I just spend a lot of time VoD reviewing Challenger player games and looking at data to get a feel for how strong comps are. For this particular patch, I probably spent more time than most people learning it to make sure the read here was good. But there are times my read is behind and I have to play catch up — varies depending on how hard a patch is to learn and how much specific knowledge there is. This set in particular is quite challenging because sometimes a comp is only really good with specific Power Ups, but you can’t filter that in stats so there’s where the VoD review goes a long way.

As for S-tier, it’s important to understand that this site uses a different tiering system than most places. The base tier that you see on this page represents the comp without special conditions like artifacts or augments. In most metas, there should be ZERO comps that have a base tier of S. If there is, the meta is in a bad place as those are the types of comps where it is correct for 2 people to play it every lobby. In some rare cases, I have moved a comp to S-tier because it was extremely underrepresented in the meta for its strength (e.g: Sorcerer Karma before people caught on) and then later move it down to A-tier once it is fairly represented in the meta.

So to answer your question, I rarely give any comps a base tier of S. But many comps on the website have conditions that raise them beyond S-tier.

Added it so you could be less confused. In all seriousness though, the comp is overrated right now. It’s slightly better because the rest of the meta got weaker and backline access decreased with All Out K’Sante dying and Gangplank now properly going front to back. Now you can actually build Ashe with true best-in-slot (Double Rageblade + Kraken) instead of being forced to build Edge of Night on her like last patch.

But it still wants to skip straight to 9 to get all the 5-costs, but it also wants to roll on 8 because it needs Ashe 2 badly. It’s one of those comps that desperately wants something like Forward Thinking. Maybe there is some 5 Crystal Gambit shenanigans you can pull off, but I haven’t seen it really because it’s hard to kill units and stabilize on 5 Crystal. And if you have the Emblem, why not just play 7 Crystal?

From what I’ve seen, it’s typically a 3rd or 4th comp UNLESS you can roll most of your gold on 9 and hit all the 5-costs. But that’s difficult to do. So I don’t love it honestly. Still mostly wants to get played from Flickerblade, but that item is so disgustingly broken that it isn’t really Jug Ashe.