Low Tier Letdown / Paladins

• Some of the upgrades you can purchase during games are simply not worth your credits and item slots:
  • Aggression was considered the worst card you can get right off the bat (or ever), since its damage increase was considered tiny, and you're often better off buying Wrecker (which does much more damage against shield-heavy characters like Makoa or Fernando) or Cauterize (which reduced the amount of healing an enemy you shoot gets, giving medics no amount of grief). Some people even outright refused to support or play with a team where someone (usually a Viktor) had bought it. Needless to say, people rejoiced when Aggression was removed in Patch 42.
  • Deft Hands has become the whipping boy of the cards, as while it gives good increases to reload speed in 20% increments, so level 3 will bring you to the 60% cap for reload speed, its issues are that, for all but 7 characters, other item cards such as Wrecker, Haven, and Bulldozer are generally considered better cards to purchase for the first or second pick in an item loadout, not Deft Hands. In short, players were taking the item on the false assumption of "If I reload faster, I can shoot more often, which means I'll get more kills", which is very rarely true (if you need to reload mid-fight often enough for reload speed to seem important, chances are you simply have bad aim). The only characters that can outright benefit from buying Deft Hands early on are Mal'Damba (his reload produces a snake that stuns the enemy, and speeding reloads up makes that activate faster, thereby making it harder to avoid), and Pip with the Combat Medic talent (which minimises reload downtime as you use the potion launchers' shots to constantly heal allies, which does make a genuine difference in a match). There was also the issue of characters who couldn't reload, buying Deft Hands, and wasting credits; right up until OB57 blanked the item out in 2017 (Sha Lin, Grover, Moji, Maeve and Terminus specifically). Deft Hands may also be helpful on characters with painstakingly long reloads (like Raum, whose reload is four seconds), but there are loadout cards that help with this.
  • Until Patch 4.5 changed it, Veteran was almost never purchased by anyone. The only effect it had was to boost your natural out-of-combat healing, which required you to spend five seconds doing nothing and avoid getting shot at. You had wait the full 5 seconds, or the item did diddley squat for you. Purchasing Veteran did not reduce the time it takes for the health regeneration to kick in either. If you could afford to wait those 5 seconds, you could also afford to wait the few seconds that Veteran would have saved you, and it was simply better to spend your credits and item slots on something else that was more immediately useful, such as Chronos, Cauterize (before its removal), Illuminate, etc. The only times where Veteran was useful is if you were playing a Front Line with a lot of health (so the max-health-percentage-based effect was bigger) and there was no Support on your team. If there was a Support on your team, purchasing Veteran was jokingly considered an insult, as in "you are so bad at healing me that Veteran does a better job than you!". This was finally addressed in Patch 4.5, where instead of being an out-of-combat self heal item, it increased the base health of a champion in 4% increments, which is not only more applicable to people's play-styles, but significantly more useful on champions with lower health pools (like supports or flanks), increasing survivability. However, it does run into the issue of being compared to Haven, another item that was reworked in the same patch to reduce both direct and area damage. Reducing incoming damage and increasing your max base HP both lead to similar effects; increasing how much you can get shot at before you die, and since you take damage almost constantly, it's almost always better to choose Haven over Veteran as it means you can survive more punishment, rather than extending your health pool. That said Veteran isn't completely worthless for the reasons stated above, and combining the two is a viable strategy in some cases.
  • Kill To Heal, which restores HP whenever you get a kill or elimination, is strongly associated with bad players since it only heals you when the enemy you're fighting against dies, rather than during the battle, where you'd actually need the extra health. The healing is also affected by the passive anti-heal in the match, so it's unlikely to make a difference even if you get attacked by another enemy right away. The only times where it might be useful is on certain supports, who get eliminations when the allies they heal get kills (such as Seris and her very spammable "Restore Soul" healing ability).