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DreamLeague Season 28 Recap: Shadow Fiend Rules The Meta
Now that DreamLeague Season 28 is over, we can dissect the picks and bans and further understand the meta. Dota 2 patch 7.40c has been here a while and it's increasingly obvious which heroes are overpowered, and which could use some love.
In this article, we will dive into the most popular picks. We will also check which heroes did well, and which faltered.
Treant Protector is the most contested hero in Dota 2 right now
While he only had 14 appearances, Treant was banned 180 times. That's a whooping 194 showing in the draft. Or 99% of the time.
Treant is just an overall strong opening pick. He can play both support roles, does well in lane, stabilizes other lanes with Living Armor. And he comes with a pretty useful ultimate and Shard upgrade.
But Treant's win rate is second highest in the top five heroes. Shadow Fiend in fact was the premium pick, winning nearly 65% of his matches. Most often as a carry, he can go for Kaya Yasha to set his ultimate, or focus on right clicks to win late game.
His master, Shadow Demon also made it to our list. With nearly 60% win rate. Similar to Treant, Shadow Demon is a great opening pick who does well in lane and comes with one of the best saves in the game.
Our last two on the list were contested heavily but lost more games than they won. Batrider and Jakiro were picked or banned 177 and 157 times respectively. Both had a reasonable win rate but their overwhelming popularity made teams pretty good at countering them.
Tinker is back, and he's worse than ever
When looking at the most successful heroes, we're checking for heroes with 5, 15, and 30 games played.
Looking at the list, Tinker emerged late in the tournament as an unbeatable threat. Winning all five games, he is a durable, highly mobile mid laner who scales incredibly well into the late-game. Let's all celebrate the return of Tinker. Yay....
With 15 games under his belt, Lion also impressed. Winning 11 of his 15 games. Over half of his games were with Aurora, where his stable lane, and multiple stuns make him well suited for Myroslav "Mira" Kolpakov's playstyle.
Another support on our list is Hoodwink, with a pretty bonkers performance. 40 Games played and 27 of them were victories. Hoodwink synergizes well with team fight while also boosting all her allies' damage thanks to her Shard. She also comes with one of the best Breaks in the game.
Kunkka failed to make a splash at DreamLeague 28
We'll use the same parameters to list the biggest failures of the tournament, and there are plenty. But some stand out more than others.
First on our list is Kunkka. Despite being a fairly flexible core with an open item build, the hero only won one out of eight games. We aren't sure if it is due to him being weak or teams not practicing with him often enough.
A few supports didn't fare well either and the two biggest disappointments were Nyx Assassin and Clockwork. Nyx won 6 out of 19 games, while Clockwork was slightly worse, with 10 victories in 33 games. The two have very different problems. Nyx is extremely weak in the lane and countered heavily by detection, while Clockwork struggles later on, when enemies can use Force Staff and BKB's to nullify most of his impact.
And that's some of the stats on the latest DreamLeague tournament. Shadow Fiend rules, Kunkka drools. You can check the official tournament page for more info. Overall, Dota 2 definitely feels like it could use a patch right now, as the meta has calcified too much on certain picks right now.
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Featured Image Source: Valve