Hey friends. I've been playing regularly for about a year, pretty much since last year's amazing TI3. I watch a lot of pro games and read about the game as much as I can, trying to help even newer players in this sub by posting useful info. Unfortunately, my typical games have been pretty mediocre, and I'm starting to think it's not just my mechanics that are lacking, but there's a fundamental approach to the chaos of solo pub games that needs to be changed.
I calibrated at around ~2700 but have since dropped to as low as ~2490 solo, and I'm at about 2600 team. As you can see, I mostly support and offlane, as I try my best to salvage the typical four-core lineups that appear in AP. There are still nine heroes that I haven't played yet, mostly the typical pub stuff that other people like, but my goal is to get competent at every position and definitely do the A-Z challenge when it gets official tracking (not sure if I want to do it in ranked, though).
The thing is, I really enjoy support - there's tons of depth, and you really can make a huge difference with a timely stun. But playing the hard 5 position, especially when your other two lanes end up going poorly, is really demoralizing. I want to smoke gank more and open up the map, but it's hard to gank mid if you don't have a partner. I feel the only heroes that can do it reliably are the three support junglers and maybe Earthshaker or Lion with a good rune. But it's risky, so I usually just try to stack and pull, although that often leaves my carry with iffy farm vs. a duo lane. I know babysitting in lane is supposedly bad, but against the common 2/1/2 lanes, I suppose focusing on harass with the occasional pull might be the way to go?
But then again, maybe support just isn't the ideal position to have an impact the game while solo queueing. I've also tried to play initiator roles on the offlane, with heroes that need levels more than farm. Centaur Warrunner is the epitome of a fight-early mentality, usually coming online just as the inevitable 5v5 mid action starts going. And I've played Brewmaster on the offlane with pretty great results. The downside is scaling into the late game. The epitome of that problem was this miserable game I played yesterday:
We crushed the bottom lane Medusa with my Clockwerk + Death Prophet, and then ganked other lanes. We were at one point 20,000 experience up per the graph, DP was like 10-0-7, and we had a big tower lead. But I knew we would lose late game, so I kept exhorting my team to keep pushing, but some bad fights mid and super questionable items by SF (BKB fourth item against Invoker and Earthshaker, ugh), doomed us.
So that brings us to the final options. I lack experience as a hard carry and especially as a mid, but seeing some of the item choices and last hitting numbers of people in my bracket, I'm confident that I can make a difference. The challenge is balancing late game inevitability with maintaining mid game relevance, right? First off, I think heroes like Antimage and Naga Siren are garbage for solo pubbing at this level, because they need so much time to get online, but on the other hand Spectre (And Medusa!) has a surprisingly high win rate, and it seems if you can survive the laning stage, you can split push like crazy and Haunt in as needed. A good balance between greed and impact, in my opinion, are heroes like Luna, Lycan, Void, Wraith King.
Essentially, my question is, beyond the eternal question of whether to go core vs. support, is whether to try to continue trying to cobble together a team, have decent lanes and participate in those dumb 10-minute team fights or just ignore everyone and farm up and split push. I suspect it's probably a mix of the two, but after losing to lanes like Morphling + Razor and Sniper + PA recently, I'm starting to think selfishness is the way to go.
So, do you try to play for the midgame and smash down towers and snowball? Or do you try to stall and just have better late game, because pubs are notoriously good at throwing?
Just play shadow shaman that hero is so good in low level pubs a lot of lockdown + a free tower every 110 seconds because no one knows how to play against wards
From the dotabuff profile I noticed you die a lot. I mean really a lot, in the first page in dotabuff, your average death per match is above 10. And your items for that clockwerk game belongs to a 30 minutes game at best not even considering you crush your lane and obtain considerable amount of assist gold. I believe you out position yourself most of the time while trying to do big stuff, you learn from pro games etc..
My mere answer for your bolded question is,
I play what my team needs considering what my hero can do. Let's say if I pick a clock, I try to disrupt the enemy safe lane early and try to annoy/grab kills in other lanes. So my aim is to have some impact on early game by disrupting hard lane and start ganking after level 6. With your skill build you can easily grab 2-3 kills at worst with the help of SF.
If I'd pick shaman, then my aim would be without losing my safe lane, reaching level 6 asap. Then take a few t1 towers and gank other lanes non-stop. Mostly aiming early to mid game push with possible ganks. If the game tends to go late, I'd grab a blink to for surprise initiations.
Between greed and and impact, a vast majority of heroes have options to either greed or impact. You can build midas/farm or early fight for core heroes in case which route you choose.
I'd suggest you not to do "dumb" things in a game even if it means abandoning your opponents or stay in laneto farm. I regret every time to do things i consider dumb.
Well, there's no magical answer that will suddenly boost your winrate to 75%. I've found (and I'm no pro) that there are certain heroes in each position who can have a very high solo impact on the game, whereas others just don't do much without strong coordination.
In ages past, I would have said that TA was the epitome of a solo mid game winner---if you knew how to gank with her and had good enough cs to get a fast blink and boots, you could just get 20 kills and win the game regardless of what your team was doing (most of the time, anyway). Zeus is similar, if you know how to dominate a lane with him and get a bunch of early game kills, you can just run around smacking people with lightning bolts. And then there's Pudge. Snowballing, high-damage heroes who can catch bad guys while working alone. If you can consistently shackle or arrow people, Mirana and WR can fill this role too.
As support, you're always at the mercy of your carries. If they don't last hit or they dive t1 towers to chase down that solo Bristleback, you're going to have a hard time (let's assume communication is at a minimum). But some supports are still really good at making things happen. Ench can kill stuff alone, Enigma farms REALLY fast (and assuming coordination on both teams is roughly equal, you won't get ganked much), Sand King is just a great hero. On the other hand, your squishy, low-damage, soft-disable supports are usually not going to fare well. AA and SD are the first examples I can think of. Maybe Disruptor too.
In general, I'd say aggression is the name of the game when you don't have a coordinated team. Pop out of the jungle and drop a stun on that offlaner whenever you can. If you see anything that looks like an opening, go in swinging. Ping when you do so. And if your team can't get a 3-hero gank together, either do it yourself (the Pudge approach) or push down a tower (the DP approach).
Try the goal of not dying at all while winning. Just do that for a few games and see how you feel about those games. Why did you die when you did die? If you want to do this on easy mode, play Abaddon.
After that just notice the mistakes you are making and what you could have done differently. Ignore your team. You are in solo queue, don't care if they go 20-0 or 0-20. What did you do wrong? You should start climbing in MMR regardless of hero played or other factors.
Thanks for the replies. That Waga video is really good.
I know I have to work on map awareness, positioning and definitely last hitting (I don't have enough practice there). I do tend to look down on certain items (Shadow Blade on everyone UGHHH), but I need to just focus on my own play.
Certain heroes are definitely better suited for pubs: I think Zeus and Brew might be the new TA as far as doing well in lanes and translating that into kills, see: http://www.dotabuff.com/heroes/winning
I hesitate to play junglers because it forces one lane to go solo, but Enigma, Enchantress and Chen can smoke early and make an impact, and I like those heroes (especially compared to Legion Commander or Ursa jungle, yuck).
My goal's to break 3k by the end of the year. I think I can do it!
Since you're inexperienced with playing the role of carry I'd recommend trying to avoid deaths caused by taking gambles or poor map awareness, do your best to play as conservative as possible while still assisting the team, wards stacking camps buying your carry(s) tp scrolls/salves early game so they can get some items up a bit faster etc. If you find yourself in a situation that may result in your death, (aside from teamfights, always be there for teamfights, and perhaps if your carry is going to die and you could sacrifice yourself to save him) do your best to retreat to safety, hide in trees/tp/smoke and run where they might not expect you to.
Try to find someone who enjoys playing carry and develop some synergy with him, you'll rise the ranks much quicker with just 1 of your 4 teammates to rely on, especially if you guys play safelane support/carry. I notice many of your most played heroes are excellent lane babysitters, find someone who is decent and likes to play AM/void/spec/riki/etc and the game will get easier.
Regarding your actual question, it depends strongly on teamcomps, if the enemy has krob/rhasta/abaddon/davion/pugna, you should attempt to stall until lategame and/or make counterattacks after they use their ults and/or attempt to defend with 4 if your team has a capable splitpusher, if the enemy has cm/spec/doom/ember/np you should attempt to destroy their towers and take map control quickly, denying them the opportunity to farm and barring some massive fuckups, winning the game.
Yeah not dieing is definitely something you can work on. As a 5-support this is of course often easier said then done, but really, it is that important. If you die in lane, your carry usually cant farm as long as you are not there, so it is almost like both of you die. As an example. As a 5-support, it easy to "inversely snowball"after one or two early deaths in the sense that you might get killed if someone just looks at you, whereas your main source of catching up in exp/gold is to SURVIVE a teamfight.
Also, if you are safelane with a carry, the other team is supposed to be aggressive/get kills, not you. Your goal is to secure the carries farm, and if nothing else happens, this should mean you are winning the lane. From my own experience, it is easy to get bored for a few minutes if that succeeds, but knowing when NOT to take any risks is one of the hardest things to learn in dota, so see it as an opportunity to learn it.
I think you might want to try out CM and sandking: they can get something out of the jungle if opportunity is there, but can just as well protect a carry in the line (should preferably be a ranged one for sandking), so you can adapt instead of going with a preset strategy.
stay with the support life, if you can actually refine your play to a high level i guarantee you will start winning more. I think that the mentality that a support doesn't have high impact isn't really true, and if you feel differently just play higher impact supports. I haven't looked at any of your games so I can't exactly give you specific advice but usually positioning is the biggest thing especially as a 5 position support.
Also being hesitant on playing junglers, if you play a high impact jungler, you prevent a teammate from going afk jungle prophet or something like that so if that would have happened then you probably actually helped your lanes.
also the key thing playing support is you're gonna have to realize that you will lose games because your team does stupid things, but if you are actually playing better than the other people in your games then you SHOULD win more than you lose.
Support works fine to get rating on, I played only WD to 4,6k, could probably have grinded it a bit higher to around 4.9k. Probably a soft cap around 6k or so for supports since you have to carry your team.
Well, a redditor was nice enough to give me some coaching, and I learned a good amount! I do think I'll stick to mostly support, but probably will lean towards those with scaling, burst and stun. Hadn't played him in a while, but Visage was great today.
Lion Witch Doctor and Sand King are beast early and maintain the ability to contribute or even flat out win fights mid/late game with or without farm, they are also very fun to play. Skeleton King and Alchemist could be experimented with for their ability to transition into carrymode lategame, but without proper coordination they bring very little in terms of early game support. I rarely play support but when I do, I play Lion, and love it. Tranq boots and manadrain allow for superb efficiency and with a blink dagger his skirmish potential rises tenfold, highly recommend.
Honestly as much as it is FoTM there is something to be said for Skywrath as a support in pubs. The hero when played well can absolutely dominate a match and dictate the tempo of the entire early game. As soon as I switched to playing him support I won somewhere around 8/10 games or something dumb like that.
The real key though IMO is that find the style you like to play and start there. Finding a style will allow you to not just have 1 hero that you can play, but a handful, and then from there I would say branch out and try new things as you slowly start to understand the differences in each hero.
I'm also a support only player mostly.. Just went from 4k to 4.3k this morning solely using Disruptor. Generally I main disruptor, WD and sandking for ratings. But as a support, you have to know when to "make space" to let your team get more kills, and it just takes experience. I often may die, but my team kills them all so its 1 for 5, very worth it. (initiator plays like sandking) - But I definitely agree that you should practice not dying at all and playing super safe.
Shadow shaman or sandking with split pushing is very good way to impact the game as a support.. If your team are being stupid, just take it into your own hands and get towers down.
My moral for playing is definitely all about objectives. Get all towers down ASAP. Even if my team is up 10-0, I tell them "We need to kill towers! Come 5 top" or something.. You can't coast in this game, things can change so fast. When you are ahead 4-6 towers there is a less chance for them to come back (The gold gain from towers is so massive) - work on trying to get your teammates to push as 5 together, either by smokes or pings or drawing on the map.
On August 28 2014 00:26 kollin wrote: Just play shadow shaman that hero is so good in low level pubs a lot of lockdown + a free tower every 110 seconds because no one knows how to play against wards
I gotta agree with this. Shaman is good early and late. He can be played greedy as hell and he comes with a ton of disable, burst, and push. His movement speed sucks, but it does teach you to play safer and recognize a positioning mistake. If enemy team 5 mans you can win through ratting. If your team likes to 5 man, shaman contributes a ton of damage and lockdown.
On August 28 2014 00:04 UberDrive wrote: First off, I think heroes like Antimage and Naga Siren are garbage for solo pubbing at this level, because they need so much time to get online
Antimage has worse winrate than techies. Take the conclusion that you wan from this.
If you want to improve your support you have to play some carry :D Tons of things that your supports are doing wrong become immediately obvious.
Also if you want to have more impact on the game try playing a carry that is not too team dependent and comes online quickly (e.g. Lifestealer, Juggernaut, Slark, Riki) and join teamfights immediately after you get your first core item (armlet for Naix, aghanims for jugger etc.) but not before!
EPT
