Play games
Choose the game that interests you and play itfor free.
Complete the quests
Every game has some quests for which you will receive Soul Gems.
Receive rewards
You can exchange your Soul Gems for Steam Wallet top-ups, game keys, CS:GO Skins and other rewards.
With a few weeks left before 7.27, every pro tournament and pub averages average are being checked by IceFrog and the dev team so they could finally look for ways to end the zoo meta in 7.26. Comparing some hero stats from DatDota and Dotabuff, here are some heroes that need to make a comeback in 7.27.
The pros’ non-meta heroes
According to DatDota’s statistics of at least 10 games, Omniknight, Drow Ranger, and Techies have the lowest win rates in the Pro scene.
Omniknight has a 15% win rate across his 13 games. Omniknight was a strong offlane back then, but several changes on his talent tree in 7.26b and 7.26c have made him a weak late game core. What once was a +100 Purification Radius became a +20 movement speed talent at level 10. Aside from that, Omniknight could not properly fit in the current meta as he lacks disables that most teams look for an offlaner. He has great defensive abilities, but in the late game, it would be hard for their draft to setup fights if their tank can’t initiate properly.
With 25% win rate over 12 games, Drow Ranger is the second one in this list. After a few reductions on some of the branches on her talent tree, Drow started falling out of the meta. Although she has great farming and pushing potential, pros could not fit her in a proper draft as there are better substitute cores than her such as Luna. Drow’s current item meta could not make her durable enough to survive the magical onslaught brought by meta cores such as Ember and Queen of Pain. If Drow is not well-positioned, then the team quickly loses their main damage dealer in fights.
The third one is Techies who has a 30% win rate at exactly 10 matches. Before 7.26c, I saw several pro matches where Techies had been impactful. The first one that came to my mind is Virtus.Pro’s Zayac who carried games on his shoulders with position 4 Techies. However, Techies began to leave the meta after his Blast Off Talents were reduced. Techies can be a great high ground defender with mines; or even a ganker with the Blast Off build, but with the meta making Necro books viable, Techies’ arsenal of nukes are now easily countered early on.
The weakest in pubs
As per Dotabuff’s 7.26 data, IO, Leshrac, and Tiny are the weakest ones so far.
With a 2.54% pick rate and a 41.29% win rate, IO is still weak in pubs. Although IO is still usually banned in Pro matches, the reason why it struggles in pub matches is because of the lack of communication between players. The talent changes in 7.26 did not affect IO much, but pub players find it difficult to play with IO as they are not on the same page. Some IO players force their cores to fight unnecessary fights. As a result, their cores lack farm to scale well in the late game, ultimately losing their match.
Not far ahead is Leshrac who has a 42.71% win rate and a 2.12% pick rate. The disco pony’s talents have been hit since 7.26b. Because of this, Leshrac’s state in pubs have been weakened. Leshrac has a deal of burst and pushes, but without proper ways to close out the game with his allies, Leshrac begins to scale down in a late game, especially when the enemy team has the proper counters against him. Aside from that, the nerf with the Boots of Travel greatly affected Leshrac as he usually uses Bot to push lanes, and TP out to escape. Without it, he has a harder time maximizing his abilities to push.
The last on this list is the Tiny who has 44.43% win rate and around 6% pick rate. Tiny one of the best position 4’s, but after accumulating several nerfs up to 7.26b, he became a difficult hero to play with. His Talent reductions on the stats as well as the Avalanche made him less viable as a pos 4. Even though he had the potential to become a core, the nerfs going back from TI9 slowly weakened his capability to be part of drafts in pub matches.
What’s next in 7.27
7.26 has just been mainly about nerfing talents and several items, but with the plans laid out for 7.27, I expect that these heroes would show back up. Even though they were once the strongest, the 7.26 may have been too much of a nerf for them.
As a suggestion, maybe the dev team could adjust the base values of certain skills instead of the talent values. With this, the meta would still require a balance of fighting and farming without making another meta of quick pushes and snowball matches.