Here, I am a filthy LD picker in the immortal bracket and I can tell you why valve didn’t nerf it… the hero is not THAT great… As simple as that.

The hero offers no teamfight and the damage it delivers (to heroes) is not that good either, so yeah it’s tanky, but doesnt offer much. Compare it to kunkka that gives a ton of easy to set up TF power, damage reduction for the whole team or compare it to OD/TA/SF who melts people in a matter of seconds, LD is quite average on almost anything besides tanking, don’t get me wrong, he’s a good laner (probably one of the best), but he has weaknesses.

In the early laning stage, don’t pressure the hero, PRESSURE THE BEAR, the bear dies, and it’s absolutly game winning if you can kill it. Killing the bear is quite easy later in the game if he doesn’t have bkb, and most LD players know that going BKB on the bear means almost sure that they can still go for your hero and ignore ur BKB, as almost every hc melee, the bear CAN BE KITED. And also is easier to kite than any other melee because if you separe the bear from the hero 1100 range (less than blink dagger) the bear won’t even attack.

So then why does he has such a good Winrate? First, look at the amount of games, he’s not a hero to pick every game, good LD players pick the hero in good games for it, as you can see it’s not like old CK with a 54% WR in over a 1,300 games in the last 8 days, it has been picked in 500 games in the mid role. You could apply the same concept to lycan or even visage. These type of heroes are really goods in some games, and the most important part of playing them is knowing when to pick them. Pullin out a win in an uncontested game as LD is very easy, but try to do it with a lot of enemy counters.

And last but not least, being a really good laner means that… yes, he almost always win his lane, and that my friends is REALLY important in pubs where people have such a weak mentality. Most players in pubs (even worse in immortal bracket) give up at the first adversity… I have a really good WR with LD mid even though IM NOT A MID PLAYER, mostly because of kids that rage buyback and go jungle after I kill them rushing diffusal when they went some naked midas or some stupid shit, then I also take their tower afterwards, and the rest of tier 1 towers, giving my supports a lot of gold and a good game. In the meantime their greedy mid has a midas, is tilted, their hc has a midas and is also tilted having to farm the side camps cause showing in the map is dangerous, and their supports are also qeueing midas cause “my noob mid won’t carry this game” and feeding in sidelanes being alone with no escape item.

The reality is that the hero WILL take your towers but if you don’t feed him and try to fight him properly, he can’t do much more and he will fall off after the laning stage and mid game. Controlling the map is easy in pubs when you win the laning stage of the game, but pushing HG is a different story. That’s why the hero didn’t have such a great WR in TI, only a few specialist players (people that play the hero A LOT) picked LD with a couple of mixed results (Ace is a good example).

TL;DR: The hero is great on pubs where coordination sucks. On proper TFs the hero offers pretty much nothing.

Don’t believe me? try playing LD and you will learn the hero has counters and has weaknesses.