Rates for the Resolution Season of World Arena.

1. Pre-Ban

The pre-ban rate of the listed Heroes refers to the percentage of matches in which the Hero was pre-banned among all matches. For example, if a Hero’s pre-ban rate is 50%, it means the Hero had been pre-banned for half of all the matches counted.

Due to the change in the pre-ban system that allows for 2 pre-bans for battles when both players are either Champion or above, the pre-ban rate of each Hero has experienced a general increase. Last season, there were 10 Heroes that had a pre-ban rate of higher than 3%. This season, however, that number of Heroes has increased to 16, and the pre-ban rates of certain Heroes that were already at the top of the list like Conqueror Lilias, Rimuru, and Ran have ascended even further. Heroes like Peira and Hwayoung also showed a drastic increase in their pre-ban rates due to their release being closer to the end of the season.

Angel of Light Angelica, who had the 2^nd highest pre-ban rate for the previous season, experienced a decrease in these values. This decrease was most likely fueled by both Designer Lilibet’s balance adjustment near the end of the season and Mediator Kawerik’s April Drop Rate Up, allowing more Heroes to be drafted to counter Angel of Light Angelica.

By separating the Resolution Season into early/mid/late stages, we can see the pre-ban rate of Conqueror Lilias gradually decreasing while that of Hwayoung’s gradually increasing.

As a Fire Element single-target Hero who inflict significant damage proportional to their difference in Health, as well as being effective against Heroes that depend on their high evasion when she is equipped with the right Artifact, Hwayoung is undeniably a unit that is difficult to deal with. Also, the combination of her passive that increases her Attack and the bonus granted by Battle Frenzy synergizes with Hwayoung much more optimally than other Heroes. Therefore, the effect of Battle Frenzy will be adjusted to refrain from giving too much of such bonuses to similar units. Please refer to the “Future Improvement Details and Schedules” below for more details.

                2. First Pick

“First Pick” here refers to the Hero selected by the player assigned the First Pick role, which means that there is only one Hero evaluated per match. For example, a Hero that has a 30% weighted distribution in the image below means 30% of players with the First Pick role have drafted the Hero in their first slot.

Like the previous season, Apocalypse Ravi and Conqueror Lilias have the highest First Pick rate, mainly due to their overall versatility in most team compositions. Also, even though she was released at the end stage of the previous season, Peira became one of the most first-picked Heroes due to her high base speed, along with her ability to control the enemy while protecting her allies simultaneously. 

Mediator Kawerik was ranked 5^th due to his versatility in various situations, except when fighting against Speed contesting team compositions.

The aggregated percentage of the Top 10 Heroes was 95% for the previous Conviction Season but showed a minor reduction to 92.5% for the Resolution Season. However, if narrowed down to the Top 3 Heroes, it showed a relatively large decrease from 65.9% to 52.6%. The change in the number of available pre-bans seems to have caused a relatively positive change when it comes to the dominating presence of a select few Heroes for First-Pick.

 Conqueror Lilias consistently held the 1^st place first-pick rate during the entire season while Peira’s first-pick rate dropped more and more towards the end of the season.

The main reason for Peira’s gradual decrease was most likely caused by Diene. Diene’s balance patch and the introduction of her exclusive equipment, along with Battle Frenzy’s Soul Weaver speed increase buff and the utility she brought to the team with her teamwide Combat Readiness increase and debuff-cleansing abilities, allowed her to become a competitive replacement for Peira

In addition, as Diene and Angel of Light Angelica became a popular duo, it became even more difficult to first-pick units like Peira. Desert Jewel Basar’s balance adjustment that introduced Barrier Inversion further influenced the decline of Heroes that could grant or were granted barriers.

Apocalypse Ravi first showed a declining pick rate when Hwayoung was first introduced to the game, but gradually recovered her position closer to the end of the season, ending up with a first-pick rate like that of the previous season.

             3. Pick

“Pick” refers to the Heroes selected by the two players for a match and includes their First Picks. If the pick rate is 50%, it means the Hero has been drafted by either player for half of all the matches.

The overall percentages of the Top 5 Heroes have decreased compared to those of the previous season, whereas those in the Top 6~10 have increased.

Apocalypse Ravi remains the most picked Hero for two seasons straight. Although Hwayoung was first introduced to mitigate Apocalypse Ravi’s dominating presence, both her high pre-ban rate and the availability of damage-sharing effects severely restricted her from playing her role. Also, Apocalypse Ravi constantly benefits from being a highly adaptable unit that can be used in various team compositions including cleave, tank, etc, which allowed her to retain her high pick rate.

The pick rate of Earth Elemental Heroes like Rimuru and Violet had decreased overall. We’ve concluded that this is mainly due to the increase in units that are of their disadvantageous element, like Hwayoung, in combination with the Battle Frenzy effect that decreases damage suffered by Heroes with an elemental advantage by 30%.

Units like Diene and Emilia saw a significant spike in their pick rates in comparison to the previous season due to the speed increase effect that Battle Frenzy applied to Soul Weavers in World Arena. While the implementation of the speed increase is currently considered a positive change, since it now allows for Soul Weavers to be considered more often for drafts, we do see a problem where Soul Weavers that can affect a team’s Combat Readiness are much more oppressive relative to those that are brought on more for their defensive utility. We saw this as an issue and tried to come up with a plan that addressed this.

In response, we readjusted the values of Soul Weavers’ constellations so that other less used Heroes would have a chance to shine. The goal of this adjustment was to even out the balance of less used Heroes by granting their constellations larger value increases than those of more commonly used ones. However, to avoid too abrupt of a change or potential side-effects from happening, this change will be implemented alongside the adjustment of Soul-Weavers’ Battle Frenzy. Please refer to the “Future Improvement Details and Schedules” below for more details.

Angel of Light Angelica’s pick rate had gradually increased from early game to late game and Diene’s pick rate also showed a drastic increase after the introduction of her exclusive equipment. As the duo of Diene and Angel of Light Angelica became popular, the pick rate of Landy and Celine also rose as an effective counter against them.

The pick rate of Fallen Cecilia went down as the season went on. In contrast, pick rates of Knight Heroes such as Troublemaker Crozet, Adventurer Ras, Shadow Knight Pyllis, and Armin rose more than 16% in total. While Fallen Cecilia is a versatile Hero who can increase the team’s overall survivability, when it comes to fighting against Speed-centric teams or protecting a specific unit, players opted to draft Heroes with more specialized roles and skills, reducing her weighted distribution in pick rate.

We would also like to bring to light some of the other Heroes that have seen an increase in their pick rates. Most of these Heroes were either released near the end of the season or had balance adjustments.

Lionheart Cermia, who performs exceptionally well under the correct conditions, recorded a stable pick rate of 20% or higher. On the other hand, after receiving her balance adjustments, Designer Lilibet initially played a significant role when countering units like Summertime Iseria and Peira who were reliant on debuffs. However, as the season progressed, these units became less popular and simultaneously caused a decrease in Designer Lilibet’s pick rate. Solitaria of the Snow also saw an increase in her pick rate, not only because she was an effective counter to Focus-based units, but also because of her high survivability rate with her stealth mechanic in fights where single target units like Hwayoung were a threat.

Additionally, Heroes like Kawerik, Kise, and Aria were often drafted to contest Hwayoung. With their high base Speed, Kawerik and Kise were used to increase the cooldown of Hwayoung’s S3, while Aria was used as a unit to defend against Hwayoung’s powerful skills with her elemental advantage and ability to hide her teammates behind her teamwide stealth. Some of the more common picks for Speed-based teams were Watcher Schuri and Eda.

          4. Resolution Season – Overall Analysis

This Resolution Season was the first official season where two new Battle Frenzy mechanics and the double pre-ban system were implemented. The Epic Seven team worked around the clock as we tried to thoroughly mitigate any abrupt changes that these newly introduced systems could have caused and put a lot of thought into how we could reimplement some of the less used Heroes back into the meta.

As a result, we believe that it is safe to say that the new pre-ban system has been effective in contesting powerful Heroes, and while the new Battle Frenzy mechanics do need some adjustments, it effectively played a positive role in influencing a change in the meta. Also, we hope that our Heirs are content with the recent Soul Weaver constellation adjustments and look forward to seeing more diverse team compositions that utilize the less used Soul Weavers.

To create a more enjoyable World Arena for all our Heirs, we have been paying a lot more attention to both our Heirs’ opinions and suggestions, and the raw data and numbers. Although the progress may be slow, we are making sure that things are steadily improving and promise to listen and appropriate to our Heirs’ opinions. We sincerely thank our Heirs for all the passion and love expressed for the game this season.

2) Season Close

With the Hero usage analysis coming to an end, we will now announce an afterword on the Resolution Season.

          1. Legend League

The Global server had the highest number of Heirs that finished in Legend League this season, followed by Asia, and then Korea. And although it was their first official season competing with all other servers, an Heir from the Japan server also made it into the records. Last season, the lowest win rate was recorded at 46%, but this season, Heirs had to have had a win rate of higher than 50% to retain their Legend rank.

During the previous infographic announcement, we promised to make changes for the Legend/Emperor League cut-off thresholds as they were too high and opted to readjust how the points were distributed with the beginning of Resolution Season. As a result, the cutline thresholds have returned to how it was during the Ambition Season.

           2. Emperor League

Similar to the Legend League, the Global server had the largest number of players for the Emperor League, followed by Asia and Korea. While the cut-off threshold for the Emperor League was 3,544, which was a 676-point decrease compared to that of the Conviction Season, both the number of average matches played and the average win rate had increased.

           3. League-specific Data

Apart from the Legend League, all Leagues in Master or higher have recorded higher average match counts compared to the Conviction Season. In contrast, the average match counter and the average win rate of the Bronze and Silver Leagues have greatly decreased. We believe that this is because of the “Daily World Arena” event that was held at the beginning of the season, increasing the number of overall players participating in World Arena.

3) Future Improvement Details and Schedules

                     1. Review of the new mechanics added for the Resolution Season

In addition to the Hero balance adjustments, we introduced two new Battle Frenzy effects to maintain a healthier meta balance for this Resolution Season.

While we had been aware of our Heirs’ suggestions and worries regarding the lack of Soul Weaver viability in World Arena, we found it difficult to implement any immediate changes since these actions could have negatively affected multiple aspects of the game; due to the lack of substantial data, we were hesitant to make any changes without properly investigating the aftereffects of said changes. With this in mind, we implemented the “Additional Speed for Soul Weavers” mechanic for World Arena to get a better understanding of how Soul Weavers could be optimized. From this, we were able to confirm any previous worries and introduced the result of our data analysis with the Soul Weavers’ constellation adjustments. However, we do acknowledge that in our effort to come to this conclusion, we used a system that ended up putting in a lot of favor towards several units within a class and restricted team composition variability. Going forward, we will try to find improved methods that will avoid granting excessive benefits or penalties to a specific class.

                   2. Mechanics planned for the next season

The next season’s Battle Frenzy will include the “decrease 30% of damage received from Covenant Heroes with elemental disadvantage” and “increase Speed of Soul Weavers by a maximum of 7” effects. 

Aside from the newly added effects, we have seen that the original Battle Frenzy effects can be overly favorable to certain class Heroes or Heroes with certain skills. To attend to this issue, we have decided to adjust some of the numeric values for the accumulative increased Attack and decreased Health effects. We have relieved the penalties that Health-based Heroes receive in comparison to Attack-based bruisers and will introduce a “decreased barrier” effect to Battle Frenzy so that units that grant a barrier will not dominate battles in terms of survivability the longer the fights go on.

We have put more focus on adjusting the existing Battle Frenzy effects instead of implementing new ones to avoid influencing the meta, especially with the ongoing E7WC. This is also the case for Equipment Set adjustments; while we have prepared the new set that was mentioned in our last Developer’s Note with plans to release it during the 2^nd quarter, we have decided to postpone it to keep it from influencing the meta. We apologize for not thinking ahead on this matter and for not being able to deliver what was promised within the allotted time.

Furthermore, starting with the next season, the point decay penalty for not playing World Arena will take effect after 7 days instead of the current 3 for those in Gold League. This is to alleviate some of the stress for Heirs who are yet accustomed to playing World Arena. We hope this makes it easier for more players to enjoy the content.

3. Plans for after E7WC

Our current goal for World Arena is to introduce entirely new metas for each new official season so that our Heirs can enjoy more variety and opportunities. For this to work, we will constantly be reviewing and keeping track of the World Arena meta, so that various Heroes and team compositions can have a chance at becoming the highlight of a season, instead of having the same unit or team dominate the meta over and over. With this in mind, we will work on optimizing the new Battle Frenzy effects and the Equipment Set so that they are introduced in an appropriate manner once the tournament ends.

Thank you.