Rat King one week in: 62% before the nerf, 56% after, still on the podium
Our first look predicted a slide toward 53%. Rat King did the opposite: he climbed to a 62.7% win rate, and Valve nerfed his ultimate by Monday. A week and 410,000 matches later, here is what the nerf changed, rank by rank.
A week ago, we wrote that Rat King, who released at a 59% win rate on his first night, would probably come back down. All seven heroes that started above 50% since August 2025 had dropped by their seventh day, by 3.9 points on average. Our forecast: around 53% by the end of the week.
The opposite happened, at least at first.
He was climbing, not dropping
Day by day, 9 pm to 9 pm UTC, Rat King won 60.3% of his matches on his first full day (85,131 matches), 61.7% on the second, 62.7% on the third. It looks as if his players were learning him faster than their opponents were learning to counter him. None of the seven heroes in our comparison had followed that path.
Valve didn't wait for the end of the week. On Monday, October 5 at 4 pm Pacific, that day's patch went after his ultimate.
The nerf: a banner cut in half
Rule, Ratannia!, the banner that gives his whole team fire rate, move speed and damage reduction, loses on every front. With its upgrades bought:
- its cooldown goes from 110 to 160 seconds (130 → 160 base, and the first upgrade no longer takes off 20 seconds); - its charge duration goes from 20 to 10 seconds (12 → 10 base, and the second upgrade no longer adds 8 seconds); - its damage reduction goes from 35 to 25%; - its radius drops from 24 to 20 meters, and its move speed bonus no longer scales with Spirit.
In exchange, Valve buffed the rest: Scrap Grenade goes from 65 to 70 damage, Rat Swarm recharges in 24 seconds instead of 28. And, without saying so in the notes, Valve shortened the grenade's bounces (1,200 units instead of 2,000) and made it favor heroes less: we read it in the game files, on [the October 5 patch page](/patches/53).
The effect was immediate: 55.7% the next day, seven points below the day before. Since then he has hovered between 55.4 and 57.3%. Across the 178,622 matches played since the nerf, he wins 55.7%.
Still on the podium
That is still the third-best win rate in the game, out of 40 heroes, behind Paige (56.9%) and Graves (55.8%), just ahead of Seven (55.6%). He is still in 92.5% of matches. In ranked he wins 54.1% of his matches (42,429), in unranked 56.2%.
The nerf did change one thing: one hero now beats him. Against Paige, Rat King wins just 48.8% of his matches (31,876). It was already his closest matchup on night one, at 51.7%. Seven (50.0%) and Graves (50.5%) hold him to a draw: they are the three heroes around him in the win rate standings. His easiest matchups are still Mirage and The Doorman (61.7%), then Pocket (60.5%). Baba, released Tuesday, gives him no trouble: 59.6% over 58,643 matches.
By rank: before the nerf, rank made no difference
This is the breakdown we promised. It comes from player match histories, which record each player's displayed rank at the time of the match: the average rank of matches is still not filled in in the public data.
Before the nerf, Rat King won between 60 and 63% of his ranked matches at every rank, from Initiate to Ascendant. Only Eternus, the very top, held up a little better, at 56.5%. That is rare: a hero's win rate usually shifts from rank to rank, because better players master or counter him better.
After the nerf, the picture changes. He still wins 55 to 56% in the middle of the ladder (Mystic, Ritualist, Emissary) and 53% among Initiates, but only 51% in Ascendant and Eternus. Ascendant is where the drop is steepest: −9.7 points, from 60.7 to 51.0%.
Two readings are possible: the best players learned to play against him faster, or the banner mattered most at their level, because a coordinated team gets more out of it. The data can't tell which. One caveat: in Eternus the sample is small (672 matches, 214 players) and the margin of error reaches 3.8 points.
Our forecast, revisited
We had written "around 53%" for the end of the week. That was wrong, for two reasons. First, Rat King didn't follow Drifter's and Victor's slope: he went up. Second, without the nerf there's no telling where he would have stopped. At the time of the pull, his seventh day, still in progress, stood at 57.3%, three points below his first full day (60.3%). The other seven had dropped 3.9 points on average: the number is close, but it took a nerf to get there.
The third of the six new heroes releases tonight, Friday, October 9 at 2 pm Pacific. The hero page, the first numbers and the tier list spot will follow within hours.
Methodology. Ranked and unranked matches in normal mode, pulled on October 9, 2026 around 4 pm UTC from the public data of deadlock-api.com, from Rat King's release (October 2, 9 pm UTC) to the pull: 410,483 matches with Rat King. Days = 24-hour slices since release, the seventh still in progress at the time of the pull. "Since the nerf" = since the October 5 patch notes (11:05 pm UTC). Presence = matches with Rat King divided by the number of matches. Matchups = Rat King's win rate in matches where the named hero was on the opposing team. Ranks = the displayed rank of the Rat King player in their ranked match history (43,824 participations before the nerf, 40,567 after); the average match rank we normally use is not yet filled in for these matches.