Support in the Laning Phase

Introduction

Remember this is theorycrafting, it does not take random factors into account. While reading this you’ll have to imagine that everyone is playing their lanes/picks perfectly.

However you’re welcome to ask questions if there’s anything you want clarified or don’t understand. I’m also open in discussing my points and my view on the things. What is written here is not necessarily the truth but it’s a reflection of my mind and thoughts. When that’s said I hope you’ll enjoy the read. Some of this might be a bit too complicated to completely newcomers and as I said before – You’re free to ask!

Apologies for the wall of text, it’s a long read and you don’t have to read it all at once!

Tri-lane vs a Solo Situation (possibly semi-tri-lane with one of your heroes in forest)

When you’re playing support on a tri-lane against a solo opponent your ultimate goal is so make the enemy get as little exp as possible. To do this you’ll have to keep him away from the creeps so he can’t get exp. There are a few things you’ll have to keep in mind when keeping an enemy away.

1.

Don’t aggro their creeps, make sure to stay more than 400 range away from their creeps so they don’t hunt you. There are various reasons for this, but the most important one is if you aggro the creeps you’ll mess up the lane due to your own creeps taking fewer hits. This will bring your creeps to the enemy tower and the enemy will then get exp.

400 range:

2.

Think about their abilities and your abilities. Look at their regen items and figure out if you actually want to trade hits with them or just try to scare them away. You must remember if your regen (hp, mana) is not started it’s simply “wasted” regen. If you start your mana-regen you’ll potentially have more mana than the other person and therefore more damage.

You can basically calculate hero power with:

“hp-regen items*skill-damage”

I’ll try to make this more obvious with some calculations:

A level 1 Crystal Maiden would probably get Crystal Nova a tango and a salve so that would be

2*100

=200

100 is the damage of crystal nova and 2 is the amount of “hp-regen items”.

A common solo sideliner is Windrunner. Windrunner could for an example bring 3 tango-"packs" (3x3) and then she’s going to skill powershot or windrun.

I’ll calculate with powershot due to windrun being a bit hard to calculate. Which would be

3*120

=360

120 is the damage of powershot and 3 is the number of regen items she’s got.

As you can obviously see WR is much more powerful than crystal maiden at level 1. When crystal maiden hits level 2 she’s however got 2 damage abilities and her powers should be greater than WR’s.

Crystal Maidens power at level 2:

(2*140) + (2*100)

= 480

(140 is frostbite damage and 100 is crystal nova damage)

Therefore you see Crystal Maidens power doubling at level 2. It’s therefore quite important for Crystal Maiden to get to at least level 2 while harassing the Windrunner out of the lane. This leaves Crystal Maiden with a quite difficult task. She must stay close to the creeps dying while not being too close as she’ll aggro the creeps then.

There are obviously things such as mana-cost, attack animation and base damage you’ll also have to take into account, but making a calculation bringing all of these factors into account is quite hard.

Remember to be aware of new waves spawning and coming your way, you can often see how far the enemy wave is by looking at your own wave. You don’t want to take unnecessary damage at all!

Playing Support in a Tri-lane vs Tri-lane Situation

Explaining how to do to play support against another tri-lane is far more complicated, but there’s some very simple things that come into mind.

1.

DENY EVERYTHING, simply deny as fast as possible making your lane stay where it is. The more denies the better. If your trilane hits level 2/3/4/5 etc. before the enemy team you’ll have much greater power. Especially if you have a hero such as Crystal Maiden that simply doubles in power from level 1-2.

2.

Make sure to look at your lane and figure out what your plan is. Do you want to kill them? Do they want to kill you? What can you do when they go on you and what will their response to your going on them be?

Let’s say you have a stun that you’re going to follow-up with a split earth from Leshrac and they have a shadow demon. They’ll most likely disrupt their teammate just as one of your stuns hits and thus negating it. This will make it almost impossible to even try to kill one of the enemies. Then you’ll have to think to yourself “What do we do then?” and change your plan. Let’s say your carry is melee, theirs is ranged. Your carry will most likely get harassed out of the lane and their carry will farm “easily” due to being ranged. In short: their carry gets farm, yours does not. If you’re on your short lane this is not a big problem as you obviously saw their tri-lane coming and therefore took sentry wards with you so you could remove their anti-pull ward. Then you’ll just go spam pull and therefore get more xp than the enemy. Either that or you have a killer-lane that can kill the enemy easily. (As said before, some heroes can stop killer lanes very easily such as shadow demon.)

If you’re tri-laning on the long-lane you’ll have to make sure you can kill the opponent or have a ranged carry that can farm against their melee-carry. It’s also a possibility to simply make a lane on their off-lane that doesn’t have a carry which sole purpose is just to kill. You can then place your carry on the middle/short-lane and he/she will farm more than their carry.

3.

In an offensive tri-lane you’ll have to be very aware of the eventual enemy jungler. If you’re against a hero such as Chen/Enchantress you’ll have to remember it takes 30 seconds for him to get a creep and then some time to get to the lane, in those first 30 seconds of the game the enemy is extremely vulnerable due to it actually being a 2v3 situation. There’s also cases with heroes such as Enigma, Enigma will most of the time be starting with the small jungle camp thus making him stay quite far away from your lane also, enigma is not a big threat before he’s level 3.

In short: make sure to check the level of the enemy forest hero frequently, know forest heroes patterns and think about creep spawns.

Supporting in a dual mid situation

When playing the dual mid your goals are very much like playing on a trilane against a solo. Most of the time your goal will be to deny their mid hero exp. Often there’s very exp dependant heroes mid and this can therefore be a very good idea to do. As heroes such as Chaos Knight have been added to the game I begin seeing more defensive dual mid lanes with for an example Lich and Morphling or Shadow Demon + carry. This composition is made to negate the power of the extremely strong Chaos Knight dual-lanes. Your sole purpose in a defensive mid lane is by denying the lane as much as possible and helping out your carry if he comes in problems, this is often done with stuns or by simply disrupting your carry whenever they choose to go for him.

Early Roaming Support

In some games you’ll see the supporters roaming around together. This can be done by dual jungling or by simply just running around the map with two supports. Whenever you do the last thing you’ll want to make sure there’s a place they can go for exp. if you roam around with two heroes and they do not succeed in their ganks (which they might not always do) they’ll fall far behind in exp. when you’re roaming you’ll have to be very aware of their wards, think about how they might predict your lanes and the logic spots for their wards. If possible try to scout out their wards at the start of the game. If you know where their wards are you can avoid them and you can even smoke through them and then the enemy will feel secure. If you’re dual jungling you’ll in a “magic” way apply pressure to all of the three lanes due to the enemy not knowing where you are. This means that either your enemy will be very easily ganked or they’ll be in a defensive position and most likely lose their lanes.

General supporting in the laning phase

1.

Think about where you place your wards, try to anticipate how they’re laning and place your wards according to this. For an example:

If you’re tri-laning bottom and you’re thinking you’re going to be against a solo laner down there, there’s probably not going to be a lot of action around your short-lane. You’ll much rather have your wards around the long-lane/mid instead as this will protect your mid-lane much better.

If you’re playing a offensive tri-lane against a semi-tri with a jungler you’ll want to be able to see incoming ganks from the jungler and you do therefore want to place some of the wards into their jungle. There’s one last situation which is when you’re dual mid. You’ll almost always want uphill vision with a ward.

2.

Be very much aware of the enemies regen, spells etc. as support you’re very reliant on your ability to calculate how big the enemy damage output is and how far you can move forth. Always think about what the enemy can do to you, what your answer will be to them doing it to you. Think about what you can do against them and what their reaction will be to your actions.

3.

Make the things happen. When you’re playing the support role you’re the one that makes the ganks happen, you do sort of decide the game plan. You’ll be the one ganking and the one starting pushes, be sure to inform your team of your plans and make a “route” of what you want to do before going into the game.

4.

Supports must beware they don’t get too under-levelled, being a few levels behind is “alright” but you’ll never want to fall too far behind. Make sure you always have a place to go get exp and you can possibly farm the forest, go to a lane with no heroes on it or stay with your carry when he farms.

5.

Stay at the same level or above the enemy you’re laning against. This can be especially hard in the middle lane, or when laning against heroes such as brood, queen of pain, or in general heroes who gets a big advantage with a few levels. If the enemy hero gets higher level than you they might gain more power than you and then they might then be able to kill you and snowball. The biggest mistake you can do is getting killed in the laning phase.

Currently Common Support Heroes

Shadow Demon

Pros:

Extremely good at negating stuns

Amplifies a lot of damage (If you have heroes with great nukes this can result in a great burst)

Vision (Shadow Poison)

The ability to purge (His ulti)

Spamable damage spell

Anti-push (Shadow Poison)

Cons:

Disruption might at times backfire and save the enemy because they get time to react.

You can blink out of disruption

Ultimate damage is delayed and it’s therefore easy to escape if you have a blink dagger.

Missing spell damage at the early stages of the game.

Takes much time to clear waves (need to stack shadow poison)

Can’t push very well

No stuns

Crystal Maiden

Pros:

Good against blinkers due to having very much control

Lots of spell damage early

A big AOE ultimate

Can easily clear waves with nova

Can be skilled in a lot of ways depending on composition (mana aura, nova, bite etc.)

Nova can give vision over small areas

Antipush with nova

Cons:

Can’t push very well

No “defensive” abilities (unlike Shadow Demon with disruption or Lich with Sacrifice)

Ultimate is channelled

No stuns (frostbite is a root, you can use abilities in it)

Venomancer

Pros:

Good at pushing with wards

Extremely high harass damage at early game with poison sting.

Lots of slow

Instant AOE ultimate

Vision (Plague Wards)

Can anti-push

Cons:

No burst

No “defensive abilities (unlike Shadow Demon with disruption or Lich with Sacrifice)

No stuns

Lich

Pros:

Denies the enemy exp.

Can push back lanes

Good singletarget nuke

Good against teams with no push

Very strong teamfight ulti

Cons:

Extremly bad at antipushing

No stuns

Ultimate is a bit luckbased

I’m not going to add more heroes, but there’s obviously a lot more support heroes. But the above things are things you should/could take into account when choosing your supports.

Hope you enjoyed the read.

-Ivz

My Thoughts About Positioning

1. Introduction

Most of the things I do is not about what is right, it's more or less about what I think. The things I do are not always right, but it's my thoughts and I hope it can help others think more about their actions both in the game and in the real world. With this said I'll be talking about positioning in this ”guide”.

I see a lot of people losing fights when they're infront, they're stronger than the enemy team but they end up losing the fight due to their bad positioning, their supports get picked up. The initiater doesn't get to initiate you get initiated upon instead of vice verse et cetera, et cetera. If you want to win a teamfight you'll have to think about your positioning. People don't do this, I see lots of people clustering up against ES, SK et cetera with daggers.

Hopefully this will help a lot of people.

To understand the rest of this guide you'll have to take a look at this colourscheme

It seems there has been a lot of discussion as to the definition of a 'tank' and I wish to clarify things. When I say 'tank' I do not mean a hero that takes all of the enemy's attacks whilst your allies lay waste with dps. I mean a hero that can take damage or is 'tanky'. To have a tank at the front of any formation is not for the purpose of 'taking all the damage'. It is simply a positional based play that forces them to initiate on the hero they least want to initiate on. If instead a squishier hero were to be at the front, they would die instantly and it would be a lot harder to punish the team for having used their spells and cooldowns as they could just instantly retreat. This is a rule of thumb and is not absolute, just be thinking these types of thoughts when you're moving with your team and deciding on a formation.

2. Doing a Smoke Gank

You might think there's not a lot of positioning in doing a smoke gank, you're wrong. It's very important who's infront and who's not. You'll want someone that is able to initiate and take some damage in case you're running into more trouble than you can handle.

I've taken this screenshot from a match I played with some of my friends. In this case we're positoning pudge infront, he's very tanky and he's able to initiate upon the enemy if we find anyone. His hook is a skillshot and it therefore might not hit, but it's a chance we have to take due to being on the backfeet and we therefore can't afford having a less tanky player infront. Enigma is right behind able to throw a stun off if anything should happen, he'll also be able to pop off a black hole we would've ran into more than one enemy.

3. Sieging a Tower

This is probably one of the most important cases to think about positoning, when you're going to siege a tower you're on your backfeet. You need to execute well and you need to bring down the enemy as fast as possible without anyone dying.

This is an example of how you can siege a tower (Note that this is just an example and it's very hard to execute at the tier 3 tower, much easier at tier 1/2 towers. You'll need to be slightly/more powerful than the enemy to do this at tier 3.)

Now, this is where the colourscheme comes in handy. When pushing a tower you'll want your tank infront. The tank will be hitting the tower thus forcing the enemy to react else you'll take a free tower. If this is executed well it'll be hard for the enemy to get the upperhand in the fight even though there's a tower. There's a few reasons why the utilities are behind the tank, but not as far away as the supports. In a lot of games your utilities will be carrying meka, pipe, etc. and they'll need to be able to pop those on the tank. hitting the tower in case the enemy is going in.

Let's say we're having Skeleton King as tank, Mirana the yellow circle, Chen the dark blue circle, es being the green one standing further behind and then the light blue circle being Windrunner with a pipe. ES is standing further away as he doesn't want to get initiated on, he needs to be able to blink in, use his spells and deal some damage to the enemy while they smack on the tank. Chen is standing a little closer, he's having the meka and he's able to send people back, he needs to get in there, use his meka and be able to send anyone back if it gets too troublesome. Mirana is standing closer, she'll be able to attack but she can easily get in/out with her leap. Windrunner is standing closer too, she's able to use pipe on the tank while hitting Chen and Mirana with it too.

This way you'll be able to get your support items on everyone, they're forced to go on the tank or you'll take a free tower and you'll have the upperhand in the fight if everything is executed correctly. This case is obviously if the teams have quite equal farm and no one is stomping the other team.

4. Going Uphill

When you're going uphill you wont have any vision of the enemy most of the time. You'll be in a bad condition to do a fight and the enemy will most of the time have the upper hand. You should avoid uphill fights most of the time. There might be cases where you'll be forced to take a uphill fight, in case this happens you should try to have some summons infront to give you vision of what's awaiting you up there. Going uphill is kind of like sieging a tower, just the fact that there's no tower. You want to make your tank / summons walk up there first, in this case you can't force them to attack the first player walking up but it'll give you vision and he'll (hopefully) be able to survive. You want the utility behind so they're able to support the tank so he doesn't die and to be ready to take the fight. The supports are even further behind. The problem with going uphill is you're really exposed, it's hard to position your supports and utility heroes in such a way they can't be initiated upon. As said before, avoid fighting uphill it's bad for you.

Ending Words

I hope this made you think about your positioning and your way of going into a fight.
Remember this is theorycrafting, there's a difference between this and the real game. This is very simplified and most of the time the games wont run like this.
If you're wondering if your positioning is good or not, you should watch through your replays, figure out what you do right. What goes wrong and what you should do to make it better.

As always feel free to private message me on IRC I'm Ivz @ Quakenet

-Ivz

(Happy easter!)

Getting Recognized in the DotA Community.

I'm not a big name, I'm not the best player and I'm rarely recognized by anyone. I can't say I don't care, obviously I do care - I aim to become the best player out there, it's a tough goal to have, but I think I'll be able to stand my ground.
However, some players will recognize me. Some will see me as an idiot, some will not care, some does not have an opinion, others see another random "high skilled" player. Other see a friend. One of the way to get recognized in the DotA community is simply to be a nice guy, play your game and do your best always.
My biggest way to improve have always been my way of thinking, I think outside the box. At times I feel like I see the game in a completely different way. I've always played with a very specific mindset: "If I lose, it's my fault - Not my teams, I need to improve. I need to be able to win alone if it's needed"
This might not be true. Sometimes you can't do anything, sometimes your team is simply doing bad. But avoid thinking about your team, especially in public games. It doesn't help flaming your team, it'll only reduce their self-esteem and they'll get worse.
I know quite a few good players, I also know mediocre players that could be good players if they would believe in themself. To be the best, you have to believe in yourself, every game you play you'll have to say to yourself: "I'm the best, I'm better than Dendi, I'm better than Maelk and Arstyle is purely the biggest noob and I can own him easily." (This is obviously not what I think, but it's what you have to make yourself believe during the game). I've played against pro teams, I've seen my teammates tilt totally due to simply seeing the name of the opponent, those players are not gods, they're beatable.

Anyone is beatable, everyone can improve and you can ALWAYS, ALWAYS get better.
There's a lot of ways to improve yourself, obviously there's self-esteem but you'll also have to put yourself in the place of the enemy, what would you do in their situation. How would you react? If you can respond to their move before they even think about doing it, then you'll succeed.
Some people might say DotA is about one small thing 'Being the fastest to find the most logical move' I'm not exactly sure if I agree. If you can understand the logic of your enemy you'll be able to counter it, therefore having a weird logic will simply give you more power in DotA which means you should ALWAYS think outside the box, use weird strats, use different heroes and always be able to pull off something different than your last game.
DotA is the most complex game in the world, there's so many possibilitys and so many ways to understand the game.

-Ivz

As always, feel free to message me on IRC. I'm Ivz @ Quakenet :)

"How to Chen" by Ivz

I've been working with Min to make a video of me playing chen, I'm trying to explain my thoughts on chen and how I play him.

Part 1 - Chen with Ivz and Min

Part 2 - Chen with Ivz and Min

Part 3 - Chen with Ivz and Min

If you want to contact me feel free to write to me on IRC - I'm Ivz @ Quakenet

-Ivz

Philosophy and DotA

I believe you need something to live for in your life, it's not a secret what I've chosen. I've chosen a game that I find endlessly interesting and exciting. It's DotA. Alongside with DotA I'm also going to highschool. My main classes are English, Society Science and Philosophy. Out of those three subjects my favourite one is philosophy, I've always been thinking a lot about everything and I've always wanted to understand what other people think.

This leads me back to DotA, thinking and understanding your enemy is the best way to win a game, if you understand your enemies next move then you'll be able to foresee it and do a countermove. This also means if you want to be unbeatable you'll have to do things that the enemy can't predict, every move has a countermove therefore you'll need to do things your enemy wont think of.

The reason my favourite game is DotA and my favourite class is philosophy is because those two things have so many things in common. There's endless ways to play a DotA game as there's endless ways to think about how the world works. The most common thing to do in DotA right now is push, as I see it the most succesful teams currently do clash oriented lineups with heroes that have the possibility of pushing effectively and fast after the clash. This is the reason why heroes such as leshrac are rising in popularity.

Inside my head I do sometimes try to take DotA and split it apart, I take all the pieces of DotA, remove the uneccesary ones and try to find the core. I've figured out the core is to kill the enemies base (their ancient) therefore this sort of gameplay makes a lot of sense but it's also very obvious that this is not the only way to win. As I've said before it's best to do the unpredictable. To do unpredictable things in DotA you'll have to step away from the "top tier heroes". Doing this is hard, it's very hard, you'll very quickly be tempted to take heroes such as shadow shaman, leshrac etc. the reason you want to do this is because you've seen others do it with great succes, you might have tried this yourself and had great succes therefore it's very hard to step outside of the box that is created by the proffesional teams.

I've always wanted to make a project with 5 committed players that agree with me and also want to take the game apart and make it all over. I want to think the game all over, rethink everything and I'll then get down to why you pick supports, why you get carries and why you push. To become the best DotA player of all time it's neccesary to understand why you do certain things.

I've always thought DotA in a rather "irrational" way, at least others would say so. But as everyone else I'm not perfect, I want to play the game in a special way and that's the main reason why I avoid hardcarries. As most teams play right now they're not very neccesary to the game. The best carries are the carries that peak in the midgame, heroes such as riki, mirana etc. carries that can attend the game early. I want to think irrational thoughts, I wanna get out of the box and I want to invent new strategies.

-Ivz

Please leave a comment! :)
Feel free to contact me on IRC if you want to talk to this, I'm Ivz @ Quakenet and I idle in #TPOC.DotA

A DotA Pro in the Making

My name is Ivan, I'm a 18 year old student that lives in Copenhagen (Denmark). I seem as a fairly normal guy, I have a girlfriend and I live a quite normal life.

The difference between me and most other people as my age is: I know what I wanna do, I know what I want to grow up to and I know what my goals are. I wanna be a proffesional DotA player, I wanna be the best and I want to beat the best. There's nothing wrong with saying this and it's probably hard to understand how determined I am in reaching my goal.

Ingame I go under the name of Ivz, I'm a support player in the team named Two Pudge One Cup, my signature heroes are chen and enchantress.
I try to practice as much as possible, which means close to everyday, it depends how much time I use per day, in the weekends I can use up to 12+ hours and in the weekdays it's usually about 7 hours. You might think "woah, that's a lot of DotA" but inside I feel like I wanna play more, everygame just makes me more hyped for the next one.

In the last few days I've been spending a lot of time with a player going under the nick of "MinSikChoi", Min is a great guy, I like him and I think he's got talent - He's not very good at the game yet, but he hopefully will be. I told him I thought it could be funny if he started a blog about his progress towards becoming a very good (eventually proffesional) player, he didn't like the idea so I thought to myself: "Then I'll do it"

In this blog I'll be describing my process towards becoming a pro player, I'll do a few analyzes of my games and I'll be posting most of my replays from practices with my team.

My name is Ivan and I'm a DotA pro in the making.
-Ivz