Rat King: 59% win rate on his first night, a near-record start

Released Friday night, Rat King played in 99% of his first night’s matches and won 59% of them. That’s the best win rate in the game, no hero counters him, and only Drifter ever started better. But the last launches also show what awaits him this week.

2026-10-03

He released Friday at 2 pm Pacific. By the next morning, Rat King had played 20,834 matches, nearly all of them: he was in 99.8% of unranked matches and 94.8% of ranked ones on his first night. In a game where each hero exists only once per match, that means one player in twelve, or close to it, picked him in every lobby.

And the team that had him won 59.0% of the time. On our tier list, he went straight into S.

The best win rate in the game, in both queues

In unranked, Rat King wins 59.5% of his matches, out of 17,790. The second-best hero, Paige, is at 57.8%. In ranked the sample is smaller, 3,044 matches, but the order is the same: 56.5%, ahead of Graves at 55.5%. He ranks first out of 39 heroes in both.

This is not an early-evening fluke. Split into three-hour slices, the curve does not drop: 58.2% from 9 pm to midnight UTC (8,548 matches), 59.7% from midnight to 3 am, 59.5% from 3 am to 6 am. More than 16,000 different accounts played him in unranked overnight: this is not a handful of specialists pulling the average up.

No hero counters him

We looked, match by match, at which hero was on the other side. Result: none of them pulls him below 50%. His closest matchups are against Paige (51.7% over 3,654 matches), Graves (52.6%) and Seven (52.7%). The easiest, against Pocket, Paradox and Viscous, are above 64.8%.

Rat King's win rate by opposing hero, first night. Even his closest matchup, against Paige, stays above 50%.

The three heroes that bother him most have one thing in common: they deal most of their damage with abilities. That is probably where his armor, which reflects bullets, holds up least.

He wins without the kills

The most interesting number is not his win rate. Per match, Rat King players get 5.4 kills, against 6.7 for the other heroes in the same matches: 20% fewer. They die about as often (6.7 vs 6.6) and collect nearly as many souls (43,700 vs 44,100). But they rack up 15.3 assists, against 12.8.

Per-match averages of Rat King players against every other hero, in the same matches.

His kit explains it. His rats (Rat Swarm, "Swarm of Rats" in Valve's announcement) latch onto enemies and lower their bullet resist with every bite: his whole team cashes in. His ultimate, Rule, Ratannia! (the Banner of Rattania), plants a standard that gives his whole team fire rate, move speed, slow immunity and reduced incoming damage. In between, Royal Pestments gives him a barrier that reflects some bullets and caps the damage of every hit, and Scrap Grenade detonates several times while slowing, unless an enemy melees it away.

Rat King doesn't win his fights: he wins his team's.

A start only Drifter has beaten

We measured the first day of the last thirteen heroes, going back to the August 2025 wave. Only one did better than Rat King: Drifter, 60.5% on August 27, 2025. Victor, released two days later, was at 57.9%. By contrast, the January-February 2026 wave started low: Silver at 43.9%, Apollo at 44.1%, Rem at 46.0%.

Graves, one of today's most played heroes, started at 55.4%.

What history says about his week

The same data tells the rest of the story. All seven heroes that started above 50% had dropped by their seventh day, by 3.9 points on average. Drifter fell from 60.5% to 54.4%, Victor from 57.9% to 51.4%. The four that started below 47% climbed back or held: Apollo by 4 points, Silver by 3, Rem by 2, Venator flat.

The reason is well known: in the first hours, nobody knows how to play against a new hero. Opponents quickly learn where to stand against the banner and when to break the armor, and the rate drifts back toward the average. If Rat King follows Drifter's and Victor's slope, he will end the week around 53%, still above average. If he holds better, Valve will have a call to make before the six releases are even over.

What came with him

Rat King didn't come alone. The same evening, the Broker and his corrupted items left town, as the City Never Sleeps update had announced. One in ten bugs on the map is now a rat, a faster one, and they respawn twice as fast. None of this was in Valve's announcement: we read it in the game files, along with a dozen other changes, on the October 2 patch page.

The next hero releases Tuesday, October 6 at 2 pm Pacific. We will check in on Rat King again at day seven, Friday, October 9, the night of the third release, this time with the breakdown by rank. To get notified of every release, the "Notify me" button on any hero page and the card on our home page are all it takes.

Methodology. Ranked and unranked matches in normal mode, pulled on October 3, 2026 around 7 am UTC from the public data of deadlock-api.com, from Rat King's release (October 2, 9 pm UTC) to the pull, about ten hours. Presence = Rat King's participations divided by the number of matches. Matchups = Rat King's win rate in matches where the named hero was on the opposing team. Other heroes' first day = 24 hours starting from the first hour in which they reached at least 300 participations; seventh day = from day 6 to day 7. Rank brackets for these matches were not yet filled in at the time of the pull: the breakdown by rank will come in the day-seven follow-up.