The truth about Mina’s low winrate in Deadlock and why that’s a lie

Deadlock’s socialite vampire Mina Ha is one of the most talked-about characters in the game. She’s the character everyone seems to complain about online, calling her overpowered and unfun to play against. She’s been accused of everything from broken, oppressive, and the worst part of Deadlock, but the numbers tell a different story.

Statistically, Mina languishes at the bottom of the winrate charts, holding the record for the worst winrate in the game globally. Despite that, the calls for tuning continue, and even Valve slaps down the occasional nerf to no avail. What exactly is going on with Mina’s low winrate in Deadlock?

Mina was the first character released before five other heroes. Those six heroes were fun and nuanced, with a clear player archetype baked into their design. Billy is a frontline brawler, Drifter is uncontestable in solo fights, and Victor is an unkillable monster once farmed up.

Despite their strengths, they have clear counterplay. On the other hand, Mina has always been a glass cannon character, a late-game carry meant to scale through stacking permanent buffs and items. She even has a weak gun, low stats, and one of the smallest HP pools in the game to reflect it.

Yet, she’s already a menace starting from the laning phase. Her third ability, Love Bites, allows bullets and abilities to build up a burst of spirit damage, which already hits hard at level one. Furthermore, every time it triggers, it permanently empowers her ultimate. Mina can sit comfortably at a safe range to poke and harass, forcing opponents to play passively for 10 minutes or get their health chunked while feeding her more bats.

While she is technically squishy, her evasiveness and movement will make it hard to catch up with her. The combination of her two omnidirectional dashes that come with invulnerability, a way to freely float in the air with her umbrella, movement speed on Love Bites, and an ultimate that propels her into the sky makes her an incredibly slippery target to lock down. 

Pinning down Mina requires heavy investment from players to counter her with items, but she still has the tools to play around that, too.

Her first ability is also a low-cooldown, dealing more damage based on the opponent’s missing health, which also sustains her on kill. Mina’s kit is overtuned and overloaded, yet she innately has the tools to overcome her own weaknesses. 

She snowballs hard, and a skilled player can completely take over the lobby. When you’ve been on the receiving end of anyone decent at Mina, she’s frustrating and hard to convince yourself she’s not overpowered.

Mina has been tuned several times since her release, indicating that Valve knows more than just the surface-level interpretation of her abysmal winrate. Frequent nerfs to everything from her damage values, to increasing her cooldowns, to even targeting her mobility tanked her winrate, but her complaints from the community remained the same.

Even as Mina’s winrate sits at the very bottom in the Old Gods, New Blood update, Valve is still throwing small nerfs to movement speed and ability scaling. Yet, Mina and her players aren’t swayed, as she still remains as one of the most popular heroes in Deadlock.

Beyond pubs, even the best players in the world value her. The pro players in Deadlock Night Shift, the game’s weekly grassroots esports tournament, frequently pick Mina in their games. The presence and dominance of Mina isn’t something winrates can accurately capture.

Mina, the supposed broken and overpowered hero, has a global winrate hovering around 44%, making her the most unsuccessful hero in the roster. However, she is also the most popular in terms of pick rate, which forms the crux of her paradox. Mina is a popular high-skill cap hero in a game full of average players. 

Mina’s abilities are potent and deceptively easy, but she’s also unforgiving of any mistakes. Players new to Deadlock don’t have enough individual skill and game knowledge yet to overcome her glaring weaknesses. What makes it worse is that she’s a difficult hero to climb back from a soul deficit. She’s the very definition of a feast-or-famine hero in Deadlock.

Her mechanical expression draws in high skill players, yet most players simply aren’t good enough to win with Mina consistently. Every time an inexperienced Mina locks in and does poorly (and there are plenty), it skews the stats lower and lower. Because of that, Mina finds herself at the bottom with another problematic character, Shiv.

Players pick her up, going in with the idea she’s OP, either from reading online or through first-hand experience, but she’s a noob trap that’s susceptible to counterplay. This even applies to an extent to higher ranks, as her winrate climbs up but still remains below average in all brackets. 

By contrast, there are heroes, such as Mo & Krill, with higher winrates due to a lower mechanical skill floor, making them easier to pick up and succeed in pub environments. Mina doesn’t offer that safety net; she demands far more effort to reach those sweet rewards.

Ironically, Mina’s notorious reputation works against her. She’s popular because her mechanical expression and perceived power precede her, which also makes enemies treat her as a priority threat even when behind. Her low winrate is real, but simultaneously a lie because of the skewed statistics.

Mina is overpicked and underperforming, yet it fails to capture how devastating she can be in the hands of someone who truly understands what it means to wield her power. Valve’s continued attention to her balance speaks more volume than her publicly available stats. In other words, play who you play in Deadlock, as long as you understand you’re not getting the full picture on the first match.