There is indeed a guild, though I rarely see people online lately. Maybe I'm just not recognizing the Steam names. I play with RexMundi sometimes, and I'd play with the rest of you too, if I knew who you were on Steam!
Here is my steam profile. If I'm not online, I might be on as
this account. While it currently has a novelty name, usually that account follows the format *adjective* Mayonnaise.
In dota people pick whatever the fuck they want. If I have any integrity at all as far as picking to fit my team goes I'm pretty much doomed to play support every single game
I've basically accepted that if I don't buy literally everything no one will. I usually end up having to buy the flying courier even if I'm playing a carry.
That's usually how it goes with stuff like this. You can't really rely on your team to win for you if you support. But at the same time, every other person in the game with you is thinking the exact same thing. "I have to get all the farm and carry these scrubs"
Here's a bit of insight into my development as a support player in this game, since (I think?) I've got a little different perspective on it than some others in the thread. Sorry that it's a bit longer than anticipated.
I've been playing Dota 2 for about 15 months now. When I started out, I played Axe, Invoker, and Luna because they were my go-to heroes when my meatspace friends and I would play DotA together at LAN parties. (Retrospectively, we were awful. It was fun, though!) Most of that phase was getting to know what the heroes did and how to play the game.
The second phase was the one where I only played Windrunner, Zeus, and Treant. I rarely played anyone else. I figured it was like the fighting games I was previously in to: pick a couple characters and practice them against the rest of the roster. Zeus was just my favorite hero, since nuking the shit out of people was ridiculously fun when my opponents weren't familiar with my hero enough to stay away when I could kill them. Windrunner was the hero I played when I didn't know what the team needed. I couldn't play Zeus every game, and supports were usually in short supply. I'd buy the courier and head off to a lane to babysit whatever carry was planning to farm there. If they were really
really bad at farming, I farmed instead. Windrunner scaled with items pretty well even back then (though until the recent focus fire changes she wasn't that good a carry) so sometimes I could carry games that way while claiming I was playing support. I started winning a lot more games when I played Treant Protector. Back then, his Living Armor blocked more damage, had a much shorter cooldown at low levels, and cost half as much mana. Due to its global range, I could idiotproof an entire team. Is our Spirit Breaker charging past a tier 3 tower at 6:00? Armor him up, dive success. Is our Huskar going a little too ham in fights? Armor him up, he lives to get a triple kill. Are my opponents diving my carry on the other side of the map? Armor him while they die to their own tunnel vision under the tower. That hero allowed me to
make my teammates play better by virtue of my mere presence on the map. He's been nerfed significantly since then, but that's when I broke out of the mindset you mentioned in the third bit I quoted. I could have only arcane boots and a Vlad's at the end of one of those games and still have an absurd amount of impact on the game. People appreciated having a support hero that so un-subtly helped them win the game. I realized that I didn't need to be the guy killing the enemy heroes in three hits so long as I enabled somebody on my team to do it for me. I made it my goal then to be the best support player I could be. (Which doesn't mean I don't play other roles; I do and I enjoy it, but I play them largely to increase my understanding of the game as a whole.)
Fast forward to now, and I'm at 4600 MMR and play the 4-5 farm position in three-quarters-ish of my matches. Here's what changed.
The first step was always making sure the team had a courier. Basic stuff, you have this already. It sucks being behind gold, but it's worse when your team can't get items for the first ten minutes because nobody will go home and drop the courier.
Later on I realized that having wards by the runes in the first few minutes was
really important. I used the obvious rune-watching cliffs since nobody would bother to deward anyway. My allied mid player would then have a much better shot at winning mid and the enemy would have a harder time ganking our side lanes. Back then they mostly wandered in through the river, right past the wards. Even if my allies were ignoring their minimaps, I could save them with Treant Protector's global safety helmet.
Back then, Ursa was a huge deal in most of my matches, so I learned that keeping a ward by the bottom rune area (specifically around the Roshan pit) conferred an important tactical advantage to my team. The Ursa on the other team was almost never smart enough to use smoke to get into the pit, so that ward basically guaranteed free kills for my team. I made it a habit to ward Roshan whenever I figured the enemy team would do it. (Later, I applied this to warding the ancient pits if I saw the other team had a randomed Beastmaster or a Medusa that wasn't showing up to a lane.)
There was then a phase where invisible heroes were all the rage. Riki, Weaver, Clinkz, and shadow blade on every hero. At first, I bought dust. Dust was cheap and sometimes netted kills for only 90 gold a pop. But then Riki got more popular and Valve implemented user-generated guides directly into the client. So people started following the top-rated Riki guide that told them that Diffusal Blade's active charges can remove the Dust of Appearance debuff. Dust has a massive cooldown, so there's no way to dust Riki twice without an ally to carry around yet more dust. That wasn't gonna happen, since 75% of the time I was a solo support, and the rest of the times the other support considered dust a waste of money. So I started dropping sentry wards. At first, I hated doing that because it seemed like a huge crapshoot. Their area of detection is quite small compared to the whole map, and Riki could be anywhere. Eventually, I found that herding my team into a tower push and then placing a sentry ward around where we planned to fight was a good system. By engineering a battlefield where I knew Riki would have to meet us, I could guarantee my ward would find him. For 200 gold I could secure two tower pushes and maybe pick off that stupid purple goat fucker. The tower and assist money made for an easy return-of-investment.
5. I realized after a few months of fairly stagnant play that I wasn't making good use of my time in the early parts of the game. In low level matches, there were three types of supports.
A. Jungling heroes like Chen or Enchantress (To limited effectiveness, since people were bad at creep management and camp stacking)
B. Supports that would stand around in the lane and bully the opposing heroes so their carry could farm.
C. Supports that hung around the lane with their carry and didn't do jack shit. (Or worse, fed the other team.)
I fell into category B most of the time, though circumstances sometimes put me into category C. As Treant, it's really easy to bully people out of the lane. You just run up and punch them in the face with your 90 base damage. As Crystal Maiden or Jakiro (before the change to liquid fire), there wasn't a whole lot to do if you couldn't get kills on the other team. CM+Juggernaut is a classic killing combination, but what if your carry is Spectre, who can't do shit for the first 15 minutes? What I learned to do was to leave that Spectre to her own devices (she does, after all, have Spectral Dagger to escape with) and go do shit. Frostbite a jungle creep or two to make cash on the side and let Spectre get full lane experience. Maybe run over to mid to kill that Shadow Fiend before he gets up to max souls and kills me in three swipes. (Later I found out that Smoke of Deceit makes this a whole lot easier.) Maybe find their jungler, last hit a couple of their creeps, harass them, and generally make life hard for them. Most supports are strongest in the first 15 minutes of the game when the carries aren't online yet and their auto-attacks aren't entirely useless. You hear a lot about how playing support is a huge gamble, since you're relying entirely on your teammates to win the game for you.
That's as true as it is not true. You need your carries to do reasonably well so that they can take the enemy heroes out of commission later in the game, but they need you to put them in a position where they can do that. Dota 2 is a team game, and every one of your teams' five players will have an impact in most games. (Sometimes one hero will simply snowball out of control, but those games become rarer as you move on up and people become more adept at not dying to ganks and not letting heroes like Phantom Lancer freefarm for 20 minutes.) It depends on the hero, but most good support heroes will enable their player to be an absolute bastard to the other team for at least 20 minutes, and that is your time frame to put the game into an unwinnable state for them. Later on, you have to mind your positioning ever more carefully to be able to control and monitor the other team without dying. It's your job to keep eyes on the other team and make sure they're not accomplishing their objectives. (Taking Roshan, farming, pushing, ganking.) Depending on your hero, you need to position yourself in teamfights to use your abilities without dying halfway through the fight and missing out on a lot of much-needed experience and assist gold.
If the job of a carry is to win the game for their team, it is the job of the supports to make the other team lose the game. Two halves of the same whole.
On a side note, if you're frustrated with the hero selections of your allies, well, things don't get that much better later on in All Pick. It's a mode for people who want to play a certain hero, and they'll usually pick it no matter how little sense it makes. If you can, I highly recommend queuing for Captain's Draft. It has a randomized list of available heroes, and one person on each team picks the heroes. Even if you're not the captain and the person who
is the captain is terrible at it, you'll get a more cogent team than the average All Pick game 90% of the time. Sometimes you'll get a hero that you don't necessarily want to play, but that's the tradeoff. I don't know if it holds true at lower levels, but if the captain is a reasonable and friendly person, their teammates will respect lane and starting item requests. They could ask Timbersaw to offlane, send Invoker mid, and that the rest head off to a double-pulling trilane. Have Vengeful spirit buy the wards while Keeper of the Light gets the courier, and so forth.
Captain's Mode is alright too, but you'll honestly see less hero diversity in that mode despite the larger pool. Everyone wants to draft a pushing strategy with any two of Lycan, Death Prophet, Shadow Shaman, and Nature's Prophet.
Out of curiosity, what are you guys' favorite heroes? Mine would have to be Io, Abaddon, Spectre, Vengeful Spirit, and maybe Bane when I'm having a good day playing him. (The whiffed defensive Nightmares are painful.)
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Topic: DotA 2 - the ultimate thread (Read 148602 times)