October 14 patch: Deadman Danny jumps nearly eight points at once, Baba drops six
Thirty-five hours after the patch, the effect is clear and shaped like a step: Danny goes from 37.5 to 45.4% wins right when Valve’s notes went out, mostly in high ranks; Baba falls from 58.3 to 51.9% and is now played in only 28% of matches.
Yesterday morning, in [our article on the October 14 patch](/news/deadlock-patch-baba-nerf-deadman-danny-buff), the first hours pointed the way Valve intended, but it was only a few hours, in the middle of the European night. Thirty-five hours and 178,000 Danny and Baba matches later, the effect is clear. And it has a precise shape: a step, not a slope.
Danny: nearly eight points, right at the patch
There was room for doubt. A new hero often recovers on his own in his first days, as players learn him: Baba had gained more than four points between her first and second day, without a single buff. Danny's recovery could have come from that.
It didn't. Cut into three-hour slices, his thirty hours before the patch are flat: between 37 and 39%, with no trend at all. In the three hours after Valve's notes, he jumps to 44.8%, and he has stayed between 43.7 and 46.8% since. On average, 45.4% since the patch against 37.5% before, a +7.9-point gain, over 132,664 matches. The rise lands on the patch to the hour: the buff did it, not learning. And since then the slope stays shallow: barely 1.5 points in a day and a half.
In ranked, he no longer collapses at the top
In ranked, Danny goes from 32.3 to 41%. The gain is biggest where he lost the most: +10.7 points in Phantom, +12.3 in Ascendant, +11.4 in Eternus, against +6.3 among Initiates. Before the patch, he won 8.4 points less in Phantom than among Initiates; the gap is down to 4.
He is still far from there, though. At 45.4%, he ranks 38th of 42 heroes since the patch, and he is still in more than eight matches out of ten (83.5%, against 89.8% before). The buff pulled him out of the pit, not yet off the bottom of the table.
Baba: six points down, and played far less
Same shape, the other way. Before the patch, Baba never dropped below 57.5% in any three-hour slice. Right after: 51.5%. Since then, 51.9% on average against 58.3% before, a 6.4-point drop, over 45,150 matches. She goes from first to tenth of 42 heroes, and stays above 50%.
In ranked, the drop hits every rank, from 2 to 10 points depending on the rank (the largest gaps rest on few matches): she now sits between 50.5 and 54.4% everywhere, against 57 to 62% before at nearly every rank. Above all, players dropped her: she was in 42% of matches before the patch, she is now in only 28%.
The background noise
To know whether these gaps mean anything, we look at the heroes the patch doesn't touch, measured over the same periods. The other 40 moved by 0.9 points on average, 2.4 at most. Solomon goes from 47.2 to 46.8%, Rat King from 57.2 to 56.8%. Danny's and Baba's moves are about three times larger than the biggest of them.
What's next
For Baba, the patch did what you could expect of it: she stays above 50% without dominating anymore. Danny has covered more than half of the distance to 50%, and what learning can still add is ahead of him. The day-two and day-seven measurements will show up on their own on [the patch page](/patches/59).
The fifth hero releases tonight at 2 pm Pacific (11 pm in Paris): Nurse Harrow or Violet.
Methodology. Ranked and unranked matches in normal mode, pulled on October 16, 2026 around 3:30 pm UTC from the public data of deadlock-api.com (last match at 2:27 pm UTC). "Before" = from Deadman Danny's release (October 13, 9 pm UTC) to Valve's patch notes (October 15, 3:11 am UTC); "after" = from the notes to the pull, about 35 hours. Three-hour slices aligned on the time of the patch. Ranks = the player's displayed rank at the start of the match, in ranked. Presence = share of matches the hero is in. Background noise = average and largest gap of the 40 untouched heroes between the two periods.