Hoodwink Guide 7.41f: Build, Skill Order and Matchups

What Changed for Hoodwink Since 7.39

Hoodwink’s latest change came in 7.41f on September 15, 2026: base Strength decreased from 17 to 16. You can read the full text in Valve’s official 7.41f patch notes. The table below lists every Hoodwink change in Valve’s patch-note feed from 7.39 to today. The feed lists no Hoodwink changes in 7.39b, 7.39d, 7.40b, 7.40c or 7.41a.

The pattern is easy to read. Through 7.39 and 7.40 she was mostly buffed or reshuffled: longer Scurry, longer Bushwhack stun, cheaper Acorn Shot, a faster base walk. The 7.41 rework changed how her passive scales and made Bushwhack reach farther, and then the patches stopped being kind. Since 7.41 every patch that touched her took something away, mostly cooldowns, mana and her raw numbers. The public win rate reflects it.

Is Hoodwink Good Right Now?

By public win rate, no. Dotabuff’s last-seven-days All Pick data on October 24, 2026 puts Hoodwink at 47.12%, 2.35 points below the median hero, and she is below the median in every rank bracket. The table below uses Dotabuff’s heroes table with the rank filter applied to each row, so the median hero is recalculated for each bracket.

Source: Dotabuff heroes table, All Pick, last seven days, read on October 24, 2026. Community data, not Valve data.

Two things stand out. First, the gap is flat. Many heroes show a slope: strong in one bracket, weak in another. Hoodwink sits between 1.58 and 2.77 points under the median in all eight brackets. Our reading, and it is interpretation, not data: that is what a hero looks like when the problem is raw power and not skill expression. Second, the pick rate barely moves from Herald (11.62%) to Divine (11.99%) and then jumps to 13.76% in Immortal, where she is also at her best win rate (47.70%, 97th of 127).

OpenDota’s heroStats feed, which splits picks by bracket, agrees. Her win rate there runs from 46.03% in Herald (7,994 picks) through 46.62% in Crusader and 47.18% in Legend to 47.47% in Divine (46,857 picks), against medians of 48.81% to 49.83%. The gap is between 2.26 and 2.83 points in every bracket OpenDota reports. In Turbo she is at 45.00% over 141,603 picks. OpenDota’s Immortal bracket had no data in the feed we pulled, so the table above is the only source for that rank.

Why She Is Picked So Much and Wins So Little

We cannot read minds from a heroes table, but the data narrows it down. The comparison below lists heroes that public games commonly draft as support or utility, using OpenDota’s seven-day public win rates. The list is our selection, not an official Valve role list.

She is drafted more than Mirana, Disruptor, Snapfire, Dark Willow and Tusk, and wins less than every one of them. Only Shadow Demon is lower in this list, on a sample a fifth of her size. Our reading, flagged as interpretation and not data: she has a kit that looks excellent on paper (a stun, a long-range nuke, an escape and a 3,000-range execute), it is easy to explain to teammates, and the nerfs have been small enough, one at a time, that the draft habit never changed. The scoreboard did.

If you play her anyway, the useful question is not “is she good” but “where do the points go”. The next sections do that.

Her Kit With Current Numbers

Hoodwink is a ranged Agility hero. Valve’s data feed lists her base stats as 16 Strength (+2.0 per level), 22 Agility (+3.6) and 21 Intelligence (+2.9), 47-54 base damage at level 1, 575 attack range, 315 movement speed, a 2.0 base attack time, 472 health, 327 mana and 3.67 armor. OpenDota tags her Support, Nuker, Escape and Disabler. Every number below is from Valve’s herodata feed as of patch 7.41f.

The Scepter also improves Sharpshooter (Valve’s text: faster arrow, stronger slow). The Valve feed lists no facets for her, and Dotabuff’s facet panel shows no data for this week.

What the 7.41 Nerfs Actually Cost

A list of patch notes does not tell you what a nerf feels like. The tables below are our own arithmetic from Valve’s numbers. Where a calculation depends on an assumption, we say so.

Base stats: what a point of Strength and three Agility cost

The 7.41f Strength cut is one point, and the 7.41c Agility cut was three points offset by three base damage. Valve’s feed gives 472 health, 3.67 armor and 327 mana for the current hero, and all three match the standard formulas (health 120 plus 22 per Strength, armor Agility divided by 6, mana 75 plus 12 per Intelligence), so we used those to see the old numbers.

None of those is big on its own. Twenty-two health is about one and a half Magic Wand charges. Half a point of armor changes the physical damage she takes at level 1 from 80.0% to 82.0% (using the standard armor formula), and at level 25 from 47.3% to 48.0%. The point is the stacking: a hero with 472 health and 3.67 armor at level 1 has little room for error in lane, and there is no healing in her kit.

Acorn Shot: the cooldown staircase

The 7.41d cooldown change is a staircase, like most Valve cooldown nerfs. It hits the early ranks hardest and leaves rank 4 alone.

Casts per minute is 60 divided by the cooldown, ignoring cast time. The practical effect: the nerf is paid in the laning stage, when Acorn Shot is at rank 1 or 2, and the fully-skilled version is as good as it was.

Sharpshooter: mana is now the limit

The 7.41e mana change added 50 mana to every rank. The table shows the maximum damage you get per point of mana.

Now put it in a pool. Assuming 12 mana per Intelligence, and no items or talents, a level 6 Hoodwink has about 501 mana (75 plus 12 times 35.5 Intelligence). Her opening rotation of a rank 3 Bushwhack (110), a rank 1 Acorn Shot (70) and a rank 1 Sharpshooter (150) costs 330 mana, which is 66% of the pool before you have bought anything. Before 7.41e the same rotation cost 280, or 56%. That is the real nerf: you can still win the fight, but you cannot afford to use the whole kit twice, which is why the first item is mana.

Mistwoods Wayfarer: the slow scale

Valve’s feed lists the redirect chance as 14.25 with a per-level increase, and the 7.41e note says “14.25% plus 0.75% per level”. We assume the base applies at level 1 and the increase accrues from level 2. If Valve counts the first per-level step at level 1, add one level’s worth of increase to both columns.

At level 25 the passive lost about six points, and the doubled value under Scurry fell from 76% to 64.5%. Scurry lasts 3.5 to 5 seconds, and its charge restores every 30 to 12 seconds depending on rank, so the doubled window is a few seconds per fight, not a permanent effect.

Bushwhack, Trees and Acorn Shot

Bushwhack is the skill that defines the hero, and its text has a condition that most players ignore until a net misses. Valve’s description says the net “stuns enemies if they are near a tree in the area” and pulls them towards the nearest tree. No tree in the 265 radius, no stun. The ability notes add two more rules: destroying the tree frees the target, and invisible units are not hit.

That makes the map part of the kit. Our guide to trees in Dota 2 covers regrowth timers and cutting, and the same logic applies here: a lane that has been cut open is a lane where Bushwhack is a worse spell.

Here is the part that comes straight from Valve’s ability text, and that we suggest you test in a demo-hero lobby before you rely on it. Acorn Shot, when point-targeted, creates a tree at the target position and the acorn bounces from there. The planted tree lasts 20 seconds. Bushwhack needs a tree. So on open ground you can make your own net anchor with an acorn, and the planted tree outlives the rank 1 Acorn Shot cooldown (19 seconds) by a second. It is not free, since it costs 70 mana before the net, but it turns “no trees here, I cannot play” into a plan.

Two cautions. Hoodwink’s own passive also destroys trees: every redirected attack destroys the tree that took it, and since 7.40 it cannot take a tree that is affecting Acorn Shot or Bushwhack. And the enemy can cut your planted tree to free whoever you caught. Treat the combo as a tool for specific moments (a hero running into the jungle, a lane with no trees), not a rotation.

For the net itself, here is the rank table with stun uptime, which we computed by dividing the stun duration by the cooldown.

Rank 4 Bushwhack deals four times the rank 1 damage and holds the target 40% longer for 30 mana more. Our disables guide covers how stuns, roots and silences differ, which matters when you plan a chain.

Talents

Valve’s feed lists these eight talents. Dotabuff’s talent panel shows the usage data in an ambiguous layout that we could not read reliably, so we list what each talent does and give our view, not the public pick split.

Skill Order

Dotabuff’s most popular ability build this week (20.25% of builds) opens with Bushwhack at level 1, Acorn Shot at 2, Bushwhack at 3, Scurry at 4, Bushwhack at 5, Sharpshooter at 6 and Bushwhack at 7. The digits for later levels collapse in the page text, so we cite only the first seven levels. What the order says is clear: Bushwhack is maxed first, which gives rank 4 stun by level 7.

The cost of that order is the staircase above. In that order Acorn Shot stays at rank 1 through level 7 (levels 1 to 7 are all spent), and rank 1 is the version that lost nearly 16% of its casts per minute to the 7.41d nerf. A second Acorn Shot rank early would trade Bushwhack stun length for Acorn uptime; the public order is simply what the sample is built on.

Item Build: What the Public Buys

This is Dotabuff’s most-used items list for Hoodwink this week. Item win rates are biased: a hero who buys a 4,650-gold item is usually already ahead, so the win rate is partly the reason for the purchase and not only the result of it.

Read the table in three tiers.

• The standard purchases lose. Arcane Boots (1,500 gold, replenishes 150 mana in a 1,200 radius with a 55-second cooldown per Valve’s item data) and Magic Wand (460 gold, up to 20 charges at 15 health and mana each) are bought in the biggest samples, so their win rates (46.50% and 46.27%) sit a little under her 47.12% baseline. They are near-universal purchases, so they tell you little.
• The wards are a symptom. Games where Hoodwink buys Observer and Sentry Wards end in a win 34.86% of the time. Nobody should read that as “wards cause losses”. It most likely means she is buying wards in games where she is the only support, but the table cannot show that.
• The big items win because the game is already won. Gleipnir (Valve: 4,650 gold, roots all enemies in a 325 radius for 2 seconds on an 18-second cooldown, 150 mana, cast range 1100) at 58.83% and Aether Lens (2,275 gold, +300 mana, +2.5 mana regen, +225 cast range) at 52.65% are bought by Hoodwinks who got to farm. The win rates tell you the game state, not the build order.

Aether Lens is the item the kit asks for. Acorn Shot reaches 675 to 750 and Bushwhack 1100, and +225 cast range turns those into 900 to 975 and 1325. Glimmer Cape (2,150 gold, 375 damage barrier, 15-second cooldown, 600 cast range) is the defensive pick-up that can also be cast on a teammate. Force Staff (2,200 gold, 600-unit push, 19-second cooldown) is the usual save tool, and it is not in Dotabuff’s top 12 items for her this week. See our Dota 2 items guide for the full list, and our armor and magic resistance math if you want to know how much those numbers matter against your next opponent.

Lanes and Positions

Dotabuff’s lane panel for Hoodwink this week:

Three things to take from it. She is overwhelmingly an off-lane hero (59.62% of games) with a GPM of 394 and a KDA near 3, the profile of a position 4 who rotates and nets. The safe lane (31.84%) has near-identical GPM and XPM, so our reading is that most of those games are the same support role played from the other side of the map. And the mid lane is a small sample (6.25%) with a GPM of 552 and the best KDA at 3.67, but the lowest win rate at 46.84%. A farmed Hoodwink is a good scoreboard and a bad win rate.

One caution: the three lane win rates, weighted by presence, average about 48.8%, roughly 1.7 points above the 47.07% headline on her hero page, so the lane panel and the headline are measured on different samples. Read the ordering, not the exact numbers. For the wider support picture, our 7.41f support guide and the soft support tier list give the positions in context.

Game Plan: Early, Mid and Late

This is our reading of the numbers above, not a copy of a pro build.

Levels 1 to 6

• Bushwhack at level 1 only works if there are trees near the target. Look at the lane before you commit: if the trees are cut, take an Acorn Shot point-cast to plant one.
• Protect your health. You are on 472 health with 3.67 armor and no sustain, and Scurry has two charges and a 30-second restore at rank 1, so once both are spent you wait.
• Buy Magic Wand and boots before you think about anything else. Mana is the constraint, and Arcane Boots give 125 mana and a 150-mana replenish on a 55-second cooldown.

Level 6 to 15

• Sharpshooter at rank 1 does 600 damage after three seconds of charging and costs 150 mana. Use it on targets who cannot move out of a 125-wide line, or finish a stunned hero with it. At 2200 arrow speed and 3000 range the bolt takes about 1.4 seconds to travel full range (our arithmetic: 3000 divided by 2200), long enough to dodge if the target sees the charge.
• Your Bushwhack rank 3 stun is 1.9 seconds, enough to lock a hero for a team initiation. The Sharpshooter wind-up is longer than the stun (3 seconds to full damage), so the net will not carry a full charge by itself; a partial charge, or a teammate’s disable, has to cover the gap.
• Take the Shard if the game is going well (Boomerang, 200 damage, 25% slow and 20% spell damage amp for 6 seconds). Dotabuff shows Shard owners at 52.82% win rate, which is again partly a state-of-game effect.

Level 15 and later

• Aether Lens and Glimmer Cape are the two items that turn the kit into a teamfight kit. Gleipnir is the option if you got farm. Its 2-second root and a rank 4 net are separate disables, so on paper they can be staggered into more than four seconds of lockdown; test that before you plan a fight around it.
• Keep Sharpshooter for single targets: a carry, a fleeing core, a stunned hero. Per the 7.41 notes, creep-heroes count as creeps, the bolt flies through creeps for half damage, and it stops on a Spirit Bear because that is a true hero. Aim around those.

Matchups

Dotabuff’s best and worst versus panels for the last seven days, with Hoodwink’s own win rate in each matchup. Her baseline is 47.07%, so a matchup win rate close to that is neutral for her, not a disadvantage. Dotabuff’s “advantage” and “disadvantage” scores are not win rates, and three of Dotabuff’s ten “worst” entries (Kez, Batrider and Timbersaw) show her winning more than 50%, so use the win rate column.

The cleanest signals are the large samples. Axe (32,951 matches at 45.38%) and Bloodseeker (7,880 at 43.78%) are the two lowest win rates in Dotabuff’s worst-versus panel. Dotabuff gives the number, not the reason, and we do not want to invent one. The high-volume neutral matchups are Anti-Mage (30,948 matches, 47.85%) and Rubick (40,724 matches, 48.52%), which are close to her baseline. OpenDota’s matchup endpoint is a small sample, but its most-played matchup in our pull, Rubick (643 games), shows her at 52.4%, and the lowest win rate among the 20 most-played matchups, Ember Spirit (368 games), shows 39.1%. Treat anything in the hundreds of games as a lead, not a verdict.

How to Play Against Hoodwink

Valve’s ability text gives you most of the counterplay.

• Cut or avoid trees near the fight. Bushwhack stuns only near a tree and pulls toward the nearest one. If you are the target, destroying the tree frees you.
• Be invisible, or stay out of the 265 radius. The ability notes say Bushwhack does not hit invisible units.
• Do not attack the Decoy unless you can take the net. Per the ability text, the Decoy illusion is destroyed if attacked or hit by a targeted ability, and it throws a lesser Bushwhack (1.6s) when it is. Our true sight guide covers the reveal tools you need for the invisible Hoodwink.
• Respect the wind-up. Sharpshooter needs three seconds to reach full damage and fires automatically at five. A bolt at full range takes about 1.4 seconds to land. If you see the charge, move out of a 125-wide line.
• Remember what she lacks. Low base health (472 at level 1), no healing in the kit, and a 12 to 30-second Scurry charge restore. Kill her when she is out of charges.

What the Pro Data Shows

To get something more detailed than the public tables, we pulled the last 100 league games from OpenDota’s hero-match endpoint, covering October 15 to October 23, 2026 (about eight days).

• Record: 43 wins and 57 losses (43.0%), average length 40.6 minutes, average 3.9 kills, 7.3 deaths and 14.8 assists per game.
• By game length: under 30 minutes, 5 wins in 11 games; 30 to 40 minutes, 18 in 42; 40 to 50 minutes, 13 in 29; 50 minutes or longer, 7 in 18.
• Where the games came from: EPL Masters 2026 (39 games), DreamLeague Season 30 Qualifiers (22), NEXUS SERIES II (16), 1win Streamers League #3 (13) and PARI UNIVERSE by FISSURE (7). This is a mixed-tier sample with qualifiers and streamer leagues in it, not a top-tier tournament record.
• Most frequent players: QBFY (Team Lynx on OpenDota’s current label) 8 games, 6 wins; aik (Pipsqueak + 4) 5 games, 5 wins; Jeezy (Flame Esports) 5 games, 1 win; and ariel (LFT4) 4 games, 3 wins.

Two things matter here. One hundred league games in about eight days means she is being drafted often in the pro scene, so her pick rate is not only a public habit. And the 43% record in that sample is the same story as the public tables: a hero who gets picked more often than she wins. The kills, deaths and assists line (3.9 / 7.3 / 14.8) is a support’s line, not a carry’s. With player splits of five or fewer games we would not draw a conclusion about any one player.

When to Pick Her in Ranked

Pick Hoodwink when the draft gives her a job. The three jobs that fit the numbers are these:

• Your lane has trees and your team can follow a stun. Bushwhack at 2.1 seconds is a real chain, but only with trees and a teammate who can use it.
• You need a long-range pick-off. Sharpshooter’s 3,000 range and 600 to 1,350 damage is one of the few ways a position 4 can delete a target, and with the break and slow it works on heroes who are running.
• You are in Herald or Immortal. Those are the two brackets where she gets closest to the median hero (-1.58 and -1.89), though she is still below it. Immortal is also where she has her highest win rate (47.70%) and pick rate (13.76%).

Skip her when the enemy has Axe or Bloodseeker on the board, when the map has been cut open, or when your team already has a hero who plays the same net-and-snipe role. If your drafts keep landing you on a hero the numbers say is under-performing, our hero tier list and hero win rates page show where the points are.

If you are stuck at a rank where drafts and position 4 matchups decide your games, our MMR boosting guide explains how rank services work, and our safety guide covers the risks. For a comparison of providers, see our best Dota 2 boosting services review.

The Bottom Line

• She is popular and weak. 47.12% on Dotabuff, 109th of 127, 11.74% pick rate, below the median hero in all eight rank brackets by 1.58 to 2.77 points.
• Five straight patches contained a nerf. 7.41b (Boomerang), 7.41c (Agility), 7.41d (Acorn Shot and Scurry), 7.41e (Sharpshooter mana, Wayfarer and Boomerang) and 7.41f (Strength).
• Mana is now the bottleneck. Sharpshooter rank 1 gives 4.00 damage per mana, down from 6.00, and a level 6 opening rotation takes about 66% of her pool.
• Bushwhack needs trees. The net stuns only near a tree, but Acorn Shot can plant one that lasts 20 seconds.
• Buy for the kit, not for the item win rate. Aether Lens and Glimmer Cape fit the kit; Gleipnir and Shard win more partly because the game is already won.
• Avoid her into Axe and Bloodseeker. Those are the two lowest win rates in Dotabuff’s worst-versus panel.

For more 7.41f hero breakdowns, see our Slardar guide, Huskar guide and full hero guide index.