The first pick
Lockdown has a great Falstad and Dami has a great Greymane. It seems logical for one of these heroes to be a first pick choice right?
It's Game 1 on Battlefield of Eternity during the Summer Championships finals, and despite Greymane being a beast on this map, Tempest actually bans him. Surely this means Lockdown's Falstad, right? Nope - it's a Muradin first pick. And Tempest frequently drafts this way.
To be fair, Muradin is one of the two primary warriors in the Global Meta, with ETC being the other. Seeing that tank and support choke are a thing in the pro-scene, Muradin being highly prioritized isn't exactly groundbreaking. But Tempest clearly values him far more than ETC, despite the fact that ETC had a 60% win rate during the Summer Globals as opposed to Muradin's 48% win rate. So what makes Hongcono's Muradin so good?
First, let's look at Hongcono's talent build for Muradin. Right away that 16 talent should jump out at you: Heavy Impact.
Who picks that talent? Turns out, one of the best warrior players in the world does. Now why would he pick that over Stoneform or Give em the Axe?
It's All About The Initiation
In the competitive scene, Muradin is one of the two primary warriors in the Global Meta, and the big reason for it is his survivability plus his initiation ability with Storm Bolt. It could be even better if Muradin could use Dwarf Toss to set up Storm Bolt, but most Muradins save their Dwarf Toss for escaping a team fight when their hit points drops to dangerously low levels.
Assuming Muradin could survive in the thick of things without dwarf toss, it could be used to make Muradin's initation a lot more deadly since he could force an engage from much farther away. Heavy Impact makes this even more potent, since Muradin can now stun someone for up to 2 seconds all on his own (The 0.75 second stun Dwarf Toss into Storm Bolt when Heavy Impact is chosen).
Why doesn't Hongcono need Stoneform?
Let's look at the rest of Hongcono's talent choices. The key here is the combination of the Healing Static talent at level 13 with the choice of Avatar at level 10. Assuming Avatar is popped first, Healing Static will heal Muradin for 5% of his now much larger hit point pool per enemy hero hit, which could be a lot since Muradin is right in the thick of things.
Iron Forged Momentum at level 7 is also key since it means that Muradin will be able to Thunder Clap that much more often, increasing the value of his Healing Static talent choice and making Muradin even harder to kill. With these talent choices, Hongcono clearly doesn't need the 40% max hp heal over 4 seconds from Stoneform, and that allows him to pick Heavy Impact at 16.
What do you think of this unorthodox build?
Heavy Impact is clearly not a very popular talent choice at 16, being picked just 11.8% of the time according to Hotslogs. Then again, his overall winrate is only 44.5%, which is the 2nd worst winrate in the game despite his popularity. Hongcono, however picked him in 10 out of 13 games during the Summer Championships, and won 8 of them for an 80% win rate - and that's despite the fact that Muradin was first picked in a good portion of those games. Maybe he knows something we don't.
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