Necrophos

Necrophos has the second-highest Herald win rate in the dataset at 54.0%, behind only Wraith King. It also falls 4.8 points from there, reaching 49.2% by Divine and crossing fifty somewhere around Ancient. Both halves of that sentence describe the same hero, and the gap between them is most of what this page has to say.

It is worth being direct about the limits here. The matchup table is nearly empty: not one pairing clears the significance test in Necrophos’s favour, and only one clears against it — Windranger at 42.5% over 134 games. For a hero with over half a million recorded games that is a strikingly thin result, and it means the bracket column is carrying this page almost alone.

Thin is not the same as absent, though, and the brackets are built from tens of thousands of games apiece. The decline is real and it is unbroken: 54.0, 52.4, 51.7, 50.9, 50.5, 49.9, 49.2, down at every single step without a recovery. Only ten of the 127 heroes here fall at every step like that, and Necrophos has the second-highest starting point among them — behind Wraith King again.

The absence of favourable matchups is itself informative. Heroes with strong matchup tables tend to have a specific thing they beat — Rubick has large committed spells, Axe has heroes that want to brawl. Necrophos measurably beats nobody, which suggests its low-bracket strength is not a matchup effect at all but something more general: a hero that is durable and forgiving, qualities that matter most where mistakes are frequent and matter least where they are not.

That reading is a hypothesis, not a measurement, and this page cannot settle it.

One further number is worth putting next to the decline. Necrophos still accounts for 10.3% of its games at Divine — more than double Bristleback’s 4.3%, despite a comparable fall. High-bracket players have not dropped it the way they drop the steepest decliners, which makes the shape here different from a straightforward trap pick. The win rate says it stops being good; the pick rate says nobody has concluded that.

What the page can say with confidence is that the single number most worth knowing about Necrophos is not its overall win rate but which bracket you are reading it from.