I am hopeful that the top pro teams at ESL major will show how to break the meta.

I wish I could upvote this 100 times.

Is that the only passive that needs an active spell to do something?

If the supports are smart enough to remain hidden at the start of the fight, and you need to kill the supports first, then buy aghs earlier. Otherwise, not much need.

The core idea behind Simpson’s paradox is that depending on how you breakup the data, you will get opposite conclusions. The example from the wiki is that the it looks like the university is biased against women in admissions if you look at the university wide data. But if you break up the data by department, then most departments are biased against men.

The same thing can very easily happen here. The easiest breakdown here is to look at T5 item winrates per hero. So it might be that ex machina has poor overall winrate, when you break it down by hero you find that it’s great on a lot of heroes, but because, say Pudge is popular hero and ex machina sucks for pudge, most of the negative winrate is because of heroes like Pudge.

I am not saying that’s what’s happening for sure, but you have to check to be sure. You also have to check how ex machina performs when you are ahead at 60 min and when you are behind. Etc.

I really appreciate the effort, but you really need to be aware of Simpson’s paradox if you are going to process data like this. It’s quite easy to draw the wrong conclusions.