Brawl Stars is the latest freemium game published by Supercell. It has successfully released other popular mobile games such as Hay Day, Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, and Clash Royale. Brawl Stars started the beta launch on June 15th, 2017 in Canada. After a year and a half, it was fully released globally on December 12th, 2018.
Nearly all the top 200 players have been playing the game ever since the beta launch 2 years ago. Most of these players win over 15,000 trophies by end of each season. It got so popular that there are many Brawl Stars Youtubers sharing their various strategies through the platform. I believe that most players have thought about the same question: Which brawler is the best? Which mode is the best mode to gain trophies?
I would like to start by offering some insights to answer the following questions based on the analysis of the top 200 players’ data:
- Which clubs are these top 200 players from?
- Which brawlers currently in the game are strong or weak?
- Which mode is the top players’ favorite? Is it 3v3 or Showdown?
Data Source
I used the BrawlStats API to extract the global leaderboards, which contains the top 200 players’ data. The data was extracted on 4/2/2019 11:30 PM(GMT-5). The Python script and raw data are available on my GitHub-ggiantcrab14789.
The dataset contains the player’s name, player’s tag, EXP, total trophy counts, and trophy counts for each brawler.
Among these variables, the most important variable is the trophy counts for each brawler. Although the game data doesn’t show how trophies are collected across the games’ modes, the data will help us determine who the best/worst brawlers are.
Many players have said that Leon is too strong and needs to be nerfed. Others are complaining that Crow needs a buff because it’s too weak. However, do these users’ statements reflect the truth? In these datasets, we are considering the statistics collected from the top 200 players. These top players have lots of game experience and data we can use for our analysis. Let's take a look at what these data look like.
The Number of Trophy Counts
The highest trophy count that a top 200 player has is 19,181; the average trophies a player has is 14,735; the lowest number of trophies that a top player wins is 13,827. Thus, a player should win over 13,827 trophies in a season to be honored as the top 200 players. Most of the top 200 players have won 14,000 to 14,500 trophies per season.
Experience
Among the top 200 players, the highest experience level that a player has is 301, the lowest is 110, and the average experience level is 183.
Estimating the Player’s Win Rate
Because the exact win rate of each player is not available from its official database, the best way to estimate is to compare the experience level and the trophy counts. Meaning, the estimated win rate is the trophy counts divided by experience level. If the player’s experience level is relatively lower, yet they have won relatively more trophies, the win rate can be estimated as a higher one.
Below are the 3 players with the highest win rate among the top 200 players. Just because someone has the highest win ratio does not mean they are the highest-ranked player according to the data.
The Titan has the highest win rate with our equation, but he is ranked 25th.
Club
These top 200 players are from 69 different clubs.
42 players are from Tribe Gaming, 16 from Nova Esports, and 14 from Team Onyx. There is also a club leaderboard which has the ranking of clubs, and non-coincidently, these 3 clubs happen to be the top 3 on the club leaderboard.
Game Mode
There are many game modes in Brawl Stars, but it is mainly categorized into two major groups: 3v3 and Showdown.
- 3v3 Mode: Includes Gem Grab, Bounty, Brawl Ball, Heist, and Seige.
2. Showdown: Players can either play solo or team up with a partner.
Among these modes, many players opt for the Showdown, specifically solo showdown. This can be explained by three major reasons.
- In the showdown mode, players are less likely to lose trophies than in 3v3 modes. Generally, players will lose trophies if they are ranked from 7 to 10 in each game. For players without partners, as long as they can stay in the top 6 out of 10 players in each game, their trophies will be retained.
- It’s easier to win trophies in Showdown. Some players would hide in the bushes and camp all game long until few opponents are remaining.
- Players are not allowed to communicate during the game. Therefore, in some high-ranking matches, many solo players try to team up with other randoms by spinning their brawlers. This strategy could also lead to a trophy-winning, but it sabotages others’ playing experience as well.
The most common question that comes up in forums is how the top 200 players play. The answer could be extracted from the following correlation coefficient chart.
The red implies that the 2 variables have a positive correlation, while the greyish blue implies a negative correlation.
From the chart above, variables of Solo_Showdown_V, Duo_Showdown_V, and Trophies are negatively correlated.
This means that for players with more trophies, they play less solo/duo showdown.
What can be inferred here is that these top players win their trophies by playing 3v3 modes. The reasons are as follows:
- These top players join the best performing clubs and have developed great teamwork in 3v3 game modes.
- In solo showdown mode, it’s nearly impossible for players to place top 3 without teaming up with other individuals. If you really want to play Showdown you have to team to some extent, or you’ll likely get teamed up against and lose massive amounts of trophies. According to KariosTime’s survey, an overwhelming 82% of people said that they miss the excitement of Showdown when it was a true Free-For-All and would enjoy Solo Showdown MORE if people didn’t team.
Brawler Analysis — Best/Worst Brawlers
Currently, there are 24 brawlers in Brawl Stars. For newbie players, the most frequently asked questions or googled keywords are always related with best brawlers. They have wondered which brawlers could help them get trophies faster. Many YouTubers and bloggers have analyzed the strongest/weakest brawlers they have played. However, these are based on their experiences, but not quantitative analysis.
Before reading on, you might like to make your own opinion regarding the best brawler so far. Do you think legendary brawlers are the best? Is Leon really an unparalleled beast on the battlefield? Where is your favorite brawler ranked? Let me analyze the trophy counts for each brawler of the top 200 players to reveal these answers.
First, I made a statistic chart for each brawler based on their trophy counts.
What can be inferred here is that the more average trophies that a brawler has, the stronger the brawler is, and vice versa.
To maximize the playing experience, Supercell should try to nerf those brawlers which the average trophies are too high while buffing those brawlers with low average trophies.
From the graph above, we can see that:
The brawler with highest average trophy count is — Barley
Barley with 666 trophies, closely followed by Pam with 663 trophies. Thus, in the current version of the game, both Barley and Pam are brawlers with the best performance. If you are a newbie player and don’t know how to choose brawlers to play with, these 2 brawlers are good choices for you to get more trophies according to the data!
The brawler with the lowest average trophy count is — Darryl
Carl is a newly added brawler, so that's why he has a relatively lower average trophy count. To obtain an objective and accurate analysis, Carl is ruled out for now. Thus, the one with fewest trophies is Darryl.
Surprisingly, the second worst brawler is the Legendary brawler, Crow. If you go to the subreddit of Brawl Stars, you’ll see lots of players posting their petitions for buffing Crow using memes.
Although the discussion about Crow’s skill and abilities are beyond the focus of this article, I think legendary brawlers, like Crow, should have higher average trophy count, so Supercell should consider buff or remake Crow.
In addition, I made distribution charts of trophy counts for each brawler if you are interested in digging further into the trophy counts and filtering the performance data by brawler’s rarity.
Conclusion
Through analyzing the data of these top 200 players, not only can we know how impressive these top players are, but also we can get some insights below:
- Due to teaming in solo showdown mode, players can’t win the game solely on their own. As a result, top players prefer to play 3v3 mode. So if you want to win more trophies, you should find good players to team up with you and play more 3v3 modes!
- In the current version, the strongest brawlers are Barley and Pam, while the weakest ones are Crow and Darryl. If you don’t know which brawler to play with, just stick with Barley and Pam. If trophy pushing is getting difficult for you, maybe you should stop playing Crow or Darryl. Ultimately, you should find a brawler that best fits your play style. Games are supposed to be fun!
- My last note: Supercell please solve the long-lasting teaming problem in Solo Showdown mode!!! And please, Buff Crow!!! XD
Special thanks to ChiChi Cheng, Ryan Chen for helping translate this article. The original article is here: 荒野亂鬥-最強/最弱英雄數據分析
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