Top 5 Heroes in HoN

A great new feature on the HoN website is Hero Usage Stats, which records a summary of hero usage for the last seven days.  This can give you an idea of what the “best” and “worst” heroes are, and which are most popular.  Here are some recent trends:

Best Heroes by Win %

1. Plague Rider: 59.1%
2. Sand Wraith: 58.7%
3. Pestilence: 57.3%
4. Tempest: 55.8%
5. Demented Shaman: 54.4%

No surprises here; we already know these heroes dominate.  You could make a great lineup just by grabbing these five heroes in an AP game (Plague solo mid, Tempest jungle/Pest lane, Demented Shaman/Sand Wraith lane).  Jeraziah comes in a close sixth with a 54.2% win rate.

Worst Heroes by Loss %

1. Devourer: 58.5%
2. Dark Lady: 55.9%
3. Pandamonium: 55.0%
4. Armadon: 54.9%
5. Succubus: 54.9%

This makes sense because Dark Lady and Pandamonium are some of the hardest heroes to play, and contribute very little to the team early game.  They are by no means impossible to play though; when you’re good, you’re good, and top ten player chu` has gone 28-0 so far with Pandamonium, according to his player stats (holy shit).

As for Devourer and Succubus, these heroes make sense as well, since they are highly prone to error (hooking the wrong thing, sleeping someone at the wrong time or having your own team go right to sleep from attacking the slept guy while he escapes in the meantime).  And of course people like to pick Devourer when they are going to mess around anyways.

Most Popular Heroes by Pick %

1. Scout: 4.4%
2. Witch Slayer: 3.7%
3. Puppet Master: 3.2%
4. Pestilence: 3.2%
5. Arachna: 3.1%

No surprises here either.  Scout is an Easy Mode favorite, while Witch Hunter is new and fun to play.  Puppet Master, Pestilence, and Arachna are proven heroes that win games.  Where are Jeraziah and Tempest?  BD mode means that these typical first picks are almost always banned and are therefore getting played much less.

Least Popular Heroes by Pick %

1. Ophelia: 0.5%
2. Soul Reaper: 0.9%
3. Hellbringer: 0.9%
4. Defiler: 1.0%
5. Armaddon: 1.0%

Ophelia is obvious since it requires a lot of micro (read: effort) to use several creeps at the same time, while Armaddon, Defiler, and Hellbringer are just considered by most to be pretty boring to play.  Soul Reaper is a surprise since I think it’s pretty fun and gets to killsteal a lot.

Remember, a large portion of these stats are taken from trashy EM games that are massed daily, but even so, they still give us some great info about the state of the game.