S43's Great T0 Purge: Which 14 Honor of Kings Heroes Got the Knife and Did It Stick?

S43's Great T0 Purge: Which 14 Honor of Kings Heroes Got the Knife and Did It Stick?

The 14 Names on the Chopping Block

The pattern over the last month is impossible to miss. Mirror's double smite is gone. Tiger's signature swing has been slowed. Nuwa's matrix control got shaved by a third of a second. One by one, the dev team has been picking off T0 heroes that have spent too long parked in the ban screen. The current T0 census sits at exactly fourteen names, and only one of them — Ma Chao — has walked away from this patch cycle without a scratch.

The headline number on that panel says everything you need to know about why the balance team felt they had to act. Ao Yin is sitting on a 99% pick-or-ban rate. That is not a marksman who is "a bit strong." That is an entire role compressed into one hero. The rest of the list is no friendlier: Flowborn marksman, Flowborn support, Chano, Dun Shan, Da Yu, Shao Si Yuan, Hai Yue, Nuwa, Shen Mengxi, Jing, Pei Qinhu, Yuan Ge, and the untouchable Ma Chao. Some of these heroes are obvious — they top every S43 marksman tier list out there. Others are less flashy ban-pool regulars whose value lives in mechanics that nobody really wants to touch.

What the table doesn't show is whether each cut landed on the part of the kit that actually mattered. That is the only metric that decides if S43 is heading into a "normal person era" or whether the same names slide back to the top of the ban screen after one weekend of testing.

Ao Yin and the Frostfall Crit Bait That Backfired

Ao Yin is the cleanest example of a balance team trying everything except touching the actual problem. The dossier already flags him as the strongest marksman this season, with a kit that bundles sustain, burst, knockback, and an escape into one package, scales smoothly with low support reliance, and demands almost nothing from his lane partner. None of that has been undone.

Instead, the lever they pulled was item routing. The sub-sword from Frostfall now allows critical strikes — a nudge clearly meant to coax Ao Yin players off Frostbite Dragon and toward a crit-style build. The catch is that Frostfall was already pulling double duty before the change. One piece gave damage and tankiness in the same slot, the rotation flowed straight from CC into damage, and the build effectively turned single-wind into a copper smelter. The crit conversion was a carrot that didn't need to exist, because the stick was already a feast. So the team looped back and gave Frostfall a small rework on top of the change.

The funny part is that the crit route isn't dead. With a downhill scoreline and three-piece scaling, the late-game damage ceiling on Ao Yin's crit build genuinely is higher than the Frostbite path. The problem, as ever, is the early-game error margin. Frostbite still gives more forgiveness in the laning phase, and most players who pick Ao Yin are not picking him to suffer through a hard early game. They want a one-button safety net while the rest of the team handles the actual decisions.

So the practical effect of this patch on Ao Yin is roughly zero. His pick-or-ban rate isn't going from 99% to 30%. The damage cap moved sideways, the safest build path got slightly less safe, and the part of his kit that makes him oppressive — the supportless scaling, the knockback, the on-demand escape — was untouched. If the next patch doesn't poke at the actual ult interaction or the early lane phase, this hero is going to keep eating the BP screen for another season.

Flowborn Marksman: Punishing the Lazy 1-3-3

Flowborn marksman has the longest range of any ADC currently played, and the meta opener for the hero is exactly the same nine times out of ten: open with skill 1, then 3-3 to instantly create distance while dumping the full damage payload onto the priority target. It's a sequence designed to skip the back-and-forth poke phase entirely. You don't trade — you press buttons and walk away.

The dev response was two cuts in a row. First, the back-hop distance and movement speed during the 3-3 phase were both reduced, which means the same combo no longer pulls the marksman to true safety. The window where the enemy support can flash-pull or hard CC after the unload is now meaningfully larger. Second, the ult damage threshold was raised. Pressing 1-3-3 still works mechanically, but the burst no longer guarantees the chunk it used to.

The 1-2-2-2 mobility chain — the actual reason this hero is forgiving in skirmishes — was left alone. So the takeaway isn't that Flowborn marksman is dead. He still kites better than almost any other ADC in the pool, his clear is fast, and his support utility is intact. What changed is the mental model: you can no longer treat him as a one-button delete machine that pre-empties from max range. You have to think about positioning before pressing the combo, because the back-hop won't bail you out the way it used to.

That's a meaningful shift for high-end play and almost no shift at all for solo queue, where most enemy teams won't punish a poorly-spaced Flowborn anyway. The hero will probably slide one tier down on serious tier lists and stay exactly where he was on the average ladder. Which is, honestly, the realistic result. A hero with a 1-2-2-2 panic button is never going to be balanced through ult math alone.

Chano: Three Forms, Two Rounds of True Damage Cuts

Chano's whole identity is the form-swap kit — Defense, Attack, and Kill stances, each with its own damage profile and a 2-skill that carries true damage on top of the physical hit. The problem the balance team has been chasing for two patches is that in the laning phase, while the enemy marksman is still auto-attacking minions to last-hit, Chano can wipe the wave with a 1-2 combo and walk away with a level lead. Once she hits two items, the burst is fast enough that she stops feeling like a ranged fighter and starts feeling like half an assassin.

Round one of the cut averaged the Kill-form 2-skill true damage out across the other two forms, so the burst peak came down but the floor came up. That barely moved the needle. So round two went after the absolute numbers — the 2-skill execute true damage ratios across the three forms have now been pulled from 5%/6%/7% of missing HP down to 4%/5%/6%. The base damage on the attack and kill forms also took noticeable reductions, with the kill-form 2-skill physical damage dropping from 500-1000 (+1.7 bonus AD) to 450-900 (+1.5 bonus AD) and the bonus execute fraction trimmed from 10% missing HP down to 7%.

The shape of the hero changed because of these cuts. The old Chano was a flank pickoff specialist — show up on a side, dump a full Kill-form rotation into the carry, and either walk away with the kill or recycle into the next lane. The new Chano can't reliably do that in one go. She has to dueling instead of executing — longer fights, more attention to positioning, lower forgiveness.

What the team didn't touch is the long-range carry potential. With items, she still cleans up team fights from the back, and the form-swap mechanic that gives her bracing against pure burst answers is intact. So she's still a strong pick. She's just no longer the hero who deletes you in 0.6 seconds from a ward you forgot to clear, and that's the right kind of nerf — it shifts the playstyle without erasing the hero from the meta.

Dun Shan and Da Yu: Damage Stripped, Utility Untouched

This is the cleanest design philosophy on display this patch. Both Dun Shan and Da Yu are kept in the game by mechanics that nobody on the team wants to redesign, so the cuts went exclusively after raw output and lane bullying.

Dun Shan's merge form was the obvious target. In the laning phase, an early Dun Shan parking on top of the marksman turns the experience into pure suppression — anyone who walks up to last-hit gets melted by enhanced auto-range. So the merge-form 1-skill got three separate cuts in one pass. The speed buff was removed. The shield ratio was thinned. The attack range while the lifted ally is being held was shortened. Effectively, what used to be a merged tank-and-marksman freight train is now a tank-and-marksman caterpillar. Slow, harder to angle, and easier to disrespect.

What survives is exactly what makes Dun Shan a hero and not a stat block: allies still get to cast on the move while lifted, the ult still blocks projectiles, the wall still splits team fights into two halves. The team trimmed the proactive damage and kept the reactive utility. That's the right call.

Da Yu got the same treatment with even less subtlety. The "Shoutian" mechanic upgrade that used to deal AOE burst is now pure group control. The 2-skill enhanced basic attack count went from three down to one — the patch notes might as well say "stop pretending you're a fighter core." The 2-skill enhanced attack damage went from 125 (+25/Lv)(+0.75 AD) up to 160 (+32/Lv)(+1.0 AD), but with only one charge instead of three, the total damage swing is firmly down.

And yet Da Yu is still going to be picked. Eight cauldrons functioning as eight effective fountains, vision exposure into the enemy jungle, the ult teleport between any of those cauldrons with hard CC and unstoppable on arrival — that core is so strong the team only feels safe touching damage numbers. Push the mechanic any harder and they're rebuilding the hero from scratch. So the verdict on this patch is "yes, Da Yu got nerfed, no, Da Yu is not leaving the ban screen."

Hai Yue, Nuwa, Shen Mengxi: The Mid Lane Ban Pool Gets Pruned

Three mid laners on the T0 list, three completely different nerf strategies. Hai Yue is the holdover from the old Bai Yue Cult mage trio after Chang'e's rework knocked her out of T0. She doesn't snowball off a single item the way some bursty mages do, but every team comp seems to have a player who calls her overstatted, and the reason is the ult footprint. One ult forces a tactical drop on the enemy core, while your own side shows up to the fight with full kit. That single mechanic keeps her in ban consideration regardless of what else the patch does, and the dev team knows it. So she keeps eating mosquito-bite patches that do nothing meaningful.

Nuwa is the counter-example. The matrix collision CC duration went from 0.5s down to 0.33s — that reads like a number-tweak on paper. It is not. Nuwa's matrix is not a damage skill. The matrix has to merge, the CC has to land, and only then does the ult damage actually pour in. Cut the CC duration by a third and you've widened the enemy's reaction window from "barely possible to flash" to "respond with tenacity items." The total damage chain falls apart. The detonation damage went up slightly to compensate (210-450 → 225-450 with a 0.45 AP scaling), but that's a fig leaf. This is the kind of micro-number nerf that looks small in patch notes and reads like an earthquake in actual matches.

Shen Mengxi got the surgical knife on a specific combo. The ult gained a split-bomb addition, but the 2→1 sliding combo was removed entirely. For non-Shen-Mengxi players: the slide combo packed substantially more bombs onto the target than the 2-skill long-press version, which is the entire reason the cat poke playstyle worked in the early game. Damage on paper looks unchanged. In practice, the snowball window in lane is gone. He can't poke the enemy mid into a 30 HP corner before level 6 anymore, which means the ult comes online into a healthy lane instead of a dying one. The hero's strength was never the ult itself — it was the rolling lane lead that made the ult terminal. With the slide gone, that snowball doesn't roll.

Three different nerfs, three different theories of balance. Nuwa's is the smartest. Hai Yue's is the laziest. Shen Mengxi's is the most disruptive to actual play patterns.

Jing and Pei Qinhu: Jungle Mechanics Finally Touched

Six years. That's how long Jing has been carrying the double-smite mechanic that finally got patched out. The intuitive read is that double smite is a pure clear-speed advantage — kill camps faster, hit timings faster. That is wrong. Double smite's actual value is in jungle dueling. Old Jing walks into the enemy jungle with two smite charges in the bank, and the moment the enemy jungler steps up to contest, you press smite first and take the camp at a higher execute threshold than they have. The mirror match becomes "I have two smites and a swap, you have one smite and prayer." That mechanic is gone now, and good — it never should have lived this long.

The kicker: Jing's actual identity as a hero, the mirror swap into a one-shot on the back line, is completely untouched. So the hero's not dead. She's just no longer functionally invincible in jungle 1v1s and dragon contests. The line from the video puts it best — I got weaker, but that doesn't mean you got stronger. Treating the post-patch Jing as easy to invade is going to get a lot of solo queue tigers and assassins killed.

Pei Qinhu, the tiger jungler, took the harder structural hit. His strength is starting at the door with the ult unlocked, having two full skill rotations at level 1, and covering four jungle camps by level 2. The patch notes increased base damage in both forms, which sounds like a buff, but they also reduced the tiger-form 2-skill swing arc. Wall-jumps are the hero's soul, and jungle invasion is built on rapid back-and-forth pouncing across walls. Each pounce now takes longer than before. The early invasion tempo has been pulled measurably wider.

Damage was never Pei Qinhu's bottleneck. Showing up at the right spot at the right second was the bottleneck. The patch made him hit harder when he arrives, and arrive later than he did before. That's a net nerf to the only thing that makes him a meta jungler. The base damage compensation is window dressing.

Ma Chao Walks Free, and the Question Nobody Wants to Ask

After all that, look at what's missing from the patch notes. Ma Chao learned the spear-pickup heal during the new year update, and since then the balance team has touched nothing on him. Not the pickup loop, not the auto-aim quirk where spears chase towers instead of targets, not the piercing enhanced basic, not the speed boost on retrieval. Today, like every recent Tuesday, Ma Chao is happily invisible to the patch notes.

The dossier flags him as a high skill ceiling rhythm engine — the basic combo is throw, reposition, pick up, throw, move, pick up, with one shot reserved for safety. Skilled Ma Chao players turn that loop into perpetual tower-diving and effectively endless trades. Early reports after his release had him at around a 25% global win rate before a same-day stealth buff, which tells you the hero's curve is brutal at the bottom and warps the meta at the top. Right now he's the best example of a T0 the team is afraid to touch because nobody wants to deal with the operational mess.

So the broader question hanging over the rest of S43: did this round of nerfs actually clear the path to a normal-person meta? Ao Yin is still 99%. Da Yu's mechanic is intact. Hai Yue's ult is intact. Jing still swaps to your back line. Pei Qinhu's level-2 four-camp coverage is intact. Chano is one item slower but not weaker overall. Flowborn marksman still has the 1-2-2-2 panic chain. Dun Shan still splits team fights with one ult.

What the patch actually delivered is a series of style adjustments. Ao Yin's items shifted. Flowborn's burst combo asks for more positioning. Chano duels longer instead of executing instantly. Da Yu commits to control. The mages got their windows trimmed. The junglers lost their cheese mechanics. Nobody on the list got dropped from T0 in any honest reading of the data.

Which means the next nerf cycle is already lined up. The smart bet for who gets the next surgical strike is whichever hero on this list still has a 60%+ ban rate two weeks from now. Ao Yin is the obvious frontrunner. Ma Chao is the dark horse — the team can't keep skipping him forever, especially if the spear loop keeps producing tower-dive highlight reels. Either way, S43's "T0 purge" is a re-styling, not a wipe. The names on the ban screen tomorrow are going to look an awful lot like the names on the ban screen today.