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Also, with Rampant Hellfire, you sacrifice the massive burst that Ruinous Affliction gives in order to give yourself some (admittedly REALLY nice) sustained damage, but at the cost of it being ramp-up focused. You have to consistently hit multiple heroes with your Q in order to get the bonus in a timely manner, and it drops off fairly quickly. In addition, an E build synergizes very nicely with Gul'dan's sustained damage, essentially letting him fill both damage roles in a team at once, being very flexible in terms of compositions.
Now it could be that there is bias in this data. Two possibilities come to mind. Either people more often pick Rain when they are clearly winning already at level 10 because they feel they can afford the risk; or people pick Rain when their background Gul'dan win rate is 60% because they feel more comfortable experimenting. Both of these effects seem likely present, but for me they seem unlikely to explain the nine per cent win rate advantage Rain has over Horrify in Team League. And even if these effects explain much of the apparent advantage of Rain, it seems to clearly follow that Rain cannot be nearly as terrible as many people suppose. "One of the worst in the game" has a higher win-rate on hotslogs than "one of the best in the game".
So here is an alternate theory. People sometimes talk as if the seven second channel means casting Rain is actually worse than not. Then sometimes there is the implication that its randomness makes it bad (as though the number of heroes you can catch with a Corruption is not also substantially random--further, see this breakdown of how the meteors are distributed). Both these suggestions fail to a) properly evaluate how much damage Rain actually does and b) account for the fact that Gul'dan is generally safe while channeling because of the range (she should either be hiding or well behind her party) and because she's not expending mana! When you cast Rain, Corruption should be on cool down so you are actually just missing 3-4 Fel Flames, and all the mana you save = damage Gul'dan is not taking from Life Tap. This theory explains why Rain of Destruction has a reasonable win rate: it can do more damage than just about anything, can catch heroes as they attempt to run away because of the large area, is most potent when a team fight is going on near the enemies' base so that you are hitting their buildings and units at the same time, and saves Gul'dan mana=heatlth while channeling. It can work on defence too when you can cast it behind a wall say with the enemies' pushing boss/whatnot near the centre.
I am happy to hear theories about the advantages of Horrify, but I find them unconvincing if they do not take the available data into account. Particularly, it seems like many players write off Rain of Destruction based on the theoretical superiority of Horrify--it looks better on paper. So my request to you is to give Rain of Destruction another shot, or to give an explanation of the win-rate discrepancy. Or explain the situations it doesn't work and the situations it does (because clearly it works sometimes). Or, perhaps include a disclaimer in your guide? "While I think Rain of Destruction is terrible, it has a higher win rate than Horrify on hotslogs, so take my opinion with a grain of salt"
Incidentally, I agree Deep Impact is probably an under-performer and I only ever take it if in a win-more situation. It does improve Rain of Destruction more than it might first seem, by keeping heroes in the area.
The way I see it, the winrate discrepancy is likely based on the overall effort put into making the ultimate work. RoD *might* end up becoming the new uber-meta pick, but I simply can't see it ever outdoing a 2-second full team stun/displacement that can also be talented to be 3 seconds and apply Vulnerable. Hope this was satisfactory!
1. I tried to control for people just sucking at Horrify by focussing on upper tiers, as described in OP. This only strengthened the effect. That doesn't mean what you suggest is not there, but if it were, wouldn't it be weaker at upper tiers, where people know how abilities work and how to mostly land skillshots et c? (It could also be that your effect is present but that Horrify is easier for skilful players to get around than Rain, somehow?) Your other claim that only relatively dedicated Gul'dan players ever pick Rain is more convincing to me and is a subset of my suggestion that mostly 60% win-rate Gul'dans take it.
2. Corruption is random in two senses: first, it's random whether multiple heroes will be in position for you to catch them together, which is why I mentioned number of heroes. Of course you and your team can control the position of enemy team to some extent, but also not. Second, watch this fifteen second bit of Liszt's first Mephisto Waltz. I have never seen a pianist perform that live without errors (in studio they cut multiple takes together to remove misnotes). On a good day, maybe they get 5/6 of the jumps. Which ones? It's random. The greatest pianists in the world can't do it without a bit of luck. And unless you're in Diamond you probably shouldn't be comparing yourself to a great pianist in terms of dedication and skill anyway. (This doesn't even get at people changing direction during Corruption.) All this fear of RNG people cite against Rain seems to me to misapprehend that almost everything that happens in the game is partly under our control and partly not. People are risk averse and live in an imaginary land where getting a skill-shot is "skill" whereas RNG is "random" and that makes one better than the other, when an appraisal of how often each thing actually happens should be the relevant question. It's almost moralizing, like a person deserves to lose if they miss skill-shots but not if the random meteors misfire. Well, deserving to win doesn't win games.
To me it still seems that Horrify has a lot of utility but Rain does enough damage to be similarly good. I'm sure you would agree that there is an amount of damage that could outweigh the utility of Horrify.
Ah, I understand that you don't like Rain of Destruction, but it's a thematically awesome ability I think. They could tweak it so it's not absolutely useless some times though.