Best mid heroes in Dota 2 patch 7.34e

It seems that Dota 2 patch 7.34e is here to stay until the end of the year and possibly longer than that. And if you want to gain MMR instead of losing it, you need to play the strongest heroes of the current meta.

In this guide, you will discover the best mid heroes of Dota 2 patch 7.34e. These 10 picks will give you an edge over your opponents, as long as you play them well and pick them when they’re not completely countered.

1. Lone Druid: 55% WR

Lone Druid has not been changed since patch 7.34c. In that patch, IceFrog buffed him substantially by giving him +2 base armor and a stronger Spirit Link, which gives +20 attack speed at level 1 instead of +16.

At the moment, Lone Druid has one of the best win rates in the game and is picked in roughly 6% of all matches. This means that you can easily spam him without having to worry that someone else will pick him. And you can pick him 4^th and 5^th, just to make sure that you don’t get countered too hard.

LD excels because he farms really fast, is tanky, can take objectives early, and cannot be bullied in lane. The reason why he isn’t picked more often is that most players don’t have the technical skills and APM to play with more than one unit. Lone Druid requires you to do that because his bear is active at all times.

It looks difficult at first, but it’s not that complicated. The key is to have good settings that allow you to easily switch between your character and the bear, and then practice efficient positioning, especially in team fights. If you know how to move and what mistakes to avoid, you will be very hard to kill.

LD becomes a monster with just a few items. You can choose to empower your bear with items, or you can empower yourself. Or you can even do both! Most players prefer the first option.

The fact that your Spirit Bear has 2000 HP, 6 armor, 8 HP regen, and 400 move speed at level 4 means that by the time you’re level 7, you will be a very strong hero on the map.

2. Slardar: 56.8% WR

Slardar can be played mid now, and he is very strong on that lane because of all the bonuses he gets while being in the river. You can get the runes quickly and not miss any creeps. You will also receive lots of HP regen and 40% status resistance, which is amazing.

Slardar quickly becomes a very powerful hero thanks to his natural abilities. But you can make them even more powerful by purchasing a few key items that are inexpensive. With a simple Medallion, this hero will decrease a target’s armor by 16 at level 6! That’s a 50% effective HP reduction against physical damage. And Slardar’s damage is entirely physical.

The goal, when playing this hero, is to force everyone to run away from you, and then run them down with your superior speed. You can also play as a deadly initiator who can blink in, stun a target, reduce its armor, and then bash someone until they drop dead.

Or you can be a really strong tank. Slardar’s natural abilities, mixed with an Armlet and a bit of extra armor, will give him the capacity to tank a lot of damage and then just run away.

One of the big advantages when playing this hero is that you can do your job even from afar. As long as you use your ultimate, your opponents will suffer an enormous amount of damage.

By the time you’re level 12, Corrosive Haze alone could be regarded as an imperceptible nuke. You use it on a target and even though they don’t see it, they’ve lost 50% of their HP against physical damage.

Slardar is very versatile and can be built in a variety of ways. It’s up to you to decide how you want to play him.

3. Arc Warden: 53.9% WR

Arc Warden is similar to Lone Druid, in the sense that he’s not easy to play but can be very effective once you’ve mastered his playstyle. Using your Tempest Double, you can push lanes very quickly and create a constant threat that the enemy team will need to deal with.

In turn, this makes your carry’s life much easier because it allows him to farm without any restrictions. If you can be annoying even for just 10 minutes during the mid game, that will often be sufficient for your position 1 to get ahead of the enemy carry and then win you the game.

Arc Warden is very strong against ranged heroes like archers, who rely on their right-clicks to get the job done and like to stay away from other units. Using his Flux, he deals high amounts of damage to such heroes and slows them down for 6 seconds. The Tempest Double can apply the same debuffs, making this ability extremely powerful.

The combined debuffs result in 155 damage per second to the target, as well as a 53% slow. This lasts for 6 seconds.

Arc Warden’s Magnetic Field offers him 100% evasion against incoming attacks for 6.5s, as well as 40% magic resistance, while he gets +80 attack speed, +80 damage, and +150 attack range. This is another ability that can be also used by his Tempest Double, extending the duration to 14.5s.

When you siege a tower or a set of barracks, having these capabilities makes you extremely powerful.

Spirit Wraith deals 100 – 340 damage and lasts for 45s. These wraiths can be stacked on top of each other and will deal a lot of damage (610) even when used just by Arc and his Tempest.

4. Meepo: 53.3% WR

Apart from Invoker, Meepo is probably the hardest hero to play in Dota 2. Only 2% of matches feature this monster but he is one of the best mid options in the right hands. With the latest capabilities that he received in 2023, Meepo is unstoppable in low MMR brackets.

When using this hero, the goal is to make yourself capable of farming quickly as early as possible. If you can farm jungle camps without getting killed by the neutral creeps, you can gain gold and experience much faster than almost any other hero in the game.

For the first six levels, you will be quite weak. Abut after you get your first clone, you’ve essentially doubled your damage and HP, and you can farm in two places at once if you have the APM to do it properly.

Meepo is hard to play partly because you need to pay attention to a lot of things at once. Your enemies will understand what you’re trying to do, so they’ll invade your jungle over and over, trying to put an end to your unrestrained farming.

To ruin their tactics, you need to always be ready to use your Poof to bring your Meepos to a safe part of the map. This ability has a 1.5s delay, so it’s quite fast. But it will get canceled by stuns and silences. That is why you should play this hero when there’s not much that can stop you from Poofing in the early game.

The correct approach is to have defensive wards and then farm as much as possible without getting surprised by smoke ganks. If you can do that for 15 – 20 minutes, you’ve already won in most cases.

5. Zeus: 52.6% WR

Zeus can be both powerful and fun to play. Unlike other Dota 2 heroes, this one is actually enjoyable and will not fry your brains. Beginners often pick him because he doesn’t need to get involved in fights too much. He can just electrocute enemies from afar and then escape with his Heavenly Jump.

The ultimate of this hero is absolutely ridiculous. Every 2 minutes, you can use a 300 – 550 damage global nuke that affects the entire enemy team, as long as they’re not invisible. This damage is enhanced by an additional 5 – 10% max HP as damage. This often means that you will deal 350 damage per hero at level 6.

In a big team fight, that adds up to 1800 damage using just one ability. Needless to say, fighting against Zeus in the early game is a bad idea. But the problem is that the hero can contribute to skirmishes with his ultimate and assist in the killing of several lane heroes when his teammates decide to dive a tier 1 tower.

The other abilities that Zeus possesses turn him into a hero that can quickly gain a vision advantage (thanks to all the dewards facilitated by his Lightning Bolt’s true sight), kill illusions (using his Arc Lightning), and farm very quickly.

Some years ago, Zeus was hard to play because he lacked an escape mechanism and mana was scarce. So he was constantly out of mana and vulnerable to ganks. But now that he has a great escape mechanism and mana is easy to gain, Zeus is an excellent choice in most cases.

When playing this hero, buying Aether Lens and Phylactery early on is a great idea.

6. Necrophos: 52.5% WR

Necrophos became a strong hero in 2023, when he started to get one buff after another. And despite getting some major nerfs in Dota 2 patch 7.34e, he is still one of the strongest mid heroes that you can play right now. The only problem is that his pick rate is quite high (17.7%). This means that if you want him, you need to pick him early to avoid any issues.

Necrophos excels at farming the jungle, laning against almost any hero, and surviving long team fights. The longer a game or a fight goes, the stronger he becomes. That’s because his toolkit makes him very durable and capable of putting pressure on his opponents.

When you can heal everyone around you for 130 HP and deal 280 to every enemy in a 500 radius every 5s, that’s a 410 HP difference that you can create very frequently. If the fight goes on for just 5s, Necrophos gets to use this ability twice, which brings the total to 820 HP.

Ghost Shroud allows Necrophos to become untargetable by physical damage for 4.5s. And he will heal himself during this time 75% more than usual.

Heartstopper Aura keeps him quite healthy and full of mana during the laning phase thanks to the 4-7 HP/mana regen per kill. And the fact that it also deals 0.6 – 2.4% damage based on the target’s HP passively, in an 800 radius, makes him very hard to lane against.

Necro’s ultimate gives him permanent HP and mana regen whenever he kills a hero with it. If you get 10 kills in a match, you become incredibly tanky and will regenerate super fast when your natural regen is combined with other items.

7. Outworld Destroyer: 52.4% WR

OD is making a comeback thanks to the changes introduced by Dota 2 patch 7.34. His ultimate is now very strong against spell-oriented lineups, and the rest of his toolkit allows him to farm quickly and keep himself alive in difficult situations.

Like Shadow Demon, this hero is perfect for setting up or breaking combinations of abilities. His Astral Imprisonment has a cast range of 650 and can be self-cast as well. Its 4s duration is more than enough to ruin a Faceless Void’s Chronosphere. Or to escape the wrath of a Clinkz.

Thanks to Arcane Orb, OD can deal a lot of damage to enemy heroes. The mana lost in the process is quickly replenished thanks to Essence Flux.

When playing OD, the hardest thing to do is to decide which items to buy. The hero needs to be upgraded in more than one way to become truly powerful and the early game tends to be weak. But if you can get passed the first 15 minutes without falling behind, during the mid and late game you will be very hard to stop.

Among the items that players buy when playing OD, Revenant’s Brooch, Blink Dagger, Dragon Lance, Aghanim’s Scepter, Scythe of Vyse, and Shiva’s Guard are some of the best.

In the laning phase, OD’s primary technique is to prevent the enemy mid from farming properly by trapping him with Astral Imprisonment. If you can do that frequently, you will get ahead in last hits and then slowly extend your lead. With well-chosen items. Try to skip the Bottle when playing OD. Go for some HP regen item and rely on Essence Flux for mana.

8. Visage: 51.7% WR

Visage is picked in around 1% of matches and very few players know how to use this hero. The higher your MMR, the higher your chances of encountering good Visage competitors. In the Divine and Immortal brackets, Visage is picked in 4.5% of matches with a winning rate of 57.2%. That alone should make you ponder.

The strength of Visage comes from the combination of buffs that he can give himself and debuffs that he can inflict upon his enemies. Grave Chill, for example, will drain 15 – 30% movement speed and 25 – 70 attack speed from a target. The effect lasts for 6s.

During this time, Visage can easily attack that target using his summons, stunning it twice and then finishing it off using Soul Assumption, which can deal up to 440 damage.

Visage’s abilities are greatly improved by the hero’s talents. At level 10 you can either make your Familiars deal 6 extra damage per hit or reduce the cooldown of your Grave Chill by 3s. If you pick the second option, you should also pick the talent that increases the ability’s duration by 2s. That way, you will have a lot of extra MS almost permanently.

To put this buff into perspective, 30% of 330 MS is around 100 MS. So you’ll be moving at 430 MS at all times, which is pretty good. You could further improve your movement speed by purchasing a pair of BoTs, but that would likely be overkill in most cases.

Visage focuses a lot on physical damage, which is why a lot of players like to buy Solar Crest and Assault Cuirass on this hero. When combined with Grave Chill, Solar Crest reduces attack speed by 140.

9. Sniper: 50.2% WR

Sniper is one of the easiest heroes to play mid because of his powerful early-game toolkit. There’s hardly any hero who can stay in his Shrapnel for more than a few seconds and not get destroyed. And since he gets one charge for every creep wave, this hero can farm very easily and win his lane against most opponents.

If you’re playing in a low MMR bracket, Sniper is one of the best heroes that you can pick. At the Crusader level, he gets picked in 22% of all games and his win rate is 51.5%, which is not surprising given how difficult it is to counter him.

Sniper benefits from a very long attack range thanks to Take Aim. And you should always improve upon it by purchasing Dragon Lance. That way, when you activate Take aim, you will have an enormous attack range that few heroes can escape. Add a bit of damage and you become deadly in team fights with minimal protection from your team.

Sniper can be played in many different ways but a combination of damage and mobility is usually optimal. What you want to do is to just blink to a good location, activate Take Aim, and then destroy to enemy team starting with the supports in most cases.

You don’t need to worry too much once your Shrapnel covers the battlefield because nobody will have the ability to blink towards you.

10. Kunkka: 51.1%

Kunkka used to be completely overpowered but he’s still decent even after the nerfs. This hero has a very easy laning phase thanks to his ability to go back to base and refill his Bottle. He can do this whenever his TP scroll is available, which is quite convenient.

One thing to keep in mind when playing Kunkka is that the primary goal is not to deal a lot of damage yourself, although you can certainly build the hero to be a terrifying damage dealer. In most cases, you will be expected to control the team fights and compromise a target’s position using a combination of X Marks the Spot, Torrent, and Ghostship.

Kunkka’s Tidebringer allows him to deal a massive amount of cleave damage very frequently. This means that the longer a fight lasts, the deadlier he gets. That’s why a lot of players like the Dadelaus version of Kunkka a lot more than the controller version. You just buy Armlet, Dadelaus, and a Black King Bar. And you can win fights almost on your own.

Header: Valve