The Best and Worst Dota 2 Heroes of Patch 7.28

Part of the beauty of Dota 2 is the huge changes that come with each new path. Mountains turn into valleys and vice versa. IceFrog likes to keep the game fresh and to force teams to rethink their strategies. An emphasis is always placed on the professional scene, but casual players feel the changes too.

Meta Considerations

For instance, one of my favorite heroes is Templar Assassin. But her pick rate is so low (4.12%) and her win rate so abysmal (47.16%) that I’m afraid to pick her in my games. Some players just report you if you make such unpopular choices when other heroes, such as Bounty Hunter, Ancient Apparition or Monkey King have much higher win and pick rates.

The meta always revolves around the strongest and most popular heroes. If a hero you love gets countered by many of the popular choices, and if on top of that the items and timings are unfavorable to that hero relative to the rest, you practically have no other choice but to learn new heroes that work better in the current meta. Even if you’re a diehard Nature’s Prophet player or love Enchantress, picking them at this time gives people the impression that you want to lose. NP has a win rate lower than 44% while Enchantress is only slightly better (44.56%).

Of course, if you have one thousand matches on a hero and a win rate of 60%+, then the fact that most people fail with it in the current meta doesn’t mean that you’ll fail as well. But it’s still true that if the community as a whole finds it very challenging to win with a certain hero, that hero is probably underpowered compared to the average.

Most Successful Heroes in Patch 7.28

The big heroes of this patch are Juggernaut, Ogre Magi, Wraith King, Monkey King, Shadow Shaman, Riki, Sand King, Nyx, Underlord, Clinkz, and Chaos Knight. In particular, Wraith King seems to be completely overpowered right now, having a 55% win rate and a 17.8% pick rate. His KDA ratio is 3.47. That’s absolutely ridiculous and I fully expect him to get nerfed soon.

Based on these popular and successful choices, it’s no wonder that we have heroes like Kunkka and Tiny getting little attention. And when they do get picked, players lose with them more often than not. At a first glance, you wouldn’t expect this to be the case. If we look at Tiny’s changes in patch 7.28, we can clearly see that the hero’s been buffed. The only nerf it got was the avalanche damage to tossed units. Other than that, everything got better. But it’s still not enough. Because other heroes got much better buffs, item build options, and timings.

Overall, patch 7.28 has forced a lot of people to abandon the disfavored heroes and just spam the ones that yield good results on average. The only players who continue to stubbornly pick them are the ones who have specialized in them over the years. If you have 250+ games on a hero, your superior knowledge of that hero may compensate for its deficiencies and allow you to win with it more than 50% of the time. But that doesn’t mean that you’re not starting each game with a disadvantage.

Worst Heroes of Patch 7.28

The worst heroes of patch 7.28 are the following: Keeper of the Light (43.35% win rate), Nature’s Prophet (44% win rate), Tiny (44.17% win rate), Enchantress (44.56% win rate), and Kunkka (45.29% win rate). You can still win with Kunkka if you’re Attacker, but don’t expect to be applauded if you pick him in pubs.

 

Photo credit: Valve