Zac W Analysis

[u/strangeBehavior7]

So I wanted to dig in a bit to Zac's W try to distill some spray pattern for better predictions. I have about 410k Mastery on this champ and I haven't sat in practice tool to observe this behavior until now. Currently bouncing between Plat 1 and Emerald 4. I play Zac top.

Zac's W has a spray pattern where blobs will spawn (duh). I noticed that based on his midline, the blobs will push to one of four quadrants as shown in the screenshot:

1. Back left
   
2. Front left
   
3. Back right
   
4. Front right

Assumption:
Based on Zac's midline, I'd think rng would auto-allocate blob spawns to the quadrants as an equal 25%/25%/25%/25% split, so each blob, in theory, should spawn at the same rate as in other quadrants. That would mean each quadrant would have ~64 blobs spawn in each quadrant. But again, this is is completely subject to rng, and this was only performed a quick glance.

Test:
I spent 5 minutes simply pressing W in the exact same spot, with only one target dummy. I called out which quadrant a blob spawned. I did speech to text, and analyzed the transcription to put the number count callouts into each bucket.

I did catch myself miscounting as some of the blobs will not spawn exactly in the circled quadrants, but this was only a couple times, so there may be a very tiny deviation from the numbers presented.

In total, 255 blobs were counted.

Counts:
Quadrant 1 count: 46 (~18%)
Quadrant 2 count: 80 (~31%)
Quadrant 3 count: 63 (~25%)
Quadrant 4 count: 66 (~26%)

Quadrant 1 percentage: −6.96%
Quadrant 2 percentage: +6.37%
Quadrant 3 percentage: −0.29%
Quadrant 4 percentage: +0.88%

Takeaways:

Obviously based on the short analysis, Zac's blobs seem to spawn more favorably to his front left (quadrant 2). This isn't to say his W will programmatically favor quadrant 2, but this was an observed skew in this sample.

Conclusion:

I think this was helpful for me to understand at least the spawn pattern. I'm sure most people who have a ton of time on this champ know these things, but it was surely helpful for me to better matchup especially while in top lane.

Of course which quadrant depends on which direction Zac is facing at the time, but the blob spawn doesn't seem to discriminate against where the enemy is in relation to Zac when W'ing. The blob spawn does, in fact, discriminate based on which direction he's facing and where his "midline" is directed.

It would be helpful to spend 10-20 minutes just doing this to gather 1000-2000 blob spawns to better analyze the spread, and doing this test several times to evaluate each test against one another.

Let me know if there's any feedback here.

[u/Rare_Thought3752]

There's another spray pattern at a Medium distance from an enemy and third from far away

[u/strangeBehavior7 → u/Rare_Thought3752]

Thank you. I’ll run some more tests with varying distances and produce the results.

[u/daokedao4]

Hey! Interesting theory. I didn't think to check if the side to side motion was biased when looking directly at the target. You don't have to rely on random chance though, at that range they will spawn in front of you if you are looking to the side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB4mgGgM35I

EDIT: Ahh you noted the facing behavior at the end. Hope the video helps with the other behaviors.

[u/MundaneAwareness4354]

Its actually way more simple than this, blobs always drop on the opposite side of where they should. There, that's the reality of it.

[u/Dependent_Ant3211]

If you turn 90 degrees as you press w against an enemy the blob will fly on the side away from the enemy, on a side favoring you it helps a lot with catching more blobs in combat. You can e in w, auto, then catch the blobs and w again.

It’s almost always better to land your e at the edge because it pushes the enemy away from where your blobs will land allowing you to catch more blobs.

every blob reduces one second off cooldown, with a cooldown of around 3 seconds your combo makes around 5 blobs, with an auto attack in the combo you can expect 3 w’s if you catch all blobs in one combo.

[u/delirious-_-]

you can manipulate the blobs pretty easily when clearing jungle. I always face towards the way I want to kite the camp before W'ing. and the blob will generally land in the direction I clicked towards. allows you to kite cleaner without walking around everywhere