fwiw it doesn’t matter what testers do or how they test
their feedback is of little to no value to devs anyways…if it was more valuable a lot of problems we have or have had would have been avoided
but to answer your question how a typical experienced player or tester would determine how effective or ineffective a hero is on defense or offense, is usually based on how easy or hard it is to recover from an average or worse board
to test against defenses, testers don’t change the way they set up their teams as far as changing styles from mono to 3-2 to rainbow etc etc unless they want to specifically test those styles. at least from what i can tell anyways as i haven’t seen any beta feedback specifically saying they use a different style in beta than they would in live game
one thing that noticeably changed with the new meta from the old was how many turns a player had before & after the front 3 defenders fire before the match is unrecoverable
there was times guin & company could fire multiple times and a player still at least had a chance at winning(of course the chance went down each time they fired)
whereas this new meta, at least upon initial full release, 2 out of 5 heroes firing in defense lowered the chance to recover noticeably more drastically than previous setups
telluria and vela combo originally was pretty over the top, I’ve found it surprising that was ever up for debate
but in recent months after some changes, they seemed fine to me and players used them because they were still best available. but availability doesn’t equate to OP unless you ask devs who feel players aren’t spending enough on s3 to get these new heroes but that’s moreso as the s3 heroes are pretty luckluster and don’t bring a ton of useful variety to the table than what we already had
players that have mn or alby aren’t goin to dumpa bunch of cash to chase heimdall
players that have 1 or more marjanas maxed already aren’t goin to jump and chase gefjon
players that have 1 or more blue snipers already aren’t going to chase fenrir
etc etc etc
s2 heroes, event heroes, and past hotm have been more vaulable to the playerbase due to how unique they were upon release
devs have ran out of steam in s3 so their answer to increase the value of newer lackluster heroes is to deteriorate the old ones down to unusable and force a player to quit, spend, or just go f2p and watch as the time or money or both already invested fails to remain relevant as new bushy eyed players fall into the same ol trap everyone else already has