Overview
You've probably seen chatters and streamers talking about "Wave Theory" and shops being bugged this set, and you might have, at some point, wondered what they were talking about. Maybe you're still wondering about it. Here's a quick primer on what it is:
The idea is that you should roll 3 or 4 times and then stop if you don't see the unit you're looking for. If you do, then it's "the wave" and you should continue to roll 3 or 4 more times.
This is backed up a little bit because on non-rolling turns for other players, they might have your unit in their shop. For example, if you are looking for Darius and 4 other people have a Darius in their shop, your odds of finding him are lower, but you can't possibly know that because you don't have perfect information. Wave Theory is one way of trying to account for that.
You might not have known anything about it until you read this bit from the latest patch notes.
It all began with this tweet from @CuewarsTaner.
This was compounded by reports from players about experiencing abnormal levels of bad luck while rolling this set, which Mortdog responded to here.
A lot of people responded with examples, but the short of it is that it's very easy to cherry pick specific examples of low variance. TFT is a game where you are inevitably going to experience low roll games. It happens. So what does this all mean? Wave Theory has some truth to it but it's not a tried and true science. If you have 2 HP and 60 gold, and you roll 3 times and don't see any of your units... well, you should probably keep rolling.
There has been no real indication that shops are actually bugged outside of the bugs mentioned above -- one egregious example of Pandora's Bench resulted in a player rolling 40-50 gold and finding no 5-cost units, but that should all be fixed by now. The low roll this set is mostly compounded by reroll comps being strong, and because fights can be very snowbally, you end up noticing your bad spots more often than not because it can be very easy to get 7-0ed or 8-0ed on Stage 4 when you can't kill the enemy's main tank.
All in all, Wave Theory is something to be aware of, and it is generally good fundamentally to not over-roll anyway!
