I think new ideas unrelated to balance are a much bigger factor than we would want to believe. The reality is there are too few of us to test everything, simply not enough manpower to cover all possible builds. The game has thousands of endgame viable builds, hundreds of highly competitive ones, and the chance of smth escaping our lense is very high, unfortunately. Blightlord was basically a last week on a whim testing that got into top15. And just a day after the patch we found out smth about another build that was untested but might’ve gotten it into top20.
A lot of phys builds have lost the edge of being strong vs enemy phys hits. Nothing about the dmg was nerfed, some builds were even buffed, it’s more about how everything else received much bigger buffs.
About OA - again, partially we didn’t realise the potential before but more than that the general power creep now allows to stack OA and crit on a much bigger variety of builds while keeping the tank at SR30-31 in check. Chinese were doing it for quite some time because they specialised in speedrunning that requires expert SR knowledge and skills. Now it’s available for more casual players.