Supporting in noob Dota 2 games

 

Im trying to learn support, a lot of which includes buying things like Observer Ward or Dust of Appearance, but I find in noob games my allies dont use or appreciate them. My teamates behave exactly the same whether the jungles are warded or not because they dont use their mini maps. Is there a better way I can contribute more to these games, or find a better environment to improve my supporting skills?



When you're playing support with newbies I think you've got to approach the role slightly differently.
Stacking and pulling camps for example is normally a great thing for supports to be doing, but when your lane partner is new and pushing the lane it's sometimes a lost cause. Worse, you being out of lane could easily lead to them getting caught out of position and killed. Similarly as you said yourself, wards are less valuable because people don't pay attention to the map.

Something that new players are generally very bad at dealing with is early, heavy aggression

It's easy to forget that part of what makes a support hero a support hero is how dangerous they are even before they get farmed - supports are the most dangerous heroes on the map during the early game, and a lot of people don't really take advantage of that.

Pick a support who can really make their lane hell early on, and just focus on harassing your lane opponents as heavily as possible

Good choices are:

• Lich (sacrifice gives you the mana to keep spamming your frost blast as well as give you and your ally bonus XP).
• Crystal Maiden (nice mana regen and some of the best early game kill potential from her Frostbite and Crystal Nova combo).
• Venomancer (level up poison sting and every right click from you or your wards will deal extra damage over time).

You can't make your carries carry, but you can make the enemy team feed! Providing your carries are there to pick up the kills, you should find they snowball out of control with a little help.

I find that the support role can't be utilized in low level-pubs UNLESS you baby-sit the entire team. Pinging the map, calling locations over the microphone, reminding people to buy Town Portal Scroll, suggesting items to people, etc.

Even then, you're not guaranteed anything

Had a game two days ago where I was playing support in a mid-game gank team, against a Mirana who loved to use her ult to position her team before teamfights. We won 1 single team fight, and that push we dropped their mid racks. Then the carries just turned around and left the base when they had 3 people down, and two creep waves on the mid towers. I couldn't get them to come back, and we lost the game. Sometimes you just get teams that don't win.

In Pubs, I've found that the only really effective supports are those that can help single target gank, then rely on winning a 4v5 teamfight. Disruptor uses Glimpse, Batrider uses  Flaming Lasso, Clockwerk cogs, etc. Isolation is the best you can do as a support at the low level.

THAT SAID, you may want to continue supporting in a more traditional way so that if/when you play at a higher level you don't have the bad habbits of single targeting.

I've exclusively played support for the past year while learning dota, and I've come up with a few things on my own:

• If you play a support that supports through heals, you're going to be overly dependent on your team's skill to win a match. This will often mean that with good teams you have awesome streaks of no death and your team stomps. With poor teams this means you get mocked for having no items due to too many deaths and you get focused for taunting because you're supposed to be preventing your tower-diving carry in lane from biting the big one every time he spawns.
• If you play a heavier hitting support that has some lane presence, you can help tip the balance in a match you might lose just healing.

For the first year of my support career I've gone with supports that compliment others well: Vengeful Spirit for instance. This is primarily because I like to duo with a friend online. But, I've slowly come to realize that without my friend in lane, supports that can't make a battlefield impact often give me frustrating games on a more regular basis because I'm forced to watch my team do poorly without having much to shift the balance.

Trying out more aggressive supports

For the past few weeks, I've been trying out more aggressive supports, with Lich being a favorite simply because with his frost blast and sacrifice I can make life miserable for someone I'm laning against for the whole of the laning phase and my ultimate can decimate a tightly packed team fight. I've also had good results with Bane and his ability to lock people down and solo gank heroes with his ultimate, as well as Witch Doctor's lockdown and channeled ultimate which can also nuke people down fairly fast.

The end result is that when I'm in an all pick game (I've grown to prefer all modes but all pick) if I go with an aggressive support like Lich, even if my team fails horribly (or if I fail horribly), I feel like I can contribute to the overall match rather than keeping the folks who are contributing in the game longer.

Also, when playing Lich it's nice not to have people telling me where to use my heal and when (like with Treant Protector), especially since some folks don't realize his cooldown on that heal has been changed drastically in the last few months.