Notos - The Light Knight Dominating RTA With a 61% Win Rate

Notos dropped into Mystic Summon on March 19th. Two days later, he is one of the strongest heroes in RTA.

Not "promising." Not "needs more data." At 61% win rate across 6,000+ Champion+ picks, Notos is already outperforming most of the established meta.

Notos

Win Rate60.8%

Picks6,181

Preban Rate0.3%

Postban Rate16.6%

The preban rate is still low - players haven't adjusted yet. But the 16.6% postban rate tells you what happens after they face him once.

The Build: Warfare Set Is Mandatory

Warfare Set resets skill cooldowns at the start of battle. For Notos, this means S3 is available on turn 1 - instant transformation, instant Sanctuary.

95%+ of Notos players run Warfare. Immunity is the preferred offset - it protects him from getting controlled before he can press S3. HP offset trades that safety for raw bulk, leaning into his HP-scaling damage.

Gear Sets

Pick%WR%

Warfare + Immunity

63.3%63.8%

Warfare + HP

26.8%61.5%

Warfare + Resistance

5.7%63.4%

Warfare + Pursuit

4.2%57.8%

analyze byE7 RTA Bot— e7rtabot.com/blog

Artifacts

Pick%WR%

Holy Sacrifice

60.5%64.9%

Glorious Throne

10.8%53.5%

3F

8.9%59.3%

Proof of Valor

7.3%61.7%

Bastion of Perlutia

4.3%60.4%

analyze byE7 RTA Bot— e7rtabot.com/blog

Holy Sacrifice dominates at 60% usage and 64.9% WR. As a Knight who transforms and takes hits for the team, the revive safety net from Holy Sacrifice lets him play aggressively. Glorious Throne sits at 10.8% usage but with a lower 53.5% WR.

Who He Crushes

Notos destroys heroes that depend on buffs or debuffs to function. Sanctuary strips their entire game plan.

Notos— Strongest Matchups (Champion+)

HeroWRPicks

Tori

73.6%121

UK Arowell

73.5%151

IH Achates

72.7%66

Moon Bunny Dominiel

71.6%141

Lionheart Cermia

70.0%160

Diene

69.2%130

analyze byE7 RTA Bot— e7rtabot.com/blog

Tori (73.6% WR, 121 picks) and UK Arowell (73.5%, 151 picks) top the list. Moon Bunny Dominiel (71.6%, 141 picks) relies entirely on buffs to support her team - Sanctuary shuts her down completely. Diene and other buff-dependent supports suffer the same fate.

His Counters

Speed and cleave heroes that either delete him before S3 or shut down Holy Sacrifice's revive.

Notos— Top Counters (Champion+)

CounterScoreWRPicks

Hellion Lua

+0.5643.7%87

Briar Witch Iseria

+0.5346.7%435

Commander Pavel

+0.5346.8%77

Vildred

+0.4951.5%328

Death Dealer Ray

+0.4851.9%106

analyze byE7 RTA Bot— e7rtabot.com/blog

Hellion Lua (43.7% WR, 87 picks) is the hardest counter. She outspeeds and controls the entire team before Notos can press S3 - no transformation, no Sanctuary.

Briar Witch Iseria (46.7%, 435 picks) is the most reliable counter by sample size. Her cleave comp kills through Holy Sacrifice because her kit applies Extinction - no revive, no second chance.

Commander Pavel (46.8%, 77 picks) does the same - outspeed, delete. If Notos never gets a turn, his entire kit is irrelevant.

Hellion Lua

VS

Notos

56.3%Win Rate43.7%

Picks87

analyze byE7 RTA Bot— e7rtabot.com/blog

The pattern is clear: outspeed him before S3, or cleave through Holy Sacrifice with anti-revive. If you let him transform, you are playing his game.

The Bystander Hwayoung Paradox

On paper, Bystander Hwayoung should be the perfect Notos counter. Her passive makes her immune to both buffs and debuffs - Sanctuary of Battle does literally nothing to her. Her S3 deals bonus damage against Light heroes and applies Extinction, killing through Holy Sacrifice's revive. She even ignores damage sharing, bypassing Knight protection like Aurius.

Bystander Hwayoung

VS

Notos

35.5%Win Rate64.5%

Picks631

Matchups631

BH Overall WR46.4%

analyze byE7 RTA Bot— e7rtabot.com/blog

The data says otherwise. Across 631 matchups, Notos wins 64.5% of the time against her. That is higher than his overall 60.8% WR - he actually performs better into his supposed hard counter.

Why? Sanctuary is not a single-target ability. It strips buffs and debuffs from the entire battlefield for three turns. Bystander Hwayoung might be personally unaffected, but her four teammates lose everything - attack buffs, defense buffs, barriers, immunity, CR pushes. She can survive in the Sanctuary, but her team cannot function in it.

Her 35.5% WR against Notos is actually lower than her already-struggling 46.4% overall WR. The hero designed to ignore Sanctuary gets punished harder by it than most, because drafting her into Notos means one of your four team slots is occupied by a hero whose anti-Sanctuary passive is irrelevant to the rest of your comp.

Best Partners

Notos— Best Partners (Champion+)

HeroWRPicks

LC Bellona

69.5%390

Mort

68.4%114

Moon Bunny Dominiel

67.2%238

DK Sharun

66.7%159

analyze byE7 RTA Bot— e7rtabot.com/blog

LC Bellona (69.5%, 390 picks) is the highest-WR pairing. Mort (68.4%, 114 picks) rounds out the top two - tanky heroes whose core value comes from raw stats and passives rather than buff stacking, so they lose less from Sanctuary than most allies do.

Performance by Rank

Notos wins everywhere, but players at higher ranks get more out of him.

NotosWin Rate by Rank

Emperor

66.7%0.22% pick freq

Warlord

54.9%0.18% pick freq

Champion

61.2%0.23% pick freq

Challenger

61.5%0.27% pick freq

analyze byE7 RTA Bot— e7rtabot.com/blog

Emperor players squeeze the most out of him at 66.7% WR. The drop to 54.9% at Warlord is notable - at the highest competitive rank below Emperor, opponents know how to draft around Sanctuary and punish Holy Sacrifice with Extinction cleavers. Champion and Challenger sit steady at 61%, showing he performs consistently across mid-to-high ranks.

What Our AI Model Says

We retrained both our predictor and guider models with Notos in the training data. Here is what the AI learned from 100 simulated Emperor drafts.

How the AI Drafts Him

The AI drafted Notos in 49 out of 200 sides - the highest rate for any single hero in the simulation. When it picked him, it reached up to 93.8% pick probability - near-certainty.

Notos was overwhelmingly a mid-draft pick. Out of 49 picks, 21 were in the protected slot. The AI learned not to show him early, because revealing him in the opening picks gives the opponent time to draft speed contesters.

The AI's favorite partners were Genesis Ras (34), Frieren (29), SN Yulha (23), UK Arowell (15), and Ruele of Light (15). It also learned when not to pick him - in drafts where the opponent already had speed contesters locked in, it avoided Notos entirely.

How the AI Bans Him

The opponent prebanned Notos in only 1 out of 100 matches - mirroring the real 0.3% preban rate from live data. Players have not yet adapted to banning him.

That gap between low ban rate and high win rate is exactly why the preban number is going to climb.

Embedding Weight

The predictor model assigns Notos an embedding norm of 9.36 - comparable to Mort (8.87) despite only ~6,000 training samples compared to tens of thousands for established heroes. The model has already learned to give him meaningful weight rather than treating him as filler.

The Verdict

Notos is not balanced. A 61% win rate across 6,000+ picks is not a honeymoon phase - it is dominance. The Sanctuary of Battle mechanic forces every opponent to play a fundamentally different game for three turns, and most drafts are not built to handle that.

Draft him with allies who function on raw stats and passives. Pair him with LC Bellona, SN Yulha, or Lady of the Scales. Run Warfare + Immunity with Holy Sacrifice. Press S3 and watch the enemy comp fall apart.

If you are on the other side: speed-contest him with Commander Pavel or Hellion Lua before he transforms.

His preban rate is 0.3%. That number is going up.

Data from 6,181 Notos picks across 382K RTA battles. Analysis by E7 RTA Bot.