Best heroes for Diretide (November 2022)

Diretide has arrived! Landing its spooky-yet-seasonal self onto our Dota 2 clients on November 3rd, Diretide has taken up residence as the go to game mode for many. But with new game modes comes a new meta. And it can be hard to figure out what heroes are best for dunking doofuses in Diretide. 

So just to help you out, we’ve detailed some of the best heroes for taking taffies and redirecting Roshan into your enemies wells. We’ve also provided a little bit of the reasoning behind each of our picks.

Our top must-haves for any good Diretide pick are the following:

A good hero for Diretide will have one of two of these. A great hero will have all of these. Some of our best picks for Diretide heroes are listed below.

Invisibility is one of the most broken abilities in Diretide, because it allows you to disengage in fights, barely no one buys sentry wards, and you can sneak up to an enemies well and dump taffies in there. In addition Clinkz has great potential for dealing Area of Effect damage to Greevils. And his Burning Army has dual use of helping win fights and farming Greevils. 

Drow has gross amounts of AoE for farming greevils and pushing enemies off of wells. Her Gust silence can disrupt the Taffy channel, meaning you can single handedly push entire teams off of the objectives. Coupled with Multishot, and there’s no other carry hero with as much Diretide play-making ability than Drow.

Razor is a hero that needs almost no items to be strong, which helps in a game mode where you’re basically going to have the same amount of farm as everyone else in the game. You’re not going to have some amazing lead, so being able to Link and fight someone is ideal. Plus you have great AoE. A great dueler for fighting people at wells, and then perfect for farming Greevils. 

Like so many on this list Riki has a lot of things that make him perfect for this mode. A silence, a teleport, an invis, and some CC. Riki can single-handedly defend or clear a Well, and farms Taffy quickly. And because he has so many of these things without farm or many levels, he stays relevant during all 20 minutes or so of Diretide.

Being able to stop anyone from depositing Taffy globally is absolutely broken. Silences are incredibly powerful in Diretide so it's no surprise Silencer is strong, right? With that in mind, it also helps that he has some AoE and can build carry and dunk people.

Slark is strong for a lot of the reasons Riki is, along with also being a great initiator for his team. But what’s also great about Slark is his ability to comfortably solo the Guardians at lower levels. This means he can stack Taffy, head to the well, kill the Guardian, channel and hide the Taffy, and disengage with ult if he needs to. This is a “I’ll carry the game by myself” Diretide hero if there ever was one.

You’ve probably seen this hero in your Diretide games, building Blade Mail and ulting on cooldown. That’s basically all you have to do to win with this hero. And ofcourse, they’re a great Greevil farmer to boot.

Underlord has AoE and can teleport you and your entire team to an enemy well. What else do you need to know? Underlord was already one of the strongest stealth objective takers in the game. Then you give him a game mode where being able to move multiple heroes across the map is broken, and you’re onto a winning combination.

Another seasonal game mode, another time Undying is broken. To be fair, Undying is broken in the real game as well, but once again, just being able to drop a tower, steal strength, and fight an entire team by yourself is just too OP. I think we’ve recommended playing this hero on every gamemode guide we’ve ever written on this site.

Even if your favorite hero isn’t on this list, you can try and make them work. In general you can adapt your favorite heroes to this mode using things like Shadow Amulet items. It’s also good to work on something that causes silence or hex, so an Orchid, or a Scythe. Overall, being able to interrupt heroes that are channeling, and buffing your Guardian is a great idea as well. Real try-hards will also want to place Sentry and Observer Ward around their Wells.

But remember, in the end, this is fun, dumb game mode where you collect sweets to trick Roshan into destroying wells. A lot of people will just be Cavern Crawling their way through this Diretide. So don’t mald too hard when your team picks three zoo heroes and farms camps instead of defending Wells and collecting taffy.