So, I've been sitting in queue for the PBE for over 45 minutes now for blind pick with my elo still right around starter elo (~1400, most likely) and was having issues trying to get queues to pop yesterday, as well. It would be nice to know just how good Malz, Kass, XZ, Eve, Twitch, etc are now, and people are asking for info on the forums, but it's hard to provide when games won't start.

Because we don't have ranked yet, pretty much every game is serious business because no one wants to lose too many games and fall back into elo hell. Maybe we could start using the PBE more for when we just want to try stuff out? Main server normals = ranked, PBE normals = normals? We could bring the DominateDominion chat over there, too.

Would be easier to just organize a custom game than to wait in queue.

I queued up about an hour ago and manged to get a game. It was hard to judge the changes because my teammates were terrible... Got stomped by backcapping Twitch and Eve. lol

Yeah, it is hard to tell, but I got a few queues to pop in a row after an hour on the first. So far it looks like (against the bads on PBE):

Malz is way more powerful because his voidlings don't seem to leash anymore. Probably ban tier now.
Kassadin is still ban tier.
Xin Zhao is... likely the most boring champ in existence and my team steamrolled, so it was hard to tell how much I really contributed. Probably not going to play him again.
Zyra is probably tier 1/2. Has some nice combos with her W not having a cast time and her E snare giving the plants some time to do work. Also has pseudo wards, which is always nice.
I haven't played as them yet, but Eve seems to be ban tier or tier 1 and Twitch seems to be tier 1 or 2.