Hello, VainGlorians! I'm starting a new series on How to Draft for a Ranked 5v5 match. This will be broken down into several posts because drafting involves a lot of things that can't all be stuffed together in one super long and wordy post. You'd hate to read that and I'd hate to write that. Today, we'll be looking at how to ban efficiently. Yes, the banning phase is actually important. You don't wanna be that guy who bans Skaarf so he can play Saw (please, don't be that person, ever). You'll just trigger your teammates to throw, especially in solo queue and ya'll will be wasting each others' time and end up running to Reddit or Twitter to salt about it. Not that that ever happened. But you've had similar experiences I'm sure. And not that that's a bad thing, but really, just spare yourself from the tilt!
Anyway, enough of that. Let's jump right into it and start getting overloaded with information. Special thanks to Vyzeox for lending us his brains and for, basically, every major tip you will find below. He does nerdy stuff for Tribe Gaming and vgpro.gg. Go check out his Twitter page for more!
Click here to jump to your end Solo Q.
There is a widely agreed list of heroes to ban depending on Tier. If you've been ranking for awhile, you'd have noticed the same heroes being insta-banned. If not, vgpro.gg is a good source, as you can see below (sorted by highest ban rate). VGPRO stats are taken from T9 matches and up. For lower tiers, you'll probably see Flicker banned more because solo queue coordination against him is not easy (A roam that buys vision is one thing, a roam that utilises vision properly is another).
This is an important phase because you have to know how many heroes are considered OP (or broken) so you can get nerdy and calculate how many and which heroes to leave open for pick.
To help you understand this better, I did a quick vid of how to ban if you are A team. Let's assume that there are 7 OP heroes. If you are team A, you can get up to 3 OP heroes for your team and 2 for the enemy (if both of your bans are non-OP heroes, and if the enemy bans 2 OP heroes). In the vid below, I banned Kinetic and Flicker (neither is considered OP by VGPRO, although, aren't they really?) leaving B team to ban Anka and Churnwalker because enemy would be really dumb to leave either Anka or Churnwalker open (at least in solo queue).
However, if B team is smart, after your first non-OP hero ban, they will ban another non-OP hero so you are forced to change your strategy. It's like playing chess. And it's much easier to understand if you try it on your own so head over to draft.brokenmyth.net to test out different ways to ban where your team ends up with the advantage.
Is your nose bleeding yet? Hopefully not. It's quite easy when you can wrap your mind around it. And it works regardless of the meta. Just change the number of OP heroes and adjust your calculation accordingly. Again, this works best for teams or full man parties, because you can pre-plan what comp you want before starting queue. Solo queue is another story.
Solo Q is its own world (filled with goodies and crazies alike) and the above methods might not work well enough. So, here's a separate list of tips for you all, my lovely solo Q folks.
…for any requests before you ban any hero. Some, if not a lot of, players will thank you for it. The worst thing that can happen is they will ignore you, which is fine. At least, you tried.
You want the enemy to waste their ban on the OP heroes.
You don't want the enemy to get annoying utility heroes that counter a lot of carries.
Your first ban would also be a non-OP utility hero (such as Lorelai, Flicker, Catherine) for the same reasons above and you want to leave more OP heroes open for the picking, especially since team A gets to pick first.
The most OP (to the point of being broken such as Anka) hero doesn't go to the enemy. If you can't have Anka, neither should the enemy.
Glad you made it this far. I hope you learned something new today and as always, drop me a comment below or DM me on Twitter if you wanna say hi or have suggestions! GLHF!
Special thanks to my sister for the amazing post thumbnail.