TFT: 3 Reasons Why Hyper Rolling is Dead in Early Set 3

The TFT strategy known as hyper rolling, where players bank a lot of money early to spend and try to get early game champions to a higher star level, is dead in Set 3.

Back in Set 2, a common winning strategy in TFT was to build your gold count in the first few rounds, then roll all your money trying to get one or two specific units to the max star level. While there is still a variant of hyper rolling that exists now in Set 3 (Protectors and specifically hyper rolling Xin Zhao) this strategy is considerably riskier than it was in the previous set. Here are three reasons why you shouldn’t be hyper rolling in TFT Set 3, barring major systems changes later on.

1. You Don’t Have Enough Gold

One thing that is striking about Set 2 compared to Set 3 is how much reduced gold you get in the first few rounds of play. In the past, you used to be able to buy out the shop from the first time it “opened” which could allow you to accumulate three or four copies of the same unit. This set you up nicely for hyper rolling and allowed you to evaluate whether you were going to employ the strategy.

Now, though, you’re very rarely able to buy out the shop in any of the first PvE rounds. Instead, you’re forced to carefully consider which units you’ll spend your limited income on, which generally means you will buy the strongest units available. These are also units that most of the other players in the lobby will buy, therefore taking them out of circulation and preventing you from accumulating enough of them early on to make hyper rolling an option unless you get extremely lucky.

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2. There are No Good Early Champions

Think about all the 1g champions that could potentially be a candidate for hyper rolling: Caitlyn, Twisted Fate, Fiora, Xayah, Zoe, Graves, Kha’Zix, Ziggs. None of these champions are significant damage dealers and none scale particularly well with items (maybe Ziggs or Graves). So why would you want to invest a lot of your early game gold into the chance you’ll get one of these champions to 3-star?

The only viable hyper roll strategy involves rolling for a 3-star Xin Zhao as part of a Protector comp. However, Xin is a 2g unit meaning there are fewer copies available and you won’t have access to him as early in the game. This means that you might not have enough money to buy copies of Xin when he appears early unless you sacrifice getting other units to 2-stars. This essentially means that you risk your early health pool for a low chance at reward.

3. All the Good Champions are High-Cost

If you looked at my 5 Champions to Build Comps Around article, you’ll notice that all but one were 4 or 5-cost units. The only outlier on this list was Rumble, who is a 3-cost unit. That’s been the major theme of Set 3 so far, that all the high cost units are incredibly strong.

This creates an incentive to spend your gold on leveling, so you’ll have access to those high cost units earlier and before other players buy them all up. With how little damage players take in the early game, and how much they take in the later portions of the game, it makes sense that players are more willing to try for a comp that spikes later, with higher cost units, than get a early/mid game comp that will fall off later.