Lion

Lion is the second most-played hero in Dota 2 and it does not win. Not at any bracket, not by any margin. The win rate peaks at 49.4% in Herald and drifts down to 48.3% in Divine, and at no point in between does it cross fifty.

Forty-three of the 127 heroes here never average a win at any bracket, so this is not rare in itself. What is unusual is the company Lion keeps at the top of that list: it is the most-played of the forty-three by a wide margin, ahead of Windranger and Drow Ranger. Hundreds of thousands of games a patch go to a hero that loses, very slightly, in every pair of hands.

The flatness is the point. A spread of 1.1 points across the entire bracket range means Lion plays almost identically for a Herald and a Divine. Most heroes on this site move — Bristleback collapses by 8.3 points, Enigma climbs by 9.2 — and the movement is usually the most interesting thing about them. Lion has almost none. Whatever it is doing, it does at the same rate regardless of who is holding it.

The matchup table is where the losing shows up concretely: four favourable results against ten unfavourable. Treant Protector takes it to 35.2%, with Pangolier and Earth Spirit both near 39.6%. The wins that do land are against Grimstroke at 61.3% and Razor at 58.7%.

One result is worth pointing at for a different reason. Lion loses to Sniper at 43.5% over 170 games; Sniper’s page shows the same pairing from the other side at 56.5% over the same 170 games. The two numbers are exact complements because they are the same matches counted twice, which is a small reassurance that this table is measuring what it claims to.

None of this makes Lion a bad pick, and the gap from fifty is small enough that a couple of points of personal skill swamps it. But it does mean the hero’s popularity is not being driven by its win rate, because its win rate has been quietly telling people to stop for a long time.