hey man! I literally never comment but I wanted to since I am one of the first ones here. I have played a ton of dota in the last month and your videos are always very helpful and also always auto-play after any dota video lol. Your techniques for describing the support role allow for easy understanding. I have learned a lot from you and am very glad you uploaded again!!
ZQ is for sure Best support content! If you’re looking for Pos3, speeed and BalloonDota are great. For carry, pain is good.. and for mid, iAnnihilate is also pretty good.
Pos 5 often demands save or big CC/team fight spell, while pos 4 often demands mobility or setup (preferably stun). Since pos 4 also have some gold priority, it is often interchangeable with mid/carry pick, especially if they have good mobility and isnt very reliant on gold to produce considerable impact. I also have to mention that offlane are designed to be harder to play (it used to be called hardlane / suicide lane). As a pos 4, your natural movement should not be towards babysitting offlane, but removing advantages that the enemy may have. If the lane is predictably hard, stacking/ganking other lane should be natural instead of just leeching xp from your offlane. That is why it is not recommended to have a farming offlane (wk, alche, LS, etc) unless they have some built-in farm kit and just need at least 1 item to have good impact (BB, LC, axe to name a few) Also simplifying "pos 5 stay in lane, pos 4 roam" would be outdated, reflected in pro scene where they have pos 5 roaming through gates, or pos 4 pressuring lane heavily through certain pair of heroes
Hey Zach. Thanks for all your support guides. My faves are still the "Who's fault is it anyway" series :) They've benefited me greatly, and i'm sure all my fellow support players feel the same. Great content. Keep it up. We truly appreciate it. P.S. I went from Crusader 5 in May 2023 to hitting Ancient 4 for the first time yesterday. In no small part due to videos like yours coaching me out of my bad habits.
This video was amazing! Thank you for the high level theory! You're very good at clearly explaining and teaching rather nuanced concepts with excellent examples. PS. What's your favorite hero?
I figured it out myself. You need a strong support in safe lane to defend the early weak carry. That just makes sense. And pos4 you want something with mobility who can help wherever when pos3 can solo or someone who can stack a lot of camps. It can be situational sometimes. I’m wondering if we shouldn’t change the meta to have off and safe pick first round in ranked. Also I need more time to pick on first round… especially when I don’t even know which role it’s going to give me in advance.
Ogre us my go-to when i get pos 5. He's a literal meat shield in lane and he buffs carries with bloodlust. Oracle i think is the worst hero to play against when i pick ogre because of his dispells
Basic template for how the game is played now and based on the unofficial order of the picking phase. Pos 5 enabler or a baby sitter healer. Pos 4 roamer/initiator/can be a pseudo pos 3 Pos 3 tank/initiator/ no matter what. Other pick means griefing. Pos 2 either a mid lane dominator, so the enemy supports will be forced to help their mid laner, freeing your side lanes, or it can be another roamer/initiator to help the side lanes. Picking a FARMING mid laner is griefing. Pos 1 is either a turtle hard carry or a mid game hero hunter . This pick depends on your pos 5's pick or depends on your enemy's pick Pos 2 and Pos 1 can switch for last pick priority.
Hey I love your videos ! I wanted to ask you if you ever considered doing a video about the different strategies throughout the history of dota. Like how a support played in 2012 versus how a support plays now. I think it would be interesting to visit the history of dota and contrast the different changes that happened ! I'm just throwing that out but I would love to see that analyzed.
I think it is highly underestimated how good it is to push safe lane (highly dependent on your hero), because it cause you to gain levels before enemy, enemy takes damage from creeps, you get free access to lotus, you can bull big camp, stack behind tower, downside can be pos 1 can be easier to gank, but the on the flipside they will then miss last hits and if you stand close to your creepwave that contains more creeps then them they will take more damage from the creeps than you. you can also get ganked from enemy pos 5 who tp or use portal and gank from behind.
ZQ droppin’ knowledge bombs!! I’m an immortal support player and I still learn something new every other video. This video I learned you get XP for stacking. What?!?! When I play 4 I stack 8-10 times per game. So good to know I get gold AND XP. Ty as always!
Once I was a pos3 player, but at some point I got so tilted from playing with crap like pos4 warlocks and abbadons that do absolutely nothing in lane that I just decided it would be easier just to switch roles. Now I tilt because my pos5 are token farmers who pick crap like warlocks and abbadons and do nothing in lane. Some things never change and one of them is me being bad at dota. At least I can say that I'm aware of it to some extend. But I still hate healing supports. F u abbadon.
@bii2176 what's insane about them? These are not heroes, these are just walking tangos. When I have warlock in lane I'm forced to pick passive carry cause my supp has 0 kill potential and when he tries to kill enemies he just kills the wave and I'm forced to farm under enemy tower. And abba just heals 80% of the matchups. The main problem is that they limit my options as a carry to choose a hero I feel would fit into the draft just because I cannot snowball with them. While heroes like dazzle or oracle or any hero with lockdown do not limit me in hero choice as I can play both agressively and passively with other supps.
Basic template for how the game is played now and based on the unofficial order of the picking phase. Pos 5 enabler or a baby sitter healer. Pos 4 roamer/initiator/can be a pseudo pos 3 Pos 3 tank/initiator/ no matter what. Other pick means griefing. Pos 2 either a mid lane dominator, so the enemy supports will be forced to help their mid laner, freeing your side lanes, or it can be another roamer/initiator to help the side lanes. Picking a FARMING mid laner is griefing. Pos 1 is either a turtle hard carry or a mid game hero hunter . This pick depends on your pos 5's pick or depends on your enemy's pick Pos 2 and Pos 1 can switch for last pick priority.
I have to respectfully disagree about Ancient Apparition. For me it's a 4 not a 5. AA is too weak as a 5. A 5 should be about protect and serve. AA can't protect well enough. It does damage over time. It's terrible at stopping an attack on a weak position 1. Especially if you're against a beefy hero who can take your damage.. The exception could be if you had a reliable stun on your pos 1. But those are few. A position 4 should be a lane winner making life as difficult for the enemy carry as possible. In the offlane you're more likely to be paired with a reliable stun and more likely to be paired with someone you can stand behind while you deal out the damage. So while AA isn't a great ganker it is a top tier harasser. I'm not saying it's a great pos 4, it's just better than in pos 5. It's also a more greedy hero than most 5's. For me a true 5 is still someone who can be happy with boots and just one other item for most of the game (if need be). An AA can truly snowball into a late game threat if it gets the gold and xp. AA is so squishy in the mid game it needs more than boots and glimmer to be effective and get those kills it needs to snowball. As a 4 AA has that extra leeway to be a bit more selfish.
Nah, AA is cooked. Worthless hero. As someone whose main support hero was AA, there is no reason to pick him at all. All of his damage, utility, and power is backloaded into his ult. Normally this wouldn't be an issue with free exp runes. But Icefrog nerfed the cooldown of his level 1 and 2 ult, and the damage was never increased to compensate for the HP bloat. There's a reason why TI13 should have been good theoretically for AA since it was a ranged carry and healer meta, with alch and dk, but AA is so worthless of a hero he can't even play properly into the heroes he's supposed to counter.
I can definitely be wrong about hero positions! I would say many of your points are actually about AA being bad as a hero right now though, not about being a better 4 than 5. AA is a weak laner even when he's good, but he has one of the longest ranges in the game. That's why he combines constant auto attacks with the bonus armor/regen of the safelane tower to contribute to the lane by trying to win the war of harass. As the 4 support, his harass would be mitigated by the enemy safelane tower while also preventing any successful dives should he actually get people low enough. Even in a bad match up where the carry goes to jungle early, you can hold the tower with Ice Vortex and just survive in the lane as the most expendable hero. You can still contribute around the map once you get 6 as well. And then because he is so squishy and is dependent on his ult, he just sits way in the back throwing buffs (Solar/Glimmer/etc) on his cores while waiting for the ult. If you gave him a ton of farm, he would still need to just wait to use his ult in the back meaning his gold isn't being put to use right away in fights. As a 5, you are more likely to get an initiating 4 hero to help set up your abilities. If you are 4, there are less 5's who would do the same for you which limits your options.
@ZQuixotix well the main issue is that AA ult is just bad. That's it. Too little damage and too long of a cooldown for the amount of effort it requires to aim, for the tradeoff he has to make for his other skills being mid, because that's what his core design was - mid skills to make up for a powerful ult with a low cooldown. But icefrog took an axe to the cooldown, and the damage never caught up with HP inflation. But no one really seems to care. And I can't blame the playerbase. He's not the easiest hero to mechanically use, and your average pubstar has no reason to put in effort to learn AA. Why learn a more difficult hero for inconsistent results when you can just play cm/lion/lich and have an easier time, because those heroes aren't necessarily stronger, but they're much easier to execute? Ease of execution matters alot in lower level pubs, not so much pro play. Not to mention, playing against an actual good AA probably enrages your average player, just like playing against an good OD, etc. Which is why I don't see anyone clamoring for AA buffs.
@@elijahsawyer1907 you want to leave lane as pos 5 when your safe laner is all grown up and is safe to farm by himself. this is good because he is given solo xp and helps him accelerate while you can go impact the map
Dota 2 is mostly dead I had several games last week over half of them had boosters some of them had people in same clan on different teams. Kind of wondering if anything is gonna happen to improve it.
DotA2 is losing players due to many factors. You will be facing the same people as your rank goes up. And you will be playing with those who sabotage the game intentionally so the boosted account goes up, to be sold later. Once the boosted account is sold, you will be playing with it, but this time, with the account buyer, not the booster, your game will be doomed to lose. That is just one of the many issues of DotA2. Hence, player loss.
They just did a massive ban wave with the Frostivus patch yesterday, targeting smurfs and win traders, so yes they are tackling the issue head on, but it's not a cut and dry solution. That said they really need to remove the double down mechanic to make win trading less effective. I think the game is still alive and well, but ofc, like any competitive multiplayer game, it has it's issues with people trying to game the system and cheat mmr. Just have fun and play your game imho, don't worry to much about what you cannot control. For me, the game is still as complex, diverse and downright fun to play as it's ever been.
@@BGLoscar This idea that dota is losing players at some unprecedented rate is actually false. If you look at steam charts for Dota 2, the average player count is almost identical to what it's been around this time of year for many years now. There's a basic trend - player count spikes around the international, then falls off and levels out and spikes again each year around the international. But again, if you look at the charts, average player count is remarkably consistent. Win trading, selling accounts, and other such degen activities are a fact of life in any competitive game, valve does a better job than most in terms of combatting this. It's better not to dwell on it too much and just enjoy the game for what it is, or, if your not enjoying your time, go do something else. Simple, really.
![1 DAY LEFT FOR JEJU ISLAND!!! BOT CHALLENGE WALKTHROUGH PART 11 [SOLO LEVELING: ARISE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/qF5hlmd53-Q/mqdefault.jpg)
hey man! I literally never comment but I wanted to since I am one of the first ones here. I have played a ton of dota in the last month and your videos are always very helpful and also always auto-play after any dota video lol. Your techniques for describing the support role allow for easy understanding. I have learned a lot from you and am very glad you uploaded again!!
Thank you! I've been slacking on the YT videos lately, but hoping a nice break with the holidays will give me some renewed motivation for it!
ZQ is for sure Best support content! If you’re looking for Pos3, speeed and BalloonDota are great. For carry, pain is good.. and for mid, iAnnihilate is also pretty good.
Best dota content on TH-cam.
Pos 5 often demands save or big CC/team fight spell, while pos 4 often demands mobility or setup (preferably stun). Since pos 4 also have some gold priority, it is often interchangeable with mid/carry pick, especially if they have good mobility and isnt very reliant on gold to produce considerable impact.
I also have to mention that offlane are designed to be harder to play (it used to be called hardlane / suicide lane). As a pos 4, your natural movement should not be towards babysitting offlane, but removing advantages that the enemy may have. If the lane is predictably hard, stacking/ganking other lane should be natural instead of just leeching xp from your offlane. That is why it is not recommended to have a farming offlane (wk, alche, LS, etc) unless they have some built-in farm kit and just need at least 1 item to have good impact (BB, LC, axe to name a few)
Also simplifying "pos 5 stay in lane, pos 4 roam" would be outdated, reflected in pro scene where they have pos 5 roaming through gates, or pos 4 pressuring lane heavily through certain pair of heroes
Hey Zach. Thanks for all your support guides. My faves are still the "Who's fault is it anyway" series :)
They've benefited me greatly, and i'm sure all my fellow support players feel the same.
Great content. Keep it up. We truly appreciate it.
P.S. I went from Crusader 5 in May 2023 to hitting Ancient 4 for the first time yesterday. In no small part due to videos like yours coaching me out of my bad habits.
This video was amazing! Thank you for the high level theory! You're very good at clearly explaining and teaching rather nuanced concepts with excellent examples.
PS.
What's your favorite hero?
I figured it out myself. You need a strong support in safe lane to defend the early weak carry. That just makes sense. And pos4 you want something with mobility who can help wherever when pos3 can solo or someone who can stack a lot of camps. It can be situational sometimes. I’m wondering if we shouldn’t change the meta to have off and safe pick first round in ranked. Also I need more time to pick on first round… especially when I don’t even know which role it’s going to give me in advance.
The pick order is to deal with counters, I’d rather my pos 5 be counterpicked to hell cause that means less resources to shut down the core
Ogre us my go-to when i get pos 5. He's a literal meat shield in lane and he buffs carries with bloodlust. Oracle i think is the worst hero to play against when i pick ogre because of his dispells
Basic template for how the game is played now and based on the unofficial order of the picking phase.
Pos 5 enabler or a baby sitter healer.
Pos 4 roamer/initiator/can be a pseudo pos 3
Pos 3 tank/initiator/ no matter what. Other pick means griefing.
Pos 2 either a mid lane dominator, so the enemy supports will be forced to help their mid laner, freeing your side lanes, or it can be another roamer/initiator to help the side lanes. Picking a FARMING mid laner is griefing.
Pos 1 is either a turtle hard carry or a mid game hero hunter . This pick depends on your pos 5's pick or depends on your enemy's pick
Pos 2 and Pos 1 can switch for last pick priority.
Hey I love your videos ! I wanted to ask you if you ever considered doing a video about the different strategies throughout the history of dota. Like how a support played in 2012 versus how a support plays now. I think it would be interesting to visit the history of dota and contrast the different changes that happened ! I'm just throwing that out but I would love to see that analyzed.
I think it is highly underestimated how good it is to push safe lane (highly dependent on your hero), because it cause you to gain levels before enemy, enemy takes damage from creeps, you get free access to lotus, you can bull big camp, stack behind tower, downside can be pos 1 can be easier to gank, but the on the flipside they will then miss last hits and if you stand close to your creepwave that contains more creeps then them they will take more damage from the creeps than you. you can also get ganked from enemy pos 5 who tp or use portal and gank from behind.
ZQ droppin’ knowledge bombs!! I’m an immortal support player and I still learn something new every other video.
This video I learned you get XP for stacking. What?!?! When I play 4 I stack 8-10 times per game. So good to know I get gold AND XP. Ty as always!
Once I was a pos3 player, but at some point I got so tilted from playing with crap like pos4 warlocks and abbadons that do absolutely nothing in lane that I just decided it would be easier just to switch roles. Now I tilt because my pos5 are token farmers who pick crap like warlocks and abbadons and do nothing in lane. Some things never change and one of them is me being bad at dota. At least I can say that I'm aware of it to some extend. But I still hate healing supports. F u abbadon.
not to be picky but im not really sure why you're raging about 2 of the most insane laning pos 5 champs in abaddon and warlock
@bii2176 what's insane about them? These are not heroes, these are just walking tangos. When I have warlock in lane I'm forced to pick passive carry cause my supp has 0 kill potential and when he tries to kill enemies he just kills the wave and I'm forced to farm under enemy tower. And abba just heals 80% of the matchups. The main problem is that they limit my options as a carry to choose a hero I feel would fit into the draft just because I cannot snowball with them. While heroes like dazzle or oracle or any hero with lockdown do not limit me in hero choice as I can play both agressively and passively with other supps.
You never mention that at dawn everyone is revealed on the map for 3 seconds. Great vid ty.
That's only with dawnbreaker on the team
This great video deserves a great thumbnail 🙏
Man, could you come up with a tier list, please? Update is delayed
19:54 choo-choo!
Basic template for how the game is played now and based on the unofficial order of the picking phase.
Pos 5 enabler or a baby sitter healer.
Pos 4 roamer/initiator/can be a pseudo pos 3
Pos 3 tank/initiator/ no matter what. Other pick means griefing.
Pos 2 either a mid lane dominator, so the enemy supports will be forced to help their mid laner, freeing your side lanes, or it can be another roamer/initiator to help the side lanes. Picking a FARMING mid laner is griefing.
Pos 1 is either a turtle hard carry or a mid game hero hunter . This pick depends on your pos 5's pick or depends on your enemy's pick
Pos 2 and Pos 1 can switch for last pick priority.
❤
I have to respectfully disagree about Ancient Apparition. For me it's a 4 not a 5. AA is too weak as a 5. A 5 should be about protect and serve. AA can't protect well enough. It does damage over time. It's terrible at stopping an attack on a weak position 1. Especially if you're against a beefy hero who can take your damage.. The exception could be if you had a reliable stun on your pos 1. But those are few.
A position 4 should be a lane winner making life as difficult for the enemy carry as possible. In the offlane you're more likely to be paired with a reliable stun and more likely to be paired with someone you can stand behind while you deal out the damage. So while AA isn't a great ganker it is a top tier harasser. I'm not saying it's a great pos 4, it's just better than in pos 5.
It's also a more greedy hero than most 5's. For me a true 5 is still someone who can be happy with boots and just one other item for most of the game (if need be). An AA can truly snowball into a late game threat if it gets the gold and xp. AA is so squishy in the mid game it needs more than boots and glimmer to be effective and get those kills it needs to snowball. As a 4 AA has that extra leeway to be a bit more selfish.
i have 65% winrate on AA playing pos5 only. the hero does not need a lot and does not need kills. i end most games with just glimmer and force
Nah, AA is cooked. Worthless hero. As someone whose main support hero was AA, there is no reason to pick him at all.
All of his damage, utility, and power is backloaded into his ult. Normally this wouldn't be an issue with free exp runes. But Icefrog nerfed the cooldown of his level 1 and 2 ult, and the damage was never increased to compensate for the HP bloat. There's a reason why TI13 should have been good theoretically for AA since it was a ranged carry and healer meta, with alch and dk, but AA is so worthless of a hero he can't even play properly into the heroes he's supposed to counter.
I can definitely be wrong about hero positions! I would say many of your points are actually about AA being bad as a hero right now though, not about being a better 4 than 5. AA is a weak laner even when he's good, but he has one of the longest ranges in the game. That's why he combines constant auto attacks with the bonus armor/regen of the safelane tower to contribute to the lane by trying to win the war of harass. As the 4 support, his harass would be mitigated by the enemy safelane tower while also preventing any successful dives should he actually get people low enough.
Even in a bad match up where the carry goes to jungle early, you can hold the tower with Ice Vortex and just survive in the lane as the most expendable hero. You can still contribute around the map once you get 6 as well. And then because he is so squishy and is dependent on his ult, he just sits way in the back throwing buffs (Solar/Glimmer/etc) on his cores while waiting for the ult. If you gave him a ton of farm, he would still need to just wait to use his ult in the back meaning his gold isn't being put to use right away in fights. As a 5, you are more likely to get an initiating 4 hero to help set up your abilities. If you are 4, there are less 5's who would do the same for you which limits your options.
@ZQuixotix well the main issue is that AA ult is just bad. That's it. Too little damage and too long of a cooldown for the amount of effort it requires to aim, for the tradeoff he has to make for his other skills being mid, because that's what his core design was - mid skills to make up for a powerful ult with a low cooldown. But icefrog took an axe to the cooldown, and the damage never caught up with HP inflation. But no one really seems to care.
And I can't blame the playerbase. He's not the easiest hero to mechanically use, and your average pubstar has no reason to put in effort to learn AA. Why learn a more difficult hero for inconsistent results when you can just play cm/lion/lich and have an easier time, because those heroes aren't necessarily stronger, but they're much easier to execute? Ease of execution matters alot in lower level pubs, not so much pro play.
Not to mention, playing against an actual good AA probably enrages your average player, just like playing against an good OD, etc. Which is why I don't see anyone clamoring for AA buffs.
Try building different first skills. Some heroes can play both lanes if you build them differently.
pos5 never leaves lane , pos4 does, simple as
but whenn
@@elijahsawyer1907 you want to leave lane as pos 5 when your safe laner is all grown up and is safe to farm by himself. this is good because he is given solo xp and helps him accelerate while you can go impact the map
MEH🤮🤮 its not like that. Dota isnt simple as that
Bazed
@@austindouglas9658 10 minutes in game time is typically when the pos 5 leaves.
first
sup bro
Commenting for the algorithm. Someone please start a fight with me.
Farm patterns suck
You're actually just garbage to be honest... No way that you are able to do that
TA is overpowered and should be nerfed
Cm is too fast and freezes her opponents,why no one picks her?
Is dota halal
Dota 2 is mostly dead I had several games last week over half of them had boosters some of them had people in same clan on different teams. Kind of wondering if anything is gonna happen to improve it.
DotA2 is losing players due to many factors. You will be facing the same people as your rank goes up. And you will be playing with those who sabotage the game intentionally so the boosted account goes up, to be sold later. Once the boosted account is sold, you will be playing with it, but this time, with the account buyer, not the booster, your game will be doomed to lose. That is just one of the many issues of DotA2. Hence, player loss.
They just did a massive ban wave with the Frostivus patch yesterday, targeting smurfs and win traders, so yes they are tackling the issue head on, but it's not a cut and dry solution. That said they really need to remove the double down mechanic to make win trading less effective.
I think the game is still alive and well, but ofc, like any competitive multiplayer game, it has it's issues with people trying to game the system and cheat mmr. Just have fun and play your game imho, don't worry to much about what you cannot control. For me, the game is still as complex, diverse and downright fun to play as it's ever been.
@@BGLoscar This idea that dota is losing players at some unprecedented rate is actually false. If you look at steam charts for Dota 2, the average player count is almost identical to what it's been around this time of year for many years now. There's a basic trend - player count spikes around the international, then falls off and levels out and spikes again each year around the international. But again, if you look at the charts, average player count is remarkably consistent. Win trading, selling accounts, and other such degen activities are a fact of life in any competitive game, valve does a better job than most in terms of combatting this. It's better not to dwell on it too much and just enjoy the game for what it is, or, if your not enjoying your time, go do something else. Simple, really.