How Dragon Knight and Shadow Fiend perform as teammates in Dota 2 7.41e, from ranked matches.
In Dota 2 7.41e, Dragon Knight and Shadow Fiend win 48.00% of ranked matches when playing on the same team, over 6,702 matches.
Sharing farm on the map becomes a serious problem with this pair. Both Dragon Knight and Shadow Fiend are cores who need a lot of gold and experience from the same central parts of the map to hit their timings. Dragon Knight wants to group up and pressure towers the moment he gets Elder Dragon Form. Shadow Fiend, on the other hand, is a fragile hero who needs to secure stacks and farm safely until he has items like a Black King Bar. Their ideal game plans are opposite, forcing one hero to compromise and play at an inefficient tempo.
This conflict means the team often feels pulled in two different directions. You either try to force a fight around Dragon Knight's ultimate, but Shadow Fiend is too weak to contribute much, or you wait for SF, wasting DK's best window to take objectives. An enemy team can easily capitalize on this by either punishing the split-up farming or winning the uneven fight. For this lineup to function, Shadow Fiend has to risk joining fights before he's ready, or Dragon Knight has to cede his strongest timing to play passively.
How this pairing performs across skill brackets — the duo's team win rate in recent ranked matches, split by average match rank. Ranks with too few recent matches are omitted. These rows use the last 30 days of quality-filtered ranked matches, all patches in that span combined — a wider window than the patch-scoped count above, so the per-rank match totals can exceed it.
| Rank | Team win rate | Matches |
|---|---|---|
| Herald & Guardian | 51.84% | 463 |
| Crusader & Archon | 49.72% | 1,245 |
| Legend & Ancient | 49.38% | 812 |
| Divine & Immortal | 48.82% | 254 |
This duo's team win rate in each recent balance patch — whether the pairing is trending up or down. Patches without enough matches are omitted.
| Patch | Team win rate | Change | Matches |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7.41e | 48.00% | ▲ +0.3pp | 6,702 |
| 7.41d | 47.71% | ▲ +0.7pp | 70,380 |
| 7.41c | 46.98% | ▲ +2.1pp | 29,256 |
| 7.41b | 44.90% | — | 31,298 |
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Data updated Aug 17, 2026.