Hi guys,

I decided to write a guide about how to play support heroes simply because in most public games, no matter on which level, there is a lack of decent support players. This guide aims at helping players of all different skill levels in playing a support hero to its maximum use.

Don't read this if:

- You enjoy farming for most of the game - You like getting a lot of kills - It is important to you to have positive stats - You think you already know everything and the only reason you are not a Pro yet is coz you have been unlucky

If none of the above applies to you, feel free to continue reading and commenting.

Support is a role, not a hero!

The importance of Supporters

To everyone with a little experience, this section is self-explanatory, yet I still state the brutal facts: In most games, it is indeed the support heroes deciding the game outcome and not the carries.

The reason for this is simple: With a lack in support, no carry will be able to farm the required items nor get the necessary experience for those nice rampages. (This of course assumes a similar skill level of the teams facing each other, if your team is pretty strong and the enemies are total newbies, the importance of supporting somehow fades).

As you can see in most professional teams, the captains doing the draft are most often the ones playing the supporter/ganker role and hardly ever play the hard carries. It is also the supports who most often call the moment for teamfights/pushes/roshan etc.

Mastering the art of supporting is in many ways as hard or even harder than playing a carry, since you will be making a lot more decisions throughout the game than your safe lane carry who more or less afk farms for most of the game. And decision-making offers room for mistakes. Therefore, as for all roles, the most important thing for supporting is experience and the willingness to learn from your mistakes (aka bad decisions).

The fun aspect of being a supporter is that even if you know your role by just a little, you will be helpful for your team. Even if you fail in some situations, if you do your job correctly, you had a positive impact. Whereas we all know that a failing carry/ganker has no impact whatsoever. It is important to differ between a "hard support" and a somewhat assisting supporter role, who is buying wards from time to time but who should try to focus on getting some items. When I talk about "support" in this game, I am talking about hardcore supporting only!

Section 1a: The support heroes

Apparently, there is a wide range of support heroes. Summarizing, you can say that a support hero is a hero with either one or several disables or one or several strong nukes. The typical supporter doesn’t need items too much and experience is also not as important as it usually is for carries.

Most support heroes are ranged, allowing them to effectively harass enemies without taking too much damage. Note that a lot of heroes can be played as support, yet with some heroes it makes more sense than with others.

Here is a list of typical support heroes:

After listing up the most common support heroes it is necessary to take a look at their difference capabilities. To do so, it is important to know more about the different roles in dota.

Since a dota team consists of five heroes it is logical that there are five roles. The hard carry (usually #1), the solo middle hero (usually #2), the semi-carry/utility hero/ganker (role #3, most often the hero who takes the hard lane), the supporter (#4) and the hard support (#5). The #4 and #5 mostly share the role of supporting, yet the #4 should focus a bit more on getting the key items. The difference between those two is simply how big of an impact key items make on those heroes and on how they are capable of actually getting the money for those items.

Heroes that are most often #4 are e.g the typical jungle heroes:

It is obvious that a fast mek on Chen or a fast dagger on Enigma will do more for the team than the 2k gold could ever do on a crystal maiden.

Generally speaking, if you do not have a typical jungle hero, you should talk to the other support hero on the team. If you have a Warlock e.g., try to get that Scepter up on him since it is really powerful. It all comes down to the general picks and how the game goes. As I have experienced, in most public games you might end up being the only support with four core heroes on your team, so there might not even be too many games that actually consist of a #4 and #5 role. But if there is, you are prepared now.

As you can see, most typical support heroes are ranged intelligence heroes. Also, most of these heroes have either strong nukes, good disables, a devastating ultimate or several if not all of the aforementioned. The reason for this is simple: Supports are supposed to protect their hard carry in the early stages of the game. Being ranged helps in harassing the enemy out of the lane. So does the ability of nuking them back to their fountain. Moreover, supports are supposed to help the other lanes winning, too. Nukes and disables come in really handy there.

There are a few exceptions from “Intelligence, ranged, nuked and/or disable” in this list. These heroes shine by either their sheer nuking power (like Ogre Magi and Earthshaker) or because of their abilities to change the outcome of teamfights (like Naga with her Song of the Siren). You should be aware of the fact that if you pick one of these 5 typical mêlée supports AND your hard carry is also mêlée, you might have a hard time laning if you face an aggressive tri-lane. But more about the laning stage in the latter section of this guide.

Section 1b: The duties of a supporter - You should buy a chicken at the beginning of the game - You should upgrade it to a flying courier ASAP - You should buy observer wards basically any time they are off cool down - You should buy sentry wards to de-ward the opponents’ observer wards - You should buy sentry wards, dust or even a gem against invisible heroes - You should go for supportive items (for a list of them see Section XY) - You should NOT farm - You should NOT take hero kills on purpose - You should NOT take tower kills on purpose

Arguably, there are situations in which it is totally “OK” for the support to take a last hit on a tower or a hero. That is e.g. if you lack a certain amount for your key item and a team fight is incoming soon. Or if your Alchemist with maxed out greed and a midas is free farming anyways, so the gold he doesn’t get on that kill does not really hurt him too much but greatly helps you. If you are in doubt, rather let the carry have the gold. Experience will tell you, when it is ok to last hit things and when it isn’t.

- You should ALWAYS carry a TP and help allies when they are dived or their lane is pushed too hard. - You should sacrifice your own life to save your allies if the situation allows it. - You should anticipate the game and lead your team in ganks/pushes/roshan - You should always look out for the possibility of smoking up with allies and go for a kill on enemy key heroes - You should try not to feed - You should NEVER block the creeps on the fucking safe lane (even a block for one second might cause the first wave to fight under tower range which will result in you pushing the lane away from the tower into dangerous territory and you do NOT want that to happen!)

Exception: You already planted a really aggressive ward and you can see that the enemies are blocking their own wave. In that case, it is completely perfect to block your own wave to avoid having to fight too far away from the safety of your tower.

So, apparently I am telling you to play a support hero via supporting your team. Yet what exactly does it mean?

Generally speaking, you want your own carry (with whom you'll be laning on the safe lane most of the time) to get as much farm as possible. If you succeed in granting free farm to your carry (or if you are so insanely out- laned that your presence does not play a role) you should take a look at the other lanes and search for targets for ganks. Typically this will be the enemy solo mid hero OR the enemy hard carry (who most likely will be harder to gank than the mid hero because he is on his own safe lane and probably guarded by his own support heroes). See Section 2 on laning and ganking for further information.

Section 1c: Support Items

Apparently, you are not supposed to last hit creeps, heroes or towers. So your main source of income will be the gold for assisting in kills and the regular gold income per second. This means, you will never get filthy rich or if you do, the game is most likely already won.

In early game you should invest all your money in wards, upgrading the courier, town portals and eventually in boots, which you will turn into either Arcanes or Tranquils. You will also try to become a little bit more durable, so most often you should get a magic stick and one or two bracers. Additionally, the typical support items are:

Note that in a lot of games, Mekansm, Pipe and Drums are essential items. Since you are fulfilling your role as support, you are not likely to farm them really quickly (unless you are a jungle hero). In a lot of games, your #3 hero will get these items. So make sure to communicate a lot to see if your team needs a quick Mekansm and if so, let someone else get it (unless you have a ridiculously good early game, raping the enemy tri-lane or something like that).

As you can see, almost all of these items have to be activated and have direct effects on yourself, teammates or enemies. Also, most of these items are rather “expensive” so in quite a few games you will not be able to get any of them, since warding/dewarding and TPs eat up all your money. This is fine, if your carries get the farm they need.

There are only very few scenarios justifying going for different items like Dagon e.g. (Dagon I ONLY recommend vs. heroes that go Etheral Blade build like Morphling e.g.) since most items mostly offer hero killing capacity, which is just not your main purpose. If you do not know which item to get and have a lot of spare money, HEX is THE best item in dota. PERIOD.

Section 1d: Game starts

- Buy the courier! If you have another support hero, kindly ask him to buy it and buy a set of Observer AND Sentry Wards! Use the Observer Wards to protect your carry (as shown in Section 2) and use the Sentry to counter-ward if the enemies blocked your pull spot! - Buy whatever regeneration and stats items you can afford!

Section 2a: The Art of Warding As stated above, your first main job at which you should never fail when you play a supporter is warding. Sight means map control. Map control means free farming for your carry heroes. It also provides the chance for ganks and enables you to set up team fights the way you want them to happen. So sight is absolutely crucial. So is ruining the opponent’s sight.

In the following section I will take a look at the best warding spots in the game. Note that the higher the level you play on, the worse spots you might be forced to use to ward, because a skilled opponent will always try to de-ward and the good spots are also the most obvious ones. You rather have a little less sight and make the enemy waste 200 gold for sentry wards than have no sight at all, right?

The typical warding spots include the runes as well as the enemy forest. As you should know, if you put a ward within a certain area of a neutral camp, it will prevent this camp from spawning, thus preventing the enemies to pull that camp. This ward for the Dire not only prevents the creeps from spawning, but also gives you sight for incoming ganks from that direction.

It is the best possible warding spot for the Dire, since most people put the Observer ward directly on the neutral camp, which is where the Radiant will look for it trying to de-ward with Observers. (Note that for the point I am trying to make it is irrelevant whether I used sentry wards or observer wards, it is just about the spots to place them)

So let’s stay on this lane for a second, the next typical warding spot would be a ward, which gives you even more sight of the jungle as well as of the rune to spot incoming ganks from the mid hero. Typically, this ward is placed here. Sometimes you might even want to use a tango to remove the tree and place the ward even closer to the rune spot.

The next picture shows the most typical and “obvious” direct rune wards. Note that the ward on top of the stairs will also block the big camp from spawning whereas the observer ward on the left side of the picture will most likely not be seen if the enemy uses a sentry ward inside of the river. The wards on top of both cliffs are probably THE most obvious rune spots.

On the next picture you can see another rune ward for this side of the river which gives decent sight and avoids the typical detection spots. Another spot that is not quite detectable on the screenshot is the one uphill the Dire stairs that lead to the river.

The following picture shows some of the countless possibilities to block the Dire camp from spawning. Unfortunately, for this side I am not aware of a blocking spot which gives as much sight as the according ward in the Radiant jungle does. If anyone knows of such a spot, feel free to enlighten me.

The next step is to look at this side of river, covering the upper side rune spot. Again, there are countless options to use.

These spots seem to be fairly underused in public, since they do not give sufficient side for the mid hero. Therefore people will more often use the following spots.

There are two other important ward spots, especially when you are on your own safe lane and your goal is to maximize your carries protection. The reason for these spots is obvious: It gives you sight of the lane close to the enemy tower, so if an enemy decides to port to gank your carry, you can see it in time and your carry can either retreat or you can call teammates in time to back him up.

Obviously, there are many other spots, e.g. uphill next to the big camps right at the beginning of the base (mid lane for Radiant, top lane for Dire) but those are used either very offensive or when you turtle. I add them just for completion. Use them mainly if you are either playing really offensive or turtling like crazy, since these are maybe THE most obvious spots and they will be de-warded very likely.

Note that there are limitless options about warding, just be creative. If you are forced to decide, always go for the spots around the runes for maximum map awareness and for the wards protecting your carry. A last hint about warding: If your mid hero is facing the nasty fat and ugly hero named pudge, he will thank you if you put additional wards like the following, because being able to see that big hooker when he is about to catch you is a huge advantage. These wards are even more important during night time because of the limited sight at that time of the day.

Try to always have your observer wards on cool down, even if you just carry them around with you. 150 gold less will not delay your “key items”, especially since wards are your key items!!!

Also, for more detailed information, there are several good warding guides out there: http://www.team-dignitas.net/article...de-to-warding/ http://www.playdota.com/guides/seein...living-or-rape

Section 2b: The Art of De-Warding

As was requested by BlindFanboy, I will show some of the typical “De-Warding” spots that are used most often. Note that, while the Radiant has a better way of pulling and jungling due to the way the map is set up, the Dire have the advantage of being able to counter wards which block the pull a lot easier.

On this screenshot, the typical “block-wards” are the observer wards. Sometimes people will also just put a ward right into the spot in which the camp spawns. Since this ward gives no sight at all except for the camp, the bottom observer ward is a lot more common. If the ward is inside the camp OR like on this picture at the bottom side of it, the sentry ward on the left side will be able to detect both WITHOUT blocking the camp. There is only a little space between the two trees to place the sentry ward, but it is the perfect de-warding spot. If the enemy uses the spot on the right side of the camp, just place a sentry ward above it at a little distance of the camp (as can be seen on the screenshot). I won’t include pictures of the big camp pullspot, since there are simply too many ways to ward and de-ward it and most often people in public games do not bother to block that one.

On the Radiant side, the observer ward seen in this picture seems to be at the most common blocking spot, since it does not only block the pullspot but also blocks the big spot close to the river. The sentry ward you can see on this screenshot will remove it while at the same time not blocking your own spawns.

Now for the tricky part. If the enemy didn’t use the first spot to block your camp, there is a sheer endless number of possibilities where the ward might be. There is even a spot in the trees (right above the hero in this screenshot) where a ward can be placed. If you do not cut down the trees, you will never find it. Fortunately, in public games, most players either place the ward directly into the camp (like on this screenshot) or (as you can see in the warding section of this guide) on my favorite spot, a little outside the camp to the right side. The spot inside the camp (as well as the spot inside the trees) are detected by the top sentry ward. From what I know, there is no way of using a sentry there without blocking the camp closest to the rune. But at least the ward shown here doesn’t block your spot, so you can stack and double-pull easily. If the enemy uses my favorite ward spot, the second sentry ward on this picture below the hero on the right side will remove it without blocking the camp.

Section 2c: The Art of Laning

After covering the basics, let’s move to the actual game play section. Obviously, there are a top, a bottom and a mid lane in dota.

The midlane in public will most typically be a 1vs1 Mexican standoff lane. A lane in which your role as support is very limited early on. You should provide your solo mid hero with sight to the crucial rune spots (which can be found in Section 2a) and if necessary either gank his opponent OR teleport if he is dived by one or several enemies.

Note that more often than not, just the animation of someone teleporting might be enough for the enemies to cancel their hunt. Follow the action and if your mid hero is safe, either cancel the TP and stay at the side of your hard carry, OR if the mid hero is forced to retreat to fountain and you judge the situation to be safe, use the opportunity to get a few last hits and experience on mid lane, before retreating to your safe lane. This is of course very situational; do not forget that if the enemies dove your strong, imba solo mid hero, they can probably do it with you with even less effort. If this is possible, retreat immediately or use the time to gank the long lane or maybe grab a rune, so the enemies don’t get it.

That being said, normally you will not be engaged in the mid lane too much in the typical game. That leaves the safe lane and the hard lane. The safe lane is located on the bottom for the Radiant and on Top for the Dire.

It is “safe” because the place the creeps battle is very close to your own tower, meaning you have a good chance to retreat under its protection if trouble arises. Therefore, it is easier for your carry to farm. It also gives you the chance the pull the creeps, gaining a little extra farm and denying the enemies experience from your own creeps. I will look into this in the next section.

The safe lane is the place to be for a supporter. If you play on a decent level, it will most often happen that you and the enemy team have a typical solo hardliner and a tri-lane on your safe lane OR a dual lane on your safe lane with a jungling hero. The old school 2v2 lanes on the hard lane don’t occur too often on a decent level, so let’s focus on the following two scenarios for your own safe lane:

2vs1: This means, the enemy has decided to send one single, lousy hero against you and your hard carry. This means, you HAVE to win that lane. You are two heroes against one, you have the advantage of possible pulling AND you are on the goddamned safe lane. So, how do you play?

Typically, the hardlane heroes are heroes with a good escape mechanism (windrunners windrun, darkseers surge, shadow walk of bounty hunter and clinkz, QoP’s blink or pucks phase shift & orb) which of course makes them hard to kill. The iron rule for a supporter on the 2v1 safe lane is:

Keep the bloody enemy away from the experience range!

To do so, you need to know that within a certain radius, the enemy creeps will attack you if you start right clicking an enemy hero. To avoid taking this so-called creep agro, you have to watch out for several things.

The following two screenshots illustrate what you have to do.

On both screenshots you can see the area in which the fighting between creeps usually takes place. Normally, the enemy hero will be positioned somewhere behind his own ranged creep. If you come from the front, meaning directly from your tower, you cannot attack the enemy without taking creep agro.

If you walk from that direction just past the creeps, he will attack you a couple of times from a safe distance, resulting in you not being able to 1on1 battle him afterwards. So, you should walk in either from the side or even better from behind, meaning you enter the lane from the spot closest to the river.

Normally, the enemy hero will not walk in front of his creep wave, so there is a fair chance that if you wait on the spot in the jungle closest to the river, you can let the creep wave pass and immediately start attacking the following hero after the creeps have passed. The enemy now has to either start hitting you back or retreat. He cannot catch up with the creep wave because you are constantly attacking him. Normally, he will retreat after a couple of hits. If you have a stun or heavy nuke on lvl 1, feel free to pop it to damage and scare him as much as possible or to even score the kill. In the meantime, your carry will possibly get all the last hits, experience and denies from the entire wave. This means, the next wave will be battling at the exact same spot hence you can repeat the entire process. The downside of this is that you will not get any experience either, but it doesn’t matter as long as your carry is free farming and leveling and the opponent is denied gold and experience. After all, you do not really need items or levels as badly as the enemy off-laner does.

It is important to avoid taking too much creep agro in this process because if you do, apparently you will lose hit points, but more importantly, if you do this within the radius of creep waves, you might end up pushing the lane because while the enemy creeps attack you, they are not attacking your creeps which results in pushing the fighting space towards the enemy tower, making farming for the enemy more easy and making it more dangerous and gankable for your own carry.

If you have successfully kept the enemy out of experience range until your carry is lvl 4 or 5 – or if your hard carry faces a hero that he can easily take on 1on1 - your mission on the lane is more or less accomplished for now. You might try to score a kill with the help of your carry, who should have phase boots or treads by now or you can either go and gank or stack creeps and pull.

2vs2: If you and your carry are facing two enemies, the laning is a lot different and harder. Apparently in this scenario all depends on the hero setup. Most often, you will have the weaker lane, since most hard carry heroes tend to be more or less useless in the early game. If this is the case, focus on denies, try to score an occasional harass on the enemies and play it safe. Protect your carry and your own life at all costs. If the lane is weaker, call for help or swap the lanes. The carry needs to farm! The lane will not get stronger if anyone of you dies. Do NOT pull on 2v2 lanes if you are at a disadvantage. The enemies might dive your carry while you are pulling.

Fortunately, this scenario happens less and less since putting two heroes on your hard lane to keep the enemy carry from farming exposes your own safe lane and therefore most people do not want to do it anymore. Yet, especially in the lower levels of public, it is a situation you might face.

If for some reason your lane is stronger, communicate with your carry, discussing when to move in on what hero and score kills!

2vs3: The worst nightmare of every support and hard carry is facing an aggressive tri-lane. If you and your lane mate do not out-skill the enemies by a lot, there is no way to win this lane.

As the name says, an aggressive tri-lane is all about kills and preventing your beloved carry from farming. To ruin it, you either need backup from teammates or you need to be incredibly careful, abusing the proximity of the tower without dying. Since most hard carries are mêlée heroes, an aggressive tri-lane is likely to prevent ANY farm from your carry. If you don’t get back up or swap the lanes, you can feel free to try to get some last hits on your own. Your carry can’t get them anyways and if you don’t get them, no one will or they are denied.

Fortunately, tri-lanes are a phenomenon that occur mostly in games with a relatively high skill level and therefore can be countered with a tri lane of your own.

3vs3:

Tri-lanes can happen on either safe or hard lane. They are an art for themselves. Arguably, some heroes form stronger tri-lane than others. Mostly the heroes with really high AOE range/damage and low cool downs/mana cost are dominating these lanes. Jakiro, Undying and Earthshaker are three of the heroes that can help dominating a tri lane. If you think that your enemies might run an aggressive tri-lane, you should think about picking one of these heroes and/or ask an ally to take another one.

Tri-lanes require a lot more communication and coordinated execution than normal lanes, so make sure you talk a lot with your lane mates and decide when to attack which target. The mission remains the same: Enable your carry hero to farm whilst killing the enemies. Because this guide will be long enough as it is, I will not go into details here. One could probably write an entire guide just about the art of tri-lanes.

Note that if a tri vs. tri matchup occurs, this has several effects: First of all, your own mid lane hero as well as your hard lane hero will be in 1vs.1 situations. Second, they are far less likely to get ganked since if you pull one or even two heroes off the tri-lane, the remaining heroes are likely to be overwhelmed. Plus, it is incredibly obvious if heroes disappear from a tri-lane, therefore it is easier to dodge ganks. Third, it is being said that the team doing the aggressive tri-lane loses the lane if there are no kills involved or if they just have less kills than the defensive tri-lane. This is because the safe-lane heroes always have the possibility of pulling creeps. (Even though they most likely will have to de-ward the pull spot first) and therefore the chance of gaining a significant level advantage early on.

Apparently, even if there are 0 kills, if you are on a defensive tri-lane and your carry gets close to zero last hits, you pretty much lost the lane.

Section 2d: The Art of Pulling The process of “pulling” describes the method of pulling a neutral camp towards your creep wave, causing your creeps to leave the lane and attack the neutrals. This is good for several reasons:

Firstly, you can get safe experience and gold from the neutrals without taking any damage at all.

Secondly, you cause the enemy creeps to fight under your own tower.

And thirdly and most important, it gives you an opportunity to deny an entire creep wave.

Pulling is really important for supports and can win or ruin a lane. Even if you are an experienced player, I suggest looking at this section, since even on high level public games, I have seen lots of people doing it wrong, not understanding the trouble they have caused.

First of all, to pull the creep camp, you need to attack a neutral creep at approximately .48 or .18 and walk back to the lane towards the upcoming creep wave. This causes the wave to attack the neutrals at around .52 or .22. The creeps will now follow the neutrals back to their camp and continue fighting them there.

The problem is that even with the wolves which annihilate the creeps the fastest, in the end of the process, two creeps will survive. If you attack the neutrals continuously, even more creeps will survive, so you should focus on last hitting only.

The picture shows two creeps going back to the lane. So why is this bad? Obviously, since your wave wasn’t there and your carry couldn’t tank the enemy wave yet, it got into the range of your tower which destroyed it really quickly. Also, if you check the game time and the mini map, you will see that the next creep wave is almost there, so you will have 2 more creeps than the enemies in the next wave. This will push the lane towards the enemy tower, thus allowing the enemy hero(es) to farm safer and putting your carry in increased danger. Something you want to avoid at all cost. And there are two different ways to avoid it.

The first, easier and 100% successful way is to stack the neutral camp once before you pull it. Stacking means you attack a neutral creep of the camp at .53 and walk away from the camp. If there are no creeps in or around the camp at the full minute (0.0) mark, a new set of neutrals will spawn. After the creeps you pulled away return, there will be two full sets of creeps. If you pull this camp now, your entire wave will be killed, therefore you will not push the lane and your carry can keep farming within the safety of your tower.

Note that it can happen that you accidentally pull a second wave towards the camp, since fighting it takes a while and the last surviving creep of your wave is usually the ranged creep which will be situated somewhere around the place where the hero is on this screenshot. Depending on the situation, this might be enough to get the agro of the next incoming wave. If that happens, you might end up pushing the lane, again. Due to the map layout, this happens a lot more on the Dire side and less likely on the Radiant.

But what’s the second way of pulling without pushing the lane? It is simply continuing to farm the jungle with the kind assistance of your creeps.

On the Radiant side, if you use a tango on the trees as can be seen in the following picture, it is possible to pull the camp straight above towards the first creep camp where your wave is still battling the neutrals. The tricky thing here is to time it. You want the second camp’s creeps to arrive at the time, the last neutral from the first camp dies. If you don’t time it well, your creeps will either have returned to the lane already or the creeps of the second camp will return to their camp while your creeps are still busy fighting the first camp, thus not activating their agro.

This process takes some practice and is easily messed up, so if possible, stick to stacking the camp first.

Note that on the dire side, you do not need to remove a tree; you can simply walk to the big camp closest to the lane and pull them towards the small camp. It is harder to do than on the Radiant side, though, because the distance is bigger. Unfortunately, I cannot give exact game times of when to do the second pull, since it depends on what neutrals are there and therefore on how long your creeps need to kill them.

Important notice on pulling:

Especially on 2v2 lanes, but also on 2v1 lanes, the enemy hero might try to interrupt your pulling or try to steal your creep experience and gold with nasty spells like shadow walk. So always keep an eye on the lane and where the enemies are. If he or they try to interrupt you, you need to judge the situation and maybe call your carry for help. I’ve seen first blood being spilled countless times because heroes overcommitted to preventing the pull and getting themselves in a bad situation. This is even more true if your team has a jungling hero which might come in and assist as well or if your middle hero happens to grab that haste rune close to you in exactly that moment.

Section 3: General gameplay

Apparently, game play is highly situational, yet there are a few hints that improve your support play by a lot. Let’s start with the most important issue:

Normally, you have to fucking stay back in teamfights. Support heroes are usually not the ones to start a fight. If you are forced to do so because your team has no initiator whatsoever, ok, go ahead, you will die but someone has to do the job. Yet normally, you should have at least one hero who has more farm and levels than you and a better skill set to start a fight (magnus, axe, centaur, void, basically every hero with a big AOE disable).

Note that this IS indeed highly depending on the situation. If you are the only disabler on your team and you can manage to take out a crucial enemy hero by initiating on him, do not hesitate to do so. Vengeful Spirit and her Nether Swap are the perfect example for this. So is e.g. Disruptor with Glimpse (yet he can cast it from a rather safe distance)

The reason for you to generally NOT start the fight is simple:

You are usually behind in levels and items.

You usually have a huge target on your head which tells the enemy carry “please kill me with 2 hits for additional gold and experience”. So, if you go in first, you might die without even casting all your spells. Yet, if this causes the enemies to focus you down while your team cuts through them, it is ok.

Generally, it is better to stay back, choose your target and get off all your spells. If you play heroes with low cool down spells, the longer you stay alive, the more you can cast. If you are a Rastafarian and you put down wards, used fork lightning, hexed and shackled enemies, you’re out of mana anyways and you can bite the dust, forcing the enemies to waste their time killing you while they ignore your carry. If you can get all your spells of and die, it is ok, you’ve done your job. Staying alive is still better!

If you happen to play Lion or Lina: Use your ultimate immediately on the enemy’s key hero. Be it either that sick initiator (e.g enigma) to bring him down before he initiates OR if that initiation has already taken place, just nuke the enemy carry. Even if they are at full HP. Carry players are careful and cowards by definition (I’m exaggerating of course), they are the most crucial heroes, without them, their team doesn’t deal damage. So, if you can bring them down to half HP in the beginning of the fight, you might cause them to think even for a second whether to take the fight or retreat, this second might be enough.

If you have a disable, try to use it on the carry before he pops his nasty BKB. If your team happens to be engaged upon, do not panic and just spam your spells. Instead, try to anticipate the opponent’s target priority and used your spells and items to interrupt that priority.

In most battles, the carry will try to or bring down the supports first, then focusing on the other carry and/or tanks/initiators/other roles. As a support player, you will spend a lot of times walking around warding, trying to assist in kills or simply waiting in the fog for your trap to snap or to find a lonely hero to gank. During that time, try to think ahead to the team fights. Try to anticipate the enemy battle order, their items, their positioning. This will help you a lot to do the right decisions when the time is there. E.g it is apparently useless to focus down their enigma after he got his full 5second Blackhole through and used his stun and midnight pulse already. Apart from his low damage low attack speed right click he has nothing more to throw in. Rather focus the enemy carry in that case.

After your spells are on cool down, you also only have that sad right click power, but always be aware of the fact that every second the enemies concentrate on killing you or even chasing you, your teammates have time to kill them. So be visible and be a nuisance to the enemy.

If you have a chance to sacrifice yourself for a teammate, do it! Even more so if this teammate is your carry. If the situation is a definite kill on both of you for whatever reason, don’t do it. But if you see even the slightest chance of helping your ally to survive, go suicidal. Block the enemies with your fragile body; use your meka on your ally. Shallow grave him. Pop out all your spells on a chasing hero, maybe he thinks there are more of you incoming. Just support! It is fun and if you do it correctly, you will eventually be praised more than any carry would be. Since raping with the 40mins free farm Phantom Lancer is fairly easy. Providing him with the 40mins free farm is the true art of dota.

Section 4: Analyzing the heroes:

I left this green fellow out of the list of typical support heroes since he seems to be totally underused since a few patches. In my personal opinion, for any kind of public game level, he still is probably THE best tri-lane hero in dota. The reason for this is that decay and tombstone are insanely strong early game spells. If there are several heroes around, they get better. Therefore, he is basically MADE to be on a tri-lane. I guess the reason he is not played that much in professional games is the fact that he is somewhat of a “passive” laner and doesn’t scale all too well into the later stages of the game. Tombstone sucks balls if you use it offensively, since the enemies can simply walk away from it. But if you are facing an aggressive tri-lane and you already have a ranged support, undying might be the best pick for the lane.

The infamous space cow has seen a big revival since he got buffed a lot. The reason I left him out is simply because using him as a #4 or #5 role requires a really good understanding of the game. He is a gank hero that doesn’t offer too much in terms of protecting your own carry (apart from constantly threatening the opponent’s middle and safe lane heroes thus shackling the opponent’s supports to these lanes). Yet since he is quite tanky and once he reaches level 6 can basically take out any enemy carry with the help of just one teammate, he is also a viable option.

Now here is a funny fellow. The highest base damage in the game combined with one of the best protective spells makes a great supporter. Unfortunately, he is pretty slow, mêlée and Living Armor is essentially weak in tri-lanes. Picking him gives you a high chance to win the 1v1 lanes, but only if you pay constant attention to what is happening there.

Another one of the most potent tri-laners in dota. Since fissure blocks the path entirely to both creeps and heroes, you can use it to isolate single targets and focus them down. The problem is Earthshakers pathetic mana pool and the fact that he is mêlée. Yet you can use him for nasty little tricks as well.

On Dire side it is possible to completely block the path of a creep wave and pull it over to the ancients. Note that depending on which ancients spawn, you will need boots to be able to pull it off. Just use fissure to block the path of the creeps and then immediately run to the ancients and as soon as you take their agro, run back to your wave. They should now take up the agro and fight the ancients.

This method has several effects: 1) It allows you to freely last hit creeps which give a lot of XP and Gold 2) Even if you use auto-attack (which I do not recommend since 2 of the 3 ancient camps have an area of effect damage), you can have an entire creep wave killed in the process. Thus you deny the enemy safe lane carry the XP and Gold from 4 creeps. 3) You manage to push the lane closer to your own tower, since the enemy creeps have no one to fight and will therefore walk straight to the tower. This allows your hard lane hero to get some rather easy last hits and experience. 4) Because the enemy creep wave will fight under your tower, you should not do this two waves in a row. Otherwise you expose your hard lane hero to the risk of just being dived under his tower and/or you allow the enemies to push your tower way too fast. 5) You are pretty close if your hard lane hero is dived 6) You are close to the bottom rune and therefore you can either help your middle help securing it or use it for a gank on the midlane.

Note that I have done this in a lot of public games and very rarely the enemy warded the ancients. If that is the case, you can just try to gank mid or top lane.

If you are on the Radiant side, there is also a nasty little trick you can do, yet it doesn’t offer quite as much as on Dire side.

First, you need to grab a quelling blade and some clarity potions and walk immediately to the spot between your t1 and t2 tower which you can see on the following screenshot.

You then use your quelling blade to remove all the trees inside the forest (without cutting a path through to the lane!). It might require some practicing in training games to master this technique. What you do is you just block the wave with fissure as can be seen on the screenshot. The wave will then walk into the forest, trying to take the “shortest” path to the top lane. Once they are in the forrest, you just walk a few steps back and block the entrance with your body. You can see the location of the body block on the following screenshot. You can pretty much repeat this process until the trees start growing back. If you do, the wave will stay trapped inside the forest until someone removes the trees and lets them out. You can also choose to let them out at any time you deem appropriate.

This method also denies the enemy safe lane hero XP and Gold. Since you cannot destroy your own creep wave on the Radiant side, you can at least stall them and let a huge wave out if you want to push. Also, your solo hard lane hero will level up REALLY fast that way and will be able to severely outlevel his opponents in the early stage of the game.

Even if you choose to let the creeps out eventually, you will greatly reduce the enemy carries farm, since he will be forced to last hit a lot of creeps under his tower or even in between his t1 and t2 tower, which again makes him vulnerable to ganks.

Note that you shouldn’t perform these methods if your respective hard lane hero is fragile and doesn’t have an escape mechanism or escape ability (but then again, those heroes shouldn’t be on the hard lane).

We all know the reasons why he is top pick and top ban material even since he was introduced. Just two short things on that famous ball of lightning: He is a bad tri-laner! Level 3 is his time to shine, trying to be aggressive before you reach that most often results in failure (unless you have the perfect setup combo like e.g. and Ursa and a target stun against a limited disable lane.

Another quite horrible tri-lane hero. His low level heal doesn’t do too much and the duration on repel is just too short and he is another mêlée hero. While he is pretty decent on any non tri-lane and he is really good in the later stages of the game, he really needs levels. He has no disable and no reliable nuke apart from the healing damage (for which enemies must stand close to the healing target) so he is a very passive laner.

Decent nuke and a really good disable. Naga is an all-around talent. We used to see her as a carry, yet during TI3 she shone as a support (mainly in #4 role). She is also a rather passive laner in a lot of scenarios since she is mêlée and needs to be close to enemies for riptide to deal damage. But the rather long initiation range on web as well as her amazing ultimate make her a decent choice.

Alongside Venomancer, she is probably the very best lvl 1-3 supporter in dota. A stun nuke and an aoe slow nuke and she is ranged. Need I say more? Well, probably that if you do not make stuff happen during the early levels, you basically become a walking aura. CM has such a low movement speed and hit points that she dies like no one else in dota once the game reaches a certain stage. For aggressive plays she is amazing, but I would not recommend to pick her if the enemy completely abandons the tri-lane or sends only one hero to it.

Nuke, nuke stun, ranged. Apart from the fact that the stun might be difficult to hit without a set up stun, she is just a great support hero. Even without items she will always be able to make things happen, simply because once she reaches level 6, her nuke power is really strong. Hardly ever a bad choice.

His name shouldn’t be Shadow Shaman but rather “Disabler”. No other hero (apart from Mirana) offers such a long disable at level 1. He is always nasty to lane against if you do not have a lot of nuke and/or disable yourself. His downside is that he is REALLY slow and fragile. And shackle basically also disables himself, giving the enemy time to kill you. If you need a last supporter for a push oriented lineup, he is a good choice.

Jungle only hero. Quite weak on a lane. Be aware of the fact that if you pick a jungler, you automatically expose your lanes, since even if you are able to help out on the lane, you are not there permanently, which might result in a 3vs2 lane against your safe lane carry. With Enchantress, you can do really good ganks from lvl 1 on if you find a good creep (preferably the Troll Warlord, since his net is a really good lockdown). If you play her, you should always instantly buy a smoke and either gank the middle lane or any other lane that can result in a kill. Genereally, junglers are most often the #4 role and not the hard support, since they can farm up good items pretty fast.

This dude is all about LONG RANGE. Except for fissure, he has the longest range AOE disable in the game. He has relatively low cool downs and mana cost and has 2 nukes of which one is a stun and the other a slow and damage over time spell. Also, he is one of the tankiest Intelligence heroes. Jakiro is basically never a really bad choice as a support. If I had to vote for one hero you can always pick in every scenario, it would be him together with Rubick.

Another jungle only hero. Unlike ench who is rumored to have been spotted laning once or twice in the history of dota, this guy just lives in the woods. You need a decent micro management to be able to control your creeps in an effective way, so don’t use him if you can’t micro well. He is pretty much the “ultimate” support, since he can slow down, amplify damage, nuke for pure damage, heal, send back allies and also disable (if he has the right creeps) AND provide auras (again, if he has the right creeps). A really great hero, yet also a jungler, so therefore a bit dangerous if the enemy have really strong lanes. Also, probably the support that needs the most skill to be mastered.

Personally, I really like Silencer a lot. His ultimate is just game breaking in certain matchups. The problem is that he is a horrible trilaner. He has no “real” disable, both his spells are damage over time spells that can be triggered/removed instantly and he is slow and fragile. I would only pick him if you can predict that the opponents send only one hero to your safe lane. With his glaives of wisdowm it is fairly easy to outzone most heroes and if he can stack and pull the camps and get some XP, Silencer is a really strong hero. Yet, do not pick him against trilanes (unless it is a ridiculously bad trilane with heroes that have only 1 spell).

These guys are all about NUKING. Multicast is one of the funniest things in dota. Ogre is really tanky, has a decent disable, damage over time slow and probably one of the best lategame spells of all supports: Bloodlust. He really doesn’t need items at all to do his job decently. In some matchups, I even skip Ignite and maximize Bloodlust right away, along with the stun. It is insane how much it increases your early game chasing and clashing power. Then again, Ignite is a powerful spell as well. Highly situational of course. Don’t forget that he is mêlée! So avoid tri-lanes that involve another mêlée hero if you can.

Here we got for my second choice of “the best all-around support in most scenarios”. Even though telekinesis doesn’t deal damage, it is screwing up the positioning of one or several heroes. Fade bolt early one is a great tool of pushing/depushing the lanes and minimizing damage from enemy right clicks. Rubick is both a good initiator and counter-initiator. And his ultimate can just make him game-changing. If you are in doubt, pick this guy! Tri-lane or not, it matters not to him. Be aware that he needs a good positioning even more than most other supports. He can do so much if he survives!

He is one of the most underused heroes in the current stage when it comes to professional games. And it eludes me why that is the case. In my opinion, his skill set is one of the very best in dota. He has an AOE lockdown, a decent nuke with a small AOE and the sickest repositioning ability in the entire game: Glimpse. His ultimate does not only deal decent damage, but also silences enemies. Anything else you could need? He is not the best tri-laner, as he needs the right setup. Kinetic field is not a stun but a lockdown, which means the enemies can still cast spells and right click. So you should always pair him up with a real disable hero or some massive nukers. Or a good early game right click hero like Ursa or Razor e.g. Also, I have used the tri- lane combination of Undying and Disruptor to a great effect. Despite not having a stun, from level 3 on the combination of Kinetic field and tombstone is just really strong. He is fragile though and if you choose to use his nuke, his mana pool is kind of small.

Near unlimited mana for other heroes to spam their spells, a high range high damage AOE nuke with a low cool down. There is a reason why he has been around the professional scene for a long time. He is a good supporter. He can even be on tri-lanes, despite not having any disable at all. With smart play and positioning, well-timed illuminates can wreak havoc upon the enemy. Yet, he also needs some expierence to be mastered. I have seen a lot of Kotls trying to “harass” the enemy with Illuminate who ended up ruining the farm for the carry and constantly pushed the lane. Try NOT to hit the creeps with it, but only the heroes!!

He shouldn’t need any explanation at all. His entire skill set aims at killing a single target. Which of course means, he is not too useful in tri-laning either.

Alongside Crystal Maiden, he is the very best lvl 1-3 support. Gale has an insanely long duration, slows and deals damage over time. If you happen to catch an enemy to far from his own tower, he is likely to die. His problem is is tiny manapool and the low range. He is also by nature pretty squishy. Still, he is a decent hero in a lot of scenarios. But you shouldn’t pick him against heavy disable or nuke lanes. He will cast gale and then just die. If you get overwhelmed, there is no chasing!

A classical solo middle hero in the old days, he has made his way into professional dota as one of the key support heroes. AOE ranged disable, a really annoying mana burn and one of the best spells in the game, spiked carapace, enable him to contribute a lot to his team. Despite the fact that he is mêlée, he is a decent tril-laner because with good use of carapace and impale, he has two abilities to disable several enemies. His ultimate is basically similar to Lina’s or Lion’s, with the difference that he can use it to escape, scout, and that it deals physical damage instead of magic damage.

She used to be the main support for a long time and then fell out of favor. A decent nuke, an Aura that never loses it effectiveness and a low damage low cool down spell that removes armor, thus increasing the right click damage make her a viable pick. Her ultimate screws up the enemy positioning and can be used to safe allies. In most scenarios a decent pick. Doesn’t matter if it is a tri-lane or not.

Mr. Disable! Nightmare just works really well with certain heroes. Yet it has the disadvantage that it can be removed by the opponent’s allies, which might result in your allies wasting their spells, hitting nothing. Enfeeble makes it incredibly hard for enemies to last hit creeps and can’t be dispelled anymore, so it is a decent spell even in late game. Brain Sap is pure damage and heals yourself up, which is awesome. Especially against typically low HP heroes like most carries and supports, it is super strong once you reach level 5. Since his ultimate goes through BKB and can disable any hero for quite a long time, he is also most often not a bad choice. Yet, he is not the best tri-laner, since nightmare can mess up things pretty easily and he is pretty weak on the early levels.

Auto deny creeps equals less XP for the enemy equals a lane constantly pushed towards your own tower. Equals a great support hero. A low cool down AOE nuke with a slow effect makes him even more viable. The lack of disable puts him at a disadvantage at tri-lanes. But I have seen Liches just hanging around the mid lane for the first two minutes of the game to ensure their middle hero has a huge advantage and then go their ways. Since he has one of the highest AOE damage ultimates in the game, he can be quite useful.

Lion is the first hero on my „until I reach level 3 I am useless“ list. Sure, in 2v1 or 3v1 scenarios, his disables help to kill enemies. But on a 2v2 or 3v3 lane he is just paper and doesn’t offer enough. If you manage to get the levels without dying too much, he is a great support with 2 nice disables and a sick ultimate. But I highly discourage anyone from playing him on a tri-lane.

Another one of the heroes that are fairly underused in professional games. He probably has the highest damage ultimate of all heroes in the game (maybe apart from doom with aga) if it channels through and if you get your scepter up. Yet, he is in one line with lion in the “until I am level 3 I am useless” department. His stun is unreliable and takes a lot of practice to master. Maledict is just weak in the early game since you lack the follow up damage for it to kick in really well. The heal on lvl 1 is decent, but doesn’t do too much against strong lanes. Don’t pick him on tri-lanes!

Even though he is typically used in jungle, he can be played as a hard lane hero as well. His Eidolons just allow him to auto-deny and farm pretty well. Blackhole is still one of the sickest ultimates in the game and he has a stun and an AOE damage over time spell. Overall he is a good choice. Be careful when you play against a Rubick since there is no way but catching him in the Blackhole to keep him from instantly stealing it. He has the same trouble as all junglers, exposing the lanes early on.

A nuke that also heals you, auto regen on last hits and denies and also an aura that deals damage. Theoretically, a really great hero. Problem is he has no disable and is fragile as hell. Do not ever play him on a tri-lane (unless you want to play him as a #3 role, giving him farm). He most often also shouldn’t be played as a #5, since he just is a good hero if he has some farm.

Number three in the „until I am level 3 I am useless“ department. He might be the worst tri-laner of all supporters since there is not enough damage of fatal bonds to deal enough damage and since his heal early on is so weak, it won’t do too much if three heroes focus and nuke the target. Apart from his laning weakness on tri-lanes, he might be one of the best lategame supports. IF you ever manage to get an Aga and a Refresher Orb, it will be really hard to lose the game. Fatal bonds is one of the very best lategame spells (unless the enemy is a massive BKB team) and the Golem stun and damage is also REALLY through all stages of the game.

In my opinion probably the worst “typical” support hero of all. No disable and squishy. His nuke is good even though it was a relatively low range. Nether Ward is a great spell in most stages of the game, but he simply is too squishy.

Dazzle is overall just a great support hero. All his spells are amazing in saving allies and damaging enemies. He is also a decent pick in most scenarios, yet somehow weak on tri-lanes on the early level, since shallow grave has a high cooldown early on, his heal only damages if the enemies are really close and poison touch doesn’t stun until you get a second level of it.

Another one of the sickest tri-laners in dota. Cold feet works really well with a setup stun and chilling touch offers so much extra damage for all your allies. Also, unlike the other “tri-lane rapers” Earthshaker and Undying, he is a ranged hero and therefore most often the best choice if you lack a #5 role for your trilane.

Shadow Demon works really well on all lanes, IF there is a stun to follow up disruption. He can generally be considered one of the supports that can basically always be picked.

The most picked hero of The International 3 is a support hero. Need to say more? Well, one should add that he is a sick tri-laner and that he needs some micro for his ultimate, so hardly a hero a unexperienced player should pick.

Another one of these heroes that work fine in almost every scenario. Great nukes, an AOE disable (that works best with a setup stun) and a great pushing potential. Most often a good pick.

Section 5: Using smoke

As a support, one of your tasks is to provide ganks on the cruical heroes of the enemy. A good way to do this is using smokes whenever possible. Not only do you become invisible until you are withing range of an enemy hero, but you also gain movespeed, allowing you to wander around faster. A nice bonus is the fact that smoke is not broken when you use a TP or a spell, only by physical attacks or when an enemy is near.

To efficiently use smoke, it is necessary to avoid the spots in which you might run over a sentry ward. You should also never use smoke in an area in which the enemy might have observer wards. So the best spot usually is behind your own towers, at your base or at a typical ward spot if you just de-warded the opponents.

A fact most people are not aware of is the travelling area of smoke. Once it is used, there is a cloud of smoke travelling quite a distance and this can be seen by enemies. So avoid using it too close to a creep wave since the enemy might spot it.

If you run around smoked, you should always pay attention if you are revealed. I have seen people breaking the smoke because they attacked an illusion. A great way to determine if it is an illusion is just to check your status, if the smoke didn’t break, it is NOT a real hero.

Since it only breaks if an enemy hero is close by, it is also a great way to find opponents e.g. in their own jungle. Before you even see them, you know they are there, which gives you time to prepare it.

Generally, you might want to approach whichever lane you are ganking by an “untypical” way. This means, if you are Radiant side and on the safe lane support, it might be worth to go all the way around your own ancient camps to gank the middle lane. Most middle laners have the tendency to orient themselves more towards the direction of their own safe lane, which gives you an opening. Most people do not expect a gank to come from their own jungle.

The introduction of smoke changed dota quite a bit. A lot of typical mid heros are incredibly vulnerable to smoke ganks, a fact you should abuse at any time. Even if you just stand around and do not get a kill, if your middle hero who was being owned before gets some farm and XP time because the scared enemy stays back, it might be worth it. A kill is still better of course. As hard support, you should most often take your #4 role with you when you smoke gank. The things cost 100 gold a piece, so they are not exactly cheap and shouldn’t go to waste. Since you should always have your observer wards on cool down anyways, smoke is a good thing to buy when you know you are about to die and have around 200-400 gold. Instead of losing this gold, invest it. That is why I always have smoke on the quickbuy menu when I play hard support.

Smoking can decide the outcome of long and close games. Team fight are everything at a later stage and the team with the better positioning/execution most often wins the game. Since the enemy cannot see you, you are at a natural advantage. At the same time, if you ever have some wards up and you do not see any enemy hero at all, they are likely smoked, so always pay attention to the minimap. Unlikely or uncommon wards help a lot in avoiding smoke ganks. It is always fun when you SEE the enemy go into smoke and you can see the way they are likely to take. So you just rotate your team and backstab them.

Originally, I intended to implement screenshots on smoke ganks, but I think the way better way of learning it is to watch the tier1 teams battle each other, since they will always use them.

Section 6: What should I do?

In this last section, let us have a look at typical early game scenarios and possible decision making. Once again, I can only state that this is of course highly situational. But I still think it might be helpful since I have met quite a few people who are simply overwhelmed and often do not know what is useful and what is not.

If you have a vs 0 lane, meaning you and your carry (and maybe your team’s other support) face no hero at all, your goal should always be to stack and pull camps as much as possible without pushing the lane. If you have a hero with spammable nukes you might even consider just farming the respective easy camp in your jungle. In this scenario, your carry will get his easy farm and your goal is to get money and levels as quickly as possible. Once you reached level 2 or 3 OR if you have a hero that has a really nice disable on lvl 1 already, you should take a look at the other lanes. Does your middle hero need help? Even if he is winning the last hitting battle, a kill is always a nice thing, especially if your middle hero is one of these typical high impact early-mid game heroes who can snowball really hard. Help him to score a kill. If necessary, grab a smoke and ask your other support hero to come with you. Since both of you were pulling/jungling, the enemy middle hero should have been scared of ganks since the beginning, so he just might become a little careless. The enemy safe lane will be a lot harder to gank, since the opponents abandoned your own safe lane, which means they have either 2 supports on their own safe lane or one support and a typical jungle hero who might come in to help his carry at any time. In both scenarios you need to take a look at your hard lane hero, ask your fellow support and decide whether a gank is useful or not. Also ask the solo mid hero, if he can get the next rune and if it is a good rune he would be willing to kill the enemy carry. If for some reason you cannot gank any of the other lanes, make sure you stack, pull and farm as much as possible. Early level ups and money are essential on support heroes. You should avoid walking around, failing at ganks since you absolutely gain nothing from it. The only scenario in which a failed gank is worth it is if you force the enemy carry or middle hero to take a trip to the fountain, causing him to lose a lot of farm and XP. If you have a really potent carry that is able to farm stacks and even ancients fairly easily, you can always go and stack your big camps and/or the ancients. Your carry will thank you for it.

If you face a vs 1 lane, you and your possible fellow support have to decide who is doing the stack/pull and who zones out the enemy. The goal here is to either kill the enemy hero as much as possible or to at least not let him get any XP at all. To do so, it is essential that you do not push the lane towards his tower. This will also depend on your carry’s ability to last hit without pushing the lane and/or taking creep aggro. I find that if both support heroes are able to zone the enemy hero out, the best scenario always is to swap stack/pull and zoning out. Meaning, for one wave, you will do it, while your ally pulls while for the next wave, you will pull and he will zone the enemy out. This way, both of you get XP and Gold from the neutrals. There are scenarios in which both of you might be needed for zoning out. Some heroes are by defintion hard to zone out since they either hit very hard or are sneaky bastards. An example for this would be Windrunner who is able to trade hits with most supports fairly easily. In these scenarios, try to score a kill and if you are unable to kill the enemy, just once again swap with your lanemate so neither of you has to use up all of his consumables. Another possible scenario is that your carry has the better hero for a particular 1on1 matchup. If he is confident he can farm and maybe even kill the enemy hard laner on his own, you and your other support player might as well move towards middle or the enemy safe lane instantly.

If you face a vs 2 lane, it will all depend on your heroes and on the opponents picks. If they send a dual lane towards you that is by defintion weaker than your own, they are stupid. You should always punish stupidity. Unfortunately, it is more likely that their lane is “stronger” which means your main goal should be to protect your carry at all cost. If you are 3 players, you should be able to score quite some kills against a dual lane and even manage to stack and pull in between. If you have a jungle hero, let him do the farming, wait until he is strong enough or finds a decent creep and then kill the enemy. Note that there are scenarios in which your carry will not be able to farm no matter if you are on the lane or not. If he is confident the enemies cannot kill him, you might as well abandon the lane and try to go ganking. This way, even though he will not farm, he will at least get the solo XP and you minimize the risk of dying yourself to that strong dual lane. Additionally, your ganks might force the enemy to rotate one of his hard lane heroes to another place, giving your carry some space. In scenarios of 2vs2 lanes in which the enemy is way stronger, I most often resist the temptation to pull since pulling might offer a window for the enemy to either kill your carry at his abandoned tower or you while you are pulling and your carry is busy with creeps.

If you face a tri-lane, it all comes down to the composition of these lanes. If your carry is able to farm well, you are in no hurry to score kills. If he cannot farm at all, you should either swap the lanes or try to score kills on the enemy. If the enemy tri-lane is by far superior to yours, go move your fragile ass to another place OR try to bait them into overcommitting. The higher the skill level, the more you can be sure of the fact that the enemies KNOW that they have the stronger tri-lane. This will result in a lot of attempts to kill you and your allies. And often, public players have the tendency to overcommit themselves. I have seen countless “stronger” tri-lanes losing because of overly optimistic tower diving.

Concluding, I can only state that especially tri-laning is an art for itself and requires a deep understanding of the game and the different hero combinations. If you decide to become a hard support player, you should most often be the last pick after the enemy support heroes are already picked. This is a rather easy way to counter most aggressive tri-lanes or to go aggressive yourself. In any case, I would recommend to master heroes like Ancient Apparition, Visage, Earthshaker and Undying since it is really hard to beat a tri-lane that involves any of these heroes.

Learning from the Pros:

Apart from things like lasthitting, execution, positioning there are things that can be learned merely by watching the best players in the world. Things that do not even require as much practice or experience as the aforementioned. If you watch e.g. The Alliance play, in most games you will see that they are perfectly content with Akke and EGM just massively farming their own jungle. They are heavily relying on S4 to win or at least draw his middle lane and on Bulldog to somehow “shackle” the enemy support heroes to their own safe lane. This has the simple effect, that at the time when the early game clashes take place, Akke and EGM most often have higher levels and farm than the enemy support heroes and are therefore able to contribute more to their team’s success. I would lable this kind of support play as somewhat “passive and greedy”. A lot of teams try to do that, especially if they feel they either have the stronger carry hero and/or the stronger mid hero/player. In these scenarios, ganks are not really needed, so the supports can focus on getting level and money for themselves. There are other team which like to go for aggressive tri-lanes, which basically forces the enemy supports to participate in the laning phase. And there are teams which like to rotate both their safe lane supports for early middle kills using smokes. In the end, it is also a matter of personal preference and circumstance. A farming support is useless, if your middle lane and hard lane are being raped. If you do not have the way superior carry hero, your team will most likely lose the game if you lose middle and hard lane. On the other hand, if you try to gank a lot and fail while the enemy supports are farming, you are also at a disadvantage. There is no typical recipe for success, it is all about experience and judging the hero setup to decide what to do.

I have to admit that I do not like being a hard support who stacks and pulls for the first 5-10 minutes of the game. If I liked farming, I would have chosen to be a carry or middle player.

Lastly, the most important thing for a support player is: Be useful! There is always something more useful to be done than just running around. Even if it is simply stacking camps for a while. Each second you are seen nowhere on the minimap, the enemy has to worry about a gank and might lose last hits or even XP because of that.