Dropping Stale Picks for the Overtuned Roster: A Lane-by-Lane Walkthrough in Honor of Kings

Dropping Stale Picks for the Overtuned Roster: A Lane-by-Lane Walkthrough in Honor of Kings

I had been grinding the same loyal heroes for weeks, and the climb felt like wading through wet cement. So I switched gears entirely and queued up whatever the lobby chat keeps calling "overtuned" — the heroes that simply do too much for what they cost mechanically. One run per role, four roles total, and the result was four wins where my own play was visibly rough but the kits carried. Below is what actually worked, lane by lane, plus where the friction points showed up.

Farm Lane: Ao'yin Is the One Nobody Argues About

If you ask any lobby which marksman is currently doing the most for the least effort, Ao'yin (Loong) gets named before the question finishes. He is the descendant-of-dragons marksman from the Misty Marshes, sitting in the S-tier of the Farm Lane pool alongside Hou Yi and Marco Polo this season. The reason is simple: his Hidden Dragon passive lets the last two skills he cast attach Dragon Souls to his swords, his enhanced basic attacks consume up to three marks for a different effect per soul, and Flaming Palm, Downpour and Riding the Wind all sit on the same 12-second cooldown. You can stagger element combinations all lane and never run dry.

The opening is barely a ritual: walk up, hit the wave and the laner together, and prioritize the body once they cross half-HP, then push the line and grab the side jungle. If they greed for one more cs, they pop. The two memorize-and-go combos:

Triple-Fire is the punchline word here. Each Dragon Soul mark adds an extra strike on the consumed AA, and stacking three Fire souls onto the primary sword turns one trade into a deletion. Practice cost is genuinely low — there is no muscle-memory canceling, no jungle pathing math, just remembering which two skills you queued up before the AA.

Why Ao'yin Survives Plays That Kill Other Marksmen

The game I queued went sideways early. Economy was bad, the team was behind, and the assassin had already snowballed. None of that mattered.

The fight that turned the lobby: Han Xin opened on Da Qiao, I dropped Triple-Fire plus a Water enhanced AA plus one regular AA and Da Qiao was already a sliver. Lv Bu reflected in with Anti-Magic Cloak active. The instant Han Xin respawned and re-engaged, a casual Skill 2 finished him. Then with Ultimate up and Flash held, I stacked Double-Fire, deleted Zhong Kui's hook attempt mid-cast, and Infinite Vastness peeled me out of the dive untouched.

The general principle: any other marksman caught in that position dies. Ao'yin sometimes does not even need to retreat. He can stand under his own tower with Triple-Fire ready, eat one tower shot, blow up the diver, then Skill 2 to reset and reposition. Infinite Vastness is the safety net — up to 4.5 seconds in the air, the option to swap Dragon Souls mid-flight, and the dive applies damage twice plus Dread on landing. The 80-second cooldown is long, but during the window he hits two extra targets per AA and gains attack speed and range. That is the part that feels broken: the panic button is also the team-fight button.

Clash Lane: Ma Chao's Entire Kit Is a Ladder Out of Bad Spots

Ma Chao is not on the public S-tier list this patch — the spreadsheet crowns Li Xin, Chicha and Kaizer up top, with Nezha sitting comfortably in A — but the people who actually grind him will tell you the spear loop tier lists. The opening minute is a script: at 21 seconds, throw a spear to bank a charge; at 27 seconds, dash to it and pick it up. That timing pulls aggro from the front-line minions in a way that sets up a Phantom Assault sprint into a poke without losing minion threat.

The core loop, regardless of matchup:

• Save one charge of Ten Thousand Blades Return to Sheath
• Throw Desolate Blade (300 + 120% Extra Physical Attack)
• Dash to retrieve via the passive
• Re-throw, retrieve again, repeat

Each retrieval gives an enhanced basic attack that pierces and a movement-speed boost. The number that matters is the ultimate: it is available at level 1, and upgrading the ult expands the maximum to four charges, while every recall pulls the nearest spear for 120 (+70% Extra Physical Attack +5% target's lost HP). Late game, that 5% missing-HP scaling on each individual spear is the reason a healthy SiKong Zhen can be deleted from screens away.

Picking up at level 2, I was honestly unsure whether I could trade with SiKong Zhen, so I gave up the duel and farmed the side camp. Ma Chao's sprint-to-shove pattern is forgiving — even when the solo kill is off the table, you still secure jungle priority because the enemy laner has not finished their own camp.

Ma Chao's Three Overtuned Axes: Flank, Escape, Pickup

The same Clash game went deeply behind. Jungle got invaded, my support could not rotate, and a teammate opened the surrender vote. Ma Chao does not respect any of that.

Flanking. Phantom Assault into the back line is one button. I walked behind their formation, poked Ganjiang Moye, sidestepped the Zhong Kui hook on reflex, double-poked into a kill, popped Ultimate to peel out. The dash retrieves a spear from inside or behind walls — a misthrow into terrain is still a positional advantage as long as you remember the recall.

Escape. This is the part that is genuinely unfair. The kiting routine — sprint, throw, retrieve, throw, retrieve — restores movement speed and HP through the enhanced basic-attack heal of the passive. I cleared two waves on the way home and was full HP without ever recalling. If you chase Ma Chao without hard CC, you are funding his late-game item curve.

Cleanup. Predicting Ahri (Ali) in a brush, recall + one new throw deleted her. SiKong Zhen tried to disengage at the screen edge, two spear recalls finished him from across the river. The 5% lost-HP scaling on the recall means the further behind your target is, the more disposable they become.

A Gold-medal MVP from a deficit lobby with operations I will openly admit were ugly. The kit launders the mistakes.

Mid Lane: Shen Mengxi Is Less Overtuned Than She Is Disgusting

Mid is the lane where I do not think there is a single hero who is straight-up overtuned. The current S-tier names — Daji and Angela — are matchup picks more than universal threats, and most of what people complain about (Heino, Ganjiang Moye, Xi Shi, Zhuge Liang) gets banned as counter-cards rather than auto-picks. The exception is Shen Mengxi. The Bomb Cat from the Great Wall Guard, released as the 86th hero, doesn't dominate any tier list, but in any matchup where her bombs have time to cook she is unbearable to play against.

The common take is that Shen Mengxi is strongest early. My experience says the opposite: she gets nastier in the mid-to-late phase when she has too many bombs to spend per fight. Her pattern combines wave-clear and execute on the same skill, so a full-HP target is already a kill threshold once the rotation lands. In one fight, Heino tried to clear the wave through Zhang Liang's Skill 2 and stepped past the kill threshold — one rotation, dead. That is the loop: the wave, the wave dies, the basic attacks splash into the laner, the laner is suddenly low.

What makes the kit feel wrong:

• turns every poke into vision and a slow
• Explosive AA follow-up means the auto-attack does mage damage at range
• Mobility is high enough to disrespect Zhang Liang's lockdown — Confucius's tether and Zhao Yun's coverage are the consistent answers, not a Mid duel
• Full HP is still the execute threshold, which is the actual definition of "disgusting" in this game's vocabulary

The closing fight of my run was textbook: Confucius tethered, I held position, fired Skill 2 into Flash for the layup, and the lane ended.

Jungle: The Tallest Mountain, the Longest River, Even After Nerfs

When I queued jungle, Jing was banned out, which is its own kind of compliment. The current public tier list pushes Jing all the way down to C, with Ying, Augran, Wukong and Musashi sitting at S — but the ban target tells you what people actually fear in solo queue. I tried to be a normal person and locked Luna instead. Luna's beginner sequence is BA-Ult-1-Ult-2-Ult, or 1-Ult-BA-Ult-2-Ult in 1v1, and it still works in clean conditions. It just does not carry. Her win rate is sub-50% across every bracket right now, and a single bad rotation means you spend the rest of the game playing catch-up.

So I requeued and got Jing. The Hall of Ten Thousand Mirrors operative has been hit with the nerf bat repeatedly, but Skill 1 still adds damage on top of the dash, and that is enough.

The piece of the kit doing the heavy lifting:

The ult is what wins the unwinnable team fights. In my game, Donghuang still had Ultimate up, so I waited; Nuwa walked down for an ult bait, I took the trade two-for-one, and from there the snowball ran on rails. The skill ceiling is high — I openly do not have the muscle memory for it — but Mirror Domain forgives that. You hit the button, you swap, the shards pick targets you never aimed at, and post-fight you check the kill log to find out what happened.

Silver MVP with low mastery, on a hero allegedly nerfed into the floor. The shard ult cleaned up Hou Yi and dunked the mid-laner while I was busy panicking inside the domain. The C-tier label is misleading; what is true is that the floor for getting value is higher than it used to be, not that the ceiling has dropped.

Why I Did Not Pick a Roamer

I deliberately stopped at four roles. The Roamer S-tier is currently Dolia and Cai Yan, with Yaria, Dyadia and Donghuang in A — solid picks, but I genuinely cannot tell you which one is "overtuned" the way Ao'yin is overtuned at Farm Lane or Ma Chao is overtuned in Clash. Donghuang the Seer at 215 cm is the closest thing to a feels-bad pick, locking targets through CC chains and stalling early objectives, and the tag list (Offensive Support, Recovery/Sustained, Crowd Control, Early Game Hard) is built for that. But "early-game hard" is exactly what dies when the rest of the lobby scales, and a single Anti-Magic Cloak chips significantly into the lockdown threat.

If you want my actual read after this experiment: the four overtuned picks above all share a pattern. The kit forgives the mistake. Ao'yin's Ultimate forgives a bad position. Ma Chao's spear retrieval forgives a missed throw. Shen Mengxi's forgives a missed last-hit because the wave cleared anyway. Jing's Mirror Domain forgives a panic engage because the shards still hit. Heroes outside this list — even strong ones like Hou Yi, Nezha, Wukong — generally punish your own mistakes harder. That is the criterion, not raw damage numbers, and it is why the climb feels lighter the moment you stop playing the loyal pick.