You can’t choose your hero all the time in All-pick anymore

In the latest small updates to Dota 2, Valve’s developers fiddled a bit with the way Ranked All-pick works, as it now will be removing 25 random heroes with every new draft in the game from the popular mode, rendering them unusable.

Normally, a Ranked All-pick puts players in team with other similar MMR and lets them choose the hero they want to play as. The experimental update wasn’t explained, but we can see why it’s being implemented as some heroes are getting abused with new patches.

The most notable examples of this was Patch 6.83 in the middle of 2015, where the heroes Troll Warlord and Sniper were buffed to such a degree that they became incredible nuisances—and enjoyed an overall global winrate of almost 55 percent each. Valve made its first effort to tackle the issue of certain heroes seeing an overwhelming amount of play in May of 2016, when the developer gave teams the ability to ban heroes in the drafting stage. Additionally, Valve also removed the ranked all-pick mode altogether for a brief period of time.

The update only targets the ranked all-pick mode, meaning players will be free to pick whichever hero they want in the game mode’s unranked equivalent. It’s currently not clear when the full range of heroes will become available again in all-pick—so until then, make sure to pick some daring or off-meta heroes.