Splatoon 2 Splatoon 2 Squidboards Community Weapon Tier List [10/26]

Vitezen · Jul 29, 2017

I'm very happy to start working on this project again. When I was playing the previous game, I had the idea to develop a weapon tier list that used data from the tournaments hosted on Squidboards to explore the viability of weapons in the metagame. After a lot of tweaking and discussion, myself and other users of these forums managed to create a working formula for measuring weapon viability based on tournament results. Luckily, because this work was already done long ago, I can now start posting the data from these tournaments much earlier for you guys.

These rankings are generated using the following formula:
50(W^2)
AM

W = Times a weapon is used on a winning team
A = Times a weapon appears on a team
M = Total recorded matches

This formula ensures that both the frequency of success a weapon sees, as well as how often it's used, are factors in the weapon's ranking. To be top tier, weapons must be used frequently and win frequently, as the function of this tier list is to measure not only how successful a weapon is, but how often you should expect to see it. Because of this formula, weapons that have not been recorded as being used on a winning team, or that win so infrequently that their ranking would be less than 0.01, are left unranked. All maps and game modes except turf wars are used in these rankings.

The tiers are divided in the following way:
Tier 1 - 20+
Tier 2 - 10-20
Tier 3 - 5-10
Tier 4 - 0-5
Tier 5 (Unranked) - 0

Take these divisions with a grain of salt. The numbers are much more valuable than their presentation. I will be considering changing how these tiers are divided in the future.

This tier list will be reset any time a patch is implemented that affects competitive play. We're currently in a period where the game is getting frequent updates, tournaments may not be able to keep up, leading to some lopsided data. Because of this, I'll be listing both the current tier list and the one from the previous version of the game for now.

That's enough explanation for now. I want you all to have fun learning from and discussing the findings we all share here. Feel free to ask me any questions or help in any way you can. If you would like to help me with the development of this tier list, please send me a direct message.

vanille987 · Aug 1, 2017

*sees slosher and heavy splatlings tier.
*cries.
(jk)

I'm surprised to see not a single roller made it into the rankings, weren't they a lot more popular (and better?) in splat 1?

Vitezen · Aug 1, 2017

At least the slosher and heavy splatling have seen some competitive use so far, which doesn't apply for over half the weapons available. We'll see whether that changes or not in future updates. There is a difference between them in their results from Inkopolis Start, the most recent tournament. The slosher was used 4 times and won 3, while the heavy splatling was used 8 times and won 2. This suggests that a bigger obstacle for the slosher being high tier is that it simply isn't used as much, while the heavy splatling itself might just have problems.
Looking at the rollers, they weren't actually that prevalent in the previous game. The most widely used roller competitively was the dynamo, which, while a roller, had a completely separate playstyle. Of course the Krak-On has the sought-after kraken, but so did other weapons such as the 96 deco. The carbon roller also saw a fair bit of use for its superior speed. Looking at Inkopolis Start again, I actually didn't see any roller get played at all. The closest we saw to an ambush style weapon was the octobrush.

mercenariez · Aug 1, 2017

I guess the Splattershot Pro is better in competitive cuz it has more range than the Tentatek, and is better for organized pushes. I only play Solo Queue so I would have guessed Tentatek to be in first but I guess not.

Also kinda surprised at Rapid Blaster being last since it is quite prevalent in S+ solo queue.

Vitezen · Aug 2, 2017

I expect the SSP to drop and the TTK, Nzap, and tri-slosher to rise with the next update. Those 3 were much more ubiquitous compared to the SSP, which seems to have an inflated rank only because it has an insane winrate of 13/17. The others have winrates of about 50%, but their heavier usage will only cause them to rise higher.

Francisco · Aug 3, 2017

I'm very surprised to not see the Jet Squelcher, since it has amazing range and is popular in S+ ranked lobbies.

Cerebralbore101 · Aug 3, 2017

Splattershot Pro as S tier doesn't make any sense to me. The Splattershot Pro only has a meter of range on things like the Splash-o-matic, Dualies, and Tentatek Splattershot. It takes three hits to kill somebody, and has a really low rate of fire making landing shots very difficult. Inkstorm isn't the greatest of specials either.

Some of the blasters are amazing in ranked. It makes no sense for them to be at the bottom of the tier list unless not as many of your tournament players had access to the good blaster kits.

MindWanderer · Aug 3, 2017

Yeah, I'm thinking this tier list isn't based on enough data yet, especially since you said you reset the data after each balance patch, which was just 2 days before the data above. You should definitely crunch the numbers again after a week or two and see if anything changed.

GreatGateway · Aug 4, 2017

That's pretty well placed for the Octobrush. I wonder how my Inkbrush will stand the test of time?

Smychavo · Aug 7, 2017

I think it's too early to start drafting a tier list for weapons. Other than a handful of starting tournaments, we simply do not have enough viable competitive data to tell which weapons are by far the strongest. Although the tri-slosher and ttek may be showing up to be the stronger weapons out there, I believe we should wait for more tournament results to come in so that we can effectively draft a accurate tier list.

Tables · Aug 7, 2017

What might be nice is to have a list of tournaments that this data is drawn from. And personally I'd quite like to see the raw numbers for each as well - win count + times used. I can see it's from 113 total matches, so just two tournaments I would guess, which I would guess is the tournament that happened yesterday plus the one last weekend?

Right now I'm surprised to see the Tentatek so high, especially being significantly ahead of the Tri-Slosher, which seems kinda ubiquitous.

datkoops · Aug 7, 2017

Tables said:
Right now I'm surprised to see the Tentatek so high, especially being significantly ahead of the Tri-Slosher, which seems kinda ubiquitous.

I wonder if this counts nade kills as weapon kills, coz I probably get half my Tentatek kills with nades. Timing them to explode on lil squids swimming from spawn is mad easy.

Vitezen · Aug 7, 2017

Here are the usage and win rates currently. These are from 113 matches, all taken from the recent G7 Splatoon Online tournament.

The Tentatek is actually about as equally used as the tri-slosher. The only difference awarding it such a higher rank is that it won more often.

@datkoops This list counts whether or not the weapon was on the winning team, not how many kills it got.

datkoops · Aug 7, 2017

Ahhhhhhh understood, derp.

RespawningJesus · Aug 8, 2017

Smychavo said:
I think it's too early to start drafting a tier list for weapons. Other than a handful of starting tournaments, we simply do not have enough viable competitive data to tell which weapons are by far the strongest. Although the tri-slosher and ttek may be showing up to be the stronger weapons out there, I believe we should wait for more tournament results to come in so that we can effectively draft a accurate tier list.

The point of tier lists is to just show what the current meta is at the time they were created. Since the game is new, the meta is gonna be shifting frequently, so recording these changes this early is just interesting.

Smychavo · Aug 8, 2017

You do have a point there. How much the meta is going to change within these first couple of months and onward ought to be fascinating.

Leedika42 · Aug 10, 2017

Not sure how fair it is to rate the weapons based exclusively on how often they were used and their win rate.
For example, there is major discussion in the competitive community to not run chargers on a team. This can skew results as a few very good chargers can make a weapon look amazing, when in fact it was a poor weapon being used by an amazing player.
(Not saying a charger or whatever is bad, just that this can happen)

MindWanderer · Aug 10, 2017

This isn't really a ranking, it's a tier list. It's used to describe the current meta, not to evaluate the viability of any particular weapon.

MrL1193 · Aug 10, 2017

MindWanderer said:
This isn't really a ranking, it's a tier list. It's used to describe the current meta, not to evaluate the viability of any particular weapon.

To be honest, I would prefer to just get the raw data rather than this awkward list of scores that tries to reflect both usage and win rate in a single number. If you state outright that a weapon was used 20 times but only won in 1 of those instances, I can infer that a significant number of players had an interest in using it but were unable to find success with it. However, if you just state that the weapon got a score of 0.02 according to whatever formula you made up, that suggests that the weapon is bad, but it doesn't give me any specific information beyond that.

Tables · Aug 10, 2017

MrL1193 said:
To be honest, I would prefer to just get the raw data rather than this awkward list of scores that tries to reflect both usage and win rate in a single number. If you state outright that a weapon was used 20 times but only won in 1 of those instances, I can infer that a significant number of players had an interest in using it but were unable to find success with it. However, if you just state that the weapon got a score of 0.02 according to whatever formula you made up, that suggests that the weapon is bad, but it doesn't give me any specific information beyond that.

The raw data was already posted. This kind of statistical approach is much nicer for summarising the data quickly and succinctly, which the vast majority of people are going to find more useful. Generating a single statistic in a reasonably fair way and ordering based on that is great for making a rankings/tier list that's reasonably impartial - and the formula they've used seems great for it. since it reasonably balances two important factors: How often a weapon wins, and how often it wins out of possible times it could have appeared.

Splatoon 2 Splatoon 2 Squidboards Community Weapon Tier List [10/26]

Inkling Cadet

Inkling Cadet

Inkling Cadet

Inkling Cadet

Inkling Cadet

Inkster Jr.

Inkster Jr.

Inkling Commander

Full Squid

Full Squid

Inkster Jr.

Inkling

Inkling Cadet

Inkling

I am a leaf on the wind - watch how I soar.

Full Squid

Senior Squid

Inkling Commander

Inkling Cadet

Inkster Jr.

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