Three Top Picks Of The Current Meta And What Changes We Want To See
Three of the top trending heroes of the current meta are Mirana, Nightstalker, and Lycan. In divine/immortal games Mirana is picked at 36.33% and wins at 53.74% in the past week. Nightstalker is picked in 30.43% of games and wins 53.55% of divine/immortal games. Lycan is picked in only 5.25% but wins 56.05%. All of these statistics are based on the past week as of 9/23/2019.
This makes these three heroes the hot picks of the current meta. Mirana has been on the rise for quite some time now but recently has become a very popular top pick that wins at a high rate. Nightstalker hasn’t been seen as a top hero in the past but now is one of the top picks. Lycan has always been more of a niche pick that players had to learn how to play and now wins at a very high rate.
Mirana
Her Strengths
Mirana is one of the most versatile and unique heroes in the game. She can be played in positions 1-5 and has no must build items. There is no wrong item choice for Mirana so depending on how your game is going you can build guardian greaves, or dagon, or force staff, or pipe of insight, and have it not be suspicious for your team.
This flexibility brings a large advantage over other heroes in the game that have strict item builds such as Clockwerk who almost always needs to build a force staff. If you can adjust your item build and position based on how your specific game is going and your enemy has to play in their expected way then that can lead to a slight advantage which contributes to Mirana’s high win rate.
Mirana also has great team fight abilities. Her ultimate allows her to turn her whole team invisible which is amazing for initiating or running from team fights. Also if you land an arrow in the early game, the stun lasts for so long and that can easily secure you a kill in the lane or do some serious damage so the enemy can’t stay.
Changes We Could See
Mirana was nerfed slightly in the latest patch. Her arrow is very strong so they reduced the base damage and increased the bonus damage which makes the damage come from landing long distance arrows. Her ultimate also got an increase in mana cost.
I don’t see Valve nerfing some core parts of Mirana such as her long attack range which allows her to harass enemies in lane from a safe distance or the stun duration of her arrow which is devastating at all stages of the game. Instead changes to her attributes such as agility or intelligence could be possible.
By reducing her agility or intelligence it can make her less versatile and force her play style into either a spell caster or right clicker. By making her less versatile her play style can’t be as flexible and that would eliminate one of her main strengths in the recent meta.
Night Stalker
His Strengths
Nightstalker is another versatile hero who can now play multiple positions, usually position 3 or 1 but other positions aren’t unheard of. He has been getting small buffs pretty consistently for a while now and they’ve added up.
Other than his versatile position, Nightstalker is one of the fastest and tankiest heroes in the game. At level 7 and at night he can solo kill most heroes on the map and that makes the map smaller if you’re facing Nightstalker. You can’t farm in the safe lane if your support leaves in the early mid game or you risk getting ran at and killed by Nightstalker.
With the new Agahanim’s Scepter for Nightstalker, he becomes a hero that can flash farm and deal significant amounts of area of effect damage in team fights. The day was a serious weakness for him in the past but now with the new Agahanim’s Scepter, it becomes a strength by being able to flash farm.
With the small changes adding up and the new Agahanim’s Scepter, Nightstalker is finally in a position where he’s considered overpowered.
Changes We Could See
Nightstalker is hard to kill, can gank heroes, plays multiple positions, flash farmer, half of the game he’s very powerful, and has an area of effect silence that lasts for a long time. Perhaps Valve can take away a few of these parts from Nightstalker?
Reducing his armor by 1 or 2 can make the first 5 minutes of his game more difficult. After the first 5 minutes he comes online but if his laning phase is impacted in a negative way then he may not be able to solo kill other heroes at the first or second night time.
Also his Aghanim’s Scepter probably needs a nerf. Hitting all enemies in an area seems too powerful, maybe the closest four units can get hit by his spell, that would reduce his flash farming potential and team fighting ability.
Lycan
His Strengths
Lycan has always been a niche pick. At a pick rate of 5.25% in divine/immortal games this continues to be true. Due to him being a niche pick, his win rate would be higher than other easy to play heroes who anyone can play like Viper because generally only players who know how to play Lycan would play him.
Lycan is a hero who excels at split pushing and joining team fights in timely manners. Recently his new Aghanim’s Scepter buff provides him with random wolves that spawn in a lane which helps with pushing even more.
The latest patch buffed his scepter bonus by adding 1 more wolf and reducing the gold bounty. The patch also reduced the cooldown of his ultimate ability.
The scepter bonus shifts the balance of the map in favor of Lycan and his team. As one lane pushes in, more space is provided to that team. The map becomes bigger for Lycan and his team which allows for more farming opportunities and vision of the enemy. This effect over time can provide a net worth difference in favor of Lycan and his team which improves the chances of his team winning the game by being able to buy more items.
Also with his ultimate cooldown being reduced he is able to join team fights more often. It’s always great when your carry joins team fights because you want to win as many of those as you can.
Changes We Could See
Since he is still a niche pick and wins at such a high rate, perhaps improving his Aghanim’s Scepter bonus was unnecessary. 56.05% win rate in the past week is absurdly high.
Valve recently buffed his ability to team fight by reducing his ultimate cooldown and his ability to farm by buffing his Aghanim’s Scepter.
Since he’s strong in farming the map as the game progresses and in joining team fights with a shorter ultimate, nerfing his early game seems to be an appropriate response. By taking longer to come online, he will need to farm for longer before he is comfortable joining team fights.
This puts pressure on his teammates to provide space and helps his enemies because he doesn’t want to join fights until he gets more items and levels.
So reducing his base attack damage or base strength attribute could work out in helping fix his absurd 56.05% win rate.
mirana is back my friends
imagine unironically thinking a hero that is only pick-able in 1/15 games needs nerfs
LOL
Nightstalker is OP man he dives tier 1 towers at level 3. Even more, the player got urn at minute 6 which made my gold tier juggernaut a joke so imma nag on valve to nerf him out of the meta
Yeah please nerf Lucan aghs that's what's making the hero so strong.
What the hell are you talking about? Nerf mirana? Wow maximum dmg of the arrow is 460. It's so damn big af (that's causes literally nothing to for example pudge since 20 minute of a game). whoah 5 sec of a stun wowowwow (in fact, the average duration is 2,2 sec ). Don't give a damn about what, for example, Lion controls 6,6 sec including 4 seconds of hex and moreover his skills are auto-directed, no need to aim. And his ultimate ability inflicts a minimum of 2 times more damage than the arrow of a mirana and becomes stronger throughout the game. Who cares about it? Let's better fix mirana whose characteristics are just more or less balanced, unlike the other 116 heroes.
@Placebo no wonder why you are still Guardian rank 😁
I'd prefer if you left lycan out of these conversations.
Visage and lycan are mah bois.
They almost never balance around pubs, even with statistics from divine/immortal brackets. I remember when Pudge had a 53% winrate already in 5K+ bracket, then they buffed him again, which drove him to a brief stint of competitive dominance as a position 4.
@Intelligence it literally says crusader and you call him guardian
Smh
@Intelligence Your message is incompatible with your nickname.
Try other arguments besides Ad hominem or rename yourself.
Lion has sub 48% winrate across all brackets, and in the lowest brackets this month it was below 47%, whereas Mirana has above 52% across the board and 55% in highest level pubs. The article has a few big points to consider why this is happening for Mirana (I'd tend to agree with the nerf suggestion as Mirana has the highest agi gain in the game), but since we don't have Lion mentioned in the article I'll give a shot at that part:
Lion has issues with both mobility and power timings. Yeah, he can do a lot of damage with his ulti, but to make good on it you have to hamstring your entire team by either going mid as a slowboi with low gank potential and try to get a decent aghs timing, or worse, trying the same thing from a pos 4 or 5. You'll still need a blink after that preferably, and bam: by that time the Mirana has medallion urn +1, yeeting from lane to lane and saving teammates with a (much) longer range, lower cooldown ultimate. It's not like Mirana is a slouch in the damage department either, with starstorm, leap, and arrow all contributing to her damage output, all fairly readily available. Lion has the majority of his damage locked behind Finger.
What this all means to me is that the games that Lion feels strong were more likely won before he came online. It's also at least a little more likely that the player focused on getting support items to make the best of his moment to moment power before getting the luxury aghs, thus slowing the game down and matching power timings better with the team.
Only NS deserves a nerf. His silence last way too long.
lion easy target for kill he got no natural escape like leap. playing mirana is just as fun as play lottery, who know u could hit ramzez tb with sacred arrow
Mirana used to be a beautiful nightelf, before reduced into movies passerby character Disney female
noob shit analysis
noob shit analysis
Before this patch 7.22g NS was no where in consideration of Pro players and Pub games, Now suddenly everyone needs a Nerf with just a single Buff. Don't complain if you cant just win because you didn't know how to counter a specific hero, i have been a NS spammer but alot of times i have been countered badly and losses games and sometimes i dominated enemies.
He is so shit against tank heros, also he cant do nothing against early bkb carries. Disables, silence also makes him useless.
Try to play in a way to counter heros rather asking for a nerf.
No MK or Slardar? Or did I miss an article or two?
@Placebo Unfortunately arguments in dota about how strong a hero is aren't so simple as their stun is longer than the other hero so they are better it's a more complicated system than that. Even if it was that simple you still fucked it up by comparing three abilities on one hero to one ability on another and brought up a random average with no data(you would have to look at a large set of mirana games and take the average of the stun durations of arrows hit). Generally most heroes are not directly comparable anyways even if you compare all their abilities because mirana has an escape instead of hex and more waveclear as well as the ability to make her team invisible all of which have value which is hard to quantify. This is because even if they are compared to items for what they do those items have gold value and additional stats and do not progress linearly(1 stat on an iron branch is much cheaper than ultimate orb for example). Also an abilities value goes up in down based on the meta while item costs do so much more rarely. All that being said the point is we often have to look at winrates and pickrate by higher tier players instead so in that case to look at someones rank and weight their opinion by that is actually pretty accurate unless that opinion is based on a higher tier players thoughts.
Vendetta i totally agree with that. But unfortunately public is too stupid to understand that. Mirana got 53 win rate or 56. And? So what? Does Mirana have some imbalanced spells? No. Does Mirana have some imbalanced stats? No. Its true that she got a good agility gain, but hell. She got huge mana issues. Its enough to use a couple of times your spells to be out of mana. Same for NS. Im playing pretty often against NS. I dont feel like he's imbalanced at all. He can be easily countered, with viper, just like any other hero with strong passives. But even without viper, NS gets 1 stun or control and he gets annihilated by enemies. Except his speed he doesnt have much of escapes. Making pipe on him is wasting his physical dmg potential, and without it, any magic dmg destroys him. I always laugh when people write these posts and complain how someone is strong. No, its not hero who is strong, its you, you are dumbass. U cannot counter someone. Dont play Dota, u clearly got no idea how to play it.
Comment section is spicy! Guardian and Crusader players' opinion create chaos and cause brain damage every time <3
don't touch my mirana
56% winrate on a hero who's only real niche is pushing against teams that lack AoE control, and you want to call it "absurdly high"? His winrate in previous iterations of 7.00+ were 60% and above, but now it's not fine? The hero has one function - to push. If you dumpster his early game you're basically taking a niche hero and effectively saying "Lycan has been removed from the game".
@Jake
1. Is there an article you are referencing to get those above 60% stats?
2. Yongelee may have felt this way before but hasn't written for Dotabuff long.
3. 56% WR alone is not enough information to make a total judgement on. Keep in mind that for an extremely long time Wisp had a 40% winrate, something like a 2% pick rate, and was still routinely given nerfs because the occasions that the hero was good were too reliant on draft and not enough on personal skill (granted wisp took a lot of skill still, but on an even playing field it still stood out).
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, I don't have a lot of experience with or against the hero (it seems I'm not alone as his pickrate would suggest). I'm more curious if you are willing to entertain other possibilities for his success. High pickrate AND winrate usually suggests something about a hero is OP, but when you have low pickrate and high winrate, it could be a lot of things. It could be people don't have experience against the hero enough and he is skating by on that alone. It could be that the hero is actually OP but is only now just being discovered (this happened to oracle recently). It could be that the hero is too reliant on good communication (again wisp), even for high level pubs.
Ns is balanced now,
Basically valve only add farm ability (Aghanim) wich what night stalker lack of,
All hero with bkb or tank can kill night stalker easily
Or atleast they won't take much damage from void
Last year - can't remember the specific patch number, but it would've been 7.06/7, Lycan had an over 60% winrate at Divine level. I know a lot of people use outliers as their example when it comes to hero winrate comparisons, but Io might have had an *overall* winrate at 40% at a variety of stages, but at the highest levels of play [Divine and Immortal] Io has always shown a better winrate than its general winrate amongst all players.
As for niche heroes having a high winrate, it's usually a case of the hero being picked in the right circumstances, because oftentimes pub play lacks drafting synergy. So if the enemy team drafts towards something specific, bringing out a Lycan pick when the enemy team lacks AoE control [Winter Wyvern is regarded as a fairly hard counter to Lycan] can usually - assuming that the player can play Lycan to a reasonable standard - result in an auto-win if your other lanes don't get completely dumpstered.
Visage 60% win rate all bracket lol not even mentioned.
You need just to give all this heroes MS 280 and you will see how weak they will be)
@Jake
My wisp data is definitely from an overall perspective because the last time I checked was before I figured out where to search for skill-level-specific data on Dotabuff. I just never took the time to find it for a long long time.
Do you happen to remember Lycans' pick rate back then? More data is always better ya know?
To be clear: I don't ascribe to the concept that Valve aims for 50% wr across the board when balancing heroes. That would be trying to shove a square peg in a round hole. As such, I definitely agree that niche heroes are designed to behave in the manner you describe. That aspect cannot and should not be ignored.
The big reason I don't think Lycans' winrate can only be attributed to this niche status is that while the hero is *generally* going to be picked in a favorable position, crap happens too. Bad pick, bad player, bad team, etc. Those losses hurt the numbers more than the wins help it when above 50%. Despite all that, the hero now sits above 57% this month and is now above 4% pickrate. Visage and Lycan hold a full 3% higher winrate than any other niche hero (brood sits just above 54%). Part of me has to believe that, of the games that Lycan is picked, an unnatural percentage of uphill battles are being won because Lycan is *too* good at his niche.
In the past we have seen Valve address this by both buffing and nerfing a hero to help smooth out the pickrate and winrate just a bit. If we were to see some of the article suggested nerfs, what do you think would help keep the hero relevant?
Side note: Visage at ~2% pickrate makes his status even more enigmatic to decipher if you ask me.
lycan got nerfed down enough from all the tower buff in earlier patch, before this multiple shooting forti and like 100 armor added to towers since 7.20, i used to have 80% + winrate on this hero before lol
Leave Lycan alone! :)
Nerf mirana or don't. Either way whenever I see pos 4 POTM I always pick pos 4 Zues. Ez game ez life.