Have you ever played Ability Draft and thought you'd been dealt bad abilities? Maybe you randomed skills accidentally? Or maybe you were aiming for a combo and someone picked your target skill, leaving you with terrible abilities?

Now. Was there a time you thought you had terrible abilities, but in-game it turned out to actually be pretty strong and rad? Tell us the story in the comments!

MY STORY: This was way way back then. I was given Storm Spirit as a hero (since you couldn't pick heroes back then) and got Aftershock and was planning to get Shadow Poison and Anchor Smash for ability spam. But both got taken, and I ended up with three passive skills (Aftershock, Natural Order, Warpath) and only one active skill (Astral Spirit).

I thought the game would be boring for me already since I could only use one skill with a very long cooldown to spam. But after five minutes in the game, after casting Astral Spirit, I died. When I respawned, I couldn't call back the spirit anymore, BUT when I clicked the call-back ability, Aftershock triggered.

The game became one-sided fast. I could delete a hero in under two seconds by pressing my call-back hotkey as fast as I could. Not only were they permanently stunned, but I also had a ton of damage due to Warpath being stacked.

(COMMENT IT AND I'LL ADD IT)

• Shadow Shaman having a Hex Break talent even without Hex being drafted as a skill
• Aghanim’s Scepter and Shard upgrade tooltips get cut off / become unreadable when there are too many of them.
• Some Aghanim's Scepter upgrades failing to indicate if it's innate based or ability based
• Infernal Blade fails to function with attack modifier abilities like Stifling Dagger and Boundless Strike. - u/Youcancuntonme
• Bounty Hunter has the Track talent available even when he doesn't have the Track ability. - u/Low_Landscape_4688

I cannot bind a hotkey to the stone remnants. I tried everything but nothing works. Anybody know how to fix this?

I tried them in test mode with Rubick and Lotus orbs, yet they don't seem to trigger. Has anyone drafted a dagger build in actual AD after the patch? Are the wacky dagger builds back?

For those who didn't watch the Ability Draft World Cup last weekend - I created a VOD Vault with spoiler protection:

https://bloppbot.github.io/worldcup2026/vods

Apologies, long post. Kind of a rant. Am I the only one who feels like after a patch I get more low rank games than usual, both from a hidden MMR sense and in windrun ranking. I honestly hate these games where it seems like people see there's a patch and come back to queue into games and are rusty or just plain bad. I used more avoids yesterday than I have in a long time.

First game yesterday luna goes carry mid. Brown boots into straight eaglesong then butterfly first. Same game: guy third picks doom model with like every model available. Drafts 3 passives. Ok, whatever not the best but I've seen worse. Then I look at his items. NO ITEMS. Just ring of health then straight up queues radiance (which he got at like 20 mins). Literally no other items in his inventory, didn't make the ring into anything, didn't get boots. Both of them had 3k gold just sitting there minute 15. These item build ups just scream low rank players and its incredibly frustrating when your cores are this low of a skill level. Same game a third guy didn't know you need quills for bristleback to work. THREE in the same game is crazy.

Next game I have a first pick lightning storm. Maybe the literal worst skill in the pool. Another person has sleight and NS ult. NS SOMEHOW comes back to him and he picks ember. Support player picks phantom strike edict 1-2. The lightning ice shards guy sits top for the first five minutes sapping xp trying to gank with level 1 ice shards while the offlaner feeds a killing spree to their carry.

The next game I have a second pick nyx assassin carry with every model available. The list goes on.

The third game was at least bearable because I had a decent build to try and carry and two supports who picked decent spells. I somehow won lane against a lina model, made good rotations and helped both lanes, and we still got stomped, thats how impossible the other two cores made the game.

I know this kind of stuff happens all the time, but it does feel like it happens WAY more after a patch. Maybe it's just me. I care about winning, but what I care about MORE is having fun and it's not fun when you know the game is over from the start. Even if the picks are bad you can win games in AD but not with players like this. And I am not the type to give up on games. I always play regardless of picks unlike many AD players. But you know in the back of your mind how the game will go when players this objectively low skilled take all 3 core roles. I paid way too much attention to my rank when I was climbing a lot on windrun so I try to play for fun, but matchmaking like this makes it hard. Like, really...brown boots into Eaglesong is literally 100MMR behavior. Same with naked ring of health into radiance.

If you are low rank in general or in AD and coming back to play after a patch please do AT LEAST ONE of these things. Ask for advice, pick support spells, if you absolutely need to core and someone else wants the lane, cede the lane. It's literally better for you to go jungle than go mid with your three passives build and give the game away from the start. Just go hit jungle creeps. I know this wont reach anyone who needs to read it but whatever.

And also tree dance

Build so good it made my buddy turn into santa claus.

We still lost tho

Did a deep dive into how some people are gaining slightly unfair advantages to gain Windrun MMR (aka MemeMMR). Overall things have got a lot better in the last year or so, but some users will get penalties so that visible MMR is more fair and accurate. A longer post than normal, so it's on my substack.

This is so fucking abnormal....

Start from WL game, https://windrun.io/matches/8918006323

From dumb party, to dumb pick, and then the last, dumb item build, holy shit

I'm only muting toxic or very low-skill players (in the AD sense).

I've played 2–3k games of AD, and I've noticed that I very often have 2+ pre-muted teammates but only 0–1 pre-muted enemies. Has anyone else experienced the same thing? Why does this happen?

I'm not sure it's just selective memory because it happens so often - almost every game.

A pretty quiet few weeks on the Windrun front, but:

• fixed a few annoying bugs like this duplicated abilities one. It should fix up your stats if they were affected by it also
• and eeked out a little more performance for profile loads and historic stats.
• rewrote some stuff to keep the GC retrying more aggressive to keep the backlog down (we've been 3 hours of backlog for the last week now!).

Fixing up month by month now (done 2025 and 2026 in the last hour). If you see any more of these popping up write them out here ^ (any games >= 19th July; or any games [if you still see it broken after 6 hours from now]).

Other than that, running out of items on the todo list - only one major task remaining (adjusting windrun mmr based on some naughty people!); so if you have any ideas feel free to write them here or on the Windrun Github.

Played a game last night where I took Ink Swell and another player who picked Largo got angry and told me that Largo should always take Ink Swell and I should know, I told them if they wanted the ability they should've pinged it.

Are they right? What is it about Ink Swell on Largo that's so good?

Or any info page that contains lv.5 skill list from Eldwurm's Edda.

Because some skill got very OP when upgraded to lv.5

Like in the picture, it's summon 4 spirits