How our data works

Dota2Arena runs its own match scanner on a dedicated server. It reads the public Steam Web API match stream around the clock and stores every ranked all-pick match with ten human players and at least ten minutes of play. Other modes, bot games and abandoned games are left out.

For each match we store the result, duration, the ten heroes, their final items, kills, deaths, assists, farm and damage numbers, and the order in which abilities were skilled. We do not store chat, names or anything that is not part of the public match record.

• Win rate is the share of matches the hero's team won. Pick rate is the share of all scanned matches in which the hero was picked.
• Item numbers count the final inventory. An item bought and sold again does not count. Items under 500 gold are left out of the tables.
• Tier list on the heroes page is a fixed split of the win-rate ranking over the last 7 days: the top 10 % of heroes are S, the next 20 % A, the middle 40 % B, then 20 % C and the last 10 % D. Pick rate is shown but does not change the tier.
• Neutral items count the neutral item held at the end of the match, so an item swapped away mid game does not count.
• Item ranking (/items/ranking/ and the rank on every item page) orders all items with at least 20,000 games by the win rate of players who end the match with the item. The rank within a shop category uses the same pool. Early, mid and late split the same games by match length (under 25, 25 to 40 and over 40 minutes, shown from 500 games). The trend line is the daily win rate on a fixed scale of plus or minus three percentage points around the item's average.
• Item profile (the radar on item pages) compares players who end the match with the item against their own hero's average, per minute: hero damage (Damage), deaths (Defense, fewer is better), assists (Utility), tower damage (Push) and gold per minute (Farming). Each value is a percentile among all items with at least 1,000 games; Scaling is the percentile of the win rate in games longer than 40 minutes. Comparing with the same heroes keeps hero mix and game length out of the shape.
• Matchups compare the hero's win rate with and against another hero. "Advantage" is that win rate minus the hero's overall win rate. We show pairs with at least 1,000 games.
• Benchmarks are averages per game. The percentile says how many of the other heroes have a lower average.
• Ability builds and talents come from the skill order of every player of the hero. They only cover matches scanned since the scanner started recording skill order.

Hero pages show a rolling window of recent matches, usually the last two weeks. Daily trends are kept permanently. The date under each hero's head section says when its numbers were last computed.

All ranks are combined for now. A split by rank bracket follows once player ranks are known to the scanner.

Player names and avatars on this site come from public Steam profiles of players who share their match data with the Dota 2 community. Valve publishes this data; we only read it. Players who switch off "Expose Public Match Data" in Dota 2 do not appear anywhere on Dota2Arena.

Guides and build picks are written by the Dota2Arena team and kept separate from the numbers. Where a sentence contains a number, the number comes from the scanner.