Now before you go all Sniper troll yadah yadah, hear me out. The current pub meta has to be one of the closest metas to the pro scene that we ever had. Which means if you don’t pick meta heroes you’re fucked

The Data

Looking at Dotabuff and comparing it with the picks in TI a quick glance can tell you that the meta heroes are all some of the most commonly picked heroes in almost all ranks. If you ignore pudge as an outlier that he always has been, Spirit breaker ranks as the top pick % for all ranks except herald, guardian & crusader where he comes in at 2nd.

And thats only pick rates. If you could somehow find ban rates for Spirit Breaker, I’m confident he would have been top P/B in every rank.

Same with Spectre, she comes in top ten in every rank again except for the same 3 lowest ranks.

CK is even more egregious than Specter where he is even higher on the totem pole with one of the highest win rates across all ranks in Dota.

Why does that make this meta boring?

So what does all of these data tell you? Basically it means if you are playing ranked and want to win, you literally either have to pick meta heroes or from min 0 have a disadvantage purely through the draft and that reins true the higher your rank goes, so from Legend upwards its literally meta pick after meta pick almost every game.

And there’s a reason why they are meta picks, because the heroes are insanely strong right now. Now you might argue that meta picks in the pro scene have always been the strongest heroes and why is this patch any different, and the answer to that is

This meta is braindead easy and applicable at all ranks

Comparing it to the zoo meta or IO support meta where inherently only specialists or extremely high MMR players play, or even the morphling meta where Morphling is a difficult hero to play and not everyone in pubs are confident to play him again except for specialists and high MMR players

Or combo drafts like Lycan Tiny Or heck even teamfighting drafts like Wraith pact where you need your team to play in a certain style or way which is impossible to do consistently in pub games.

In this meta you just pick strong heroes that can’t die, run in and cast spells and not even a damn, which makes it accessible to people of all ranks, especially to the lower ranks which were gatekept by the skill required to pull off some of the other meta picks.

Your positioning as a core matters so much less because every hero is so damn tanky right now. Your 5k HP Chaos knight or Specter is not going to die to a lion or shaman blink initiation which is also part of the reason why these heroes fell off.

Also decision making matters less now because spells have lost all their value due to how short their cooldowns are. You don’t see the 2 min gap where a team is weaker because they don’t have global silence or Ravage but low 40 second cooldowns from specter haunt to 0 cooldowns like Spirit Breaker and Bristleback. Add to the fact that active items now are so much less important due to the nerfs to BKB and Halberd + higher HP so you have a larger window to use items.

So this means you are pretty much forced into playing meta heroes if you want to win. Playing non meta heroes like Drow or Sniper is just actively griefing now. Its starting to feel like LoL where you are forced into picking meta heroes or simply losing.

Add to the fact that the challenge of pushing high ground now + the bigger map, the game feels so much worse than it ever has been.