Support tips

If you need to heal, walk to the fountain and back, or Town Portal and walk back if you need to avoid death.

You will need to teleport to help other lanes if they get ganked and it's generally not worth it to use your Town Portal for a few seconds of quicker healing. If you need to get to a lane quickly to push it or something, then that's fine, but watch your Town Portal usage.

Watch the creep equilibrium before pulling.

Pulling helps you get EXP and gold, but also basically tips the creep equilibrium one wave in the enemy's favour. If the creeps are already near the tower when you pull, you could be forcing the carry to tank the enemy creeps under the tower while possibly missing last hits. Similarly, if your truck wave is close to the enemy's tower and you can do lots of damage or even kill it, pulling could stop the push cold.

Think about warding.

I cannot count the number of times some idiot on my team, or the enemy team, has planted a ward, gotten dewarded and planted another ward at the exact same spot. I also cannot count the number of times some idiot on my team, or the enemy team, has warded our jungle when we're sieging the enemy base, or Roshan when it just went down, etc..

Learn to shut up. (transitive verb)

Lots of people only play cores and have no idea how to support. The next time someone's being totally unreasonable, shut them up. With the mute button. Then go on being a good (hopefully) support.

Be Felt, But Not Seen

Supports should be doing a lot, but also should be rarely seen. Being MIA creates a lot of pressure.

Often you'll see newer players sitting in lane providing "harass". This is about as close to pointless as you can get while still accomplishing very little.

From this:

• The offlane can see you, so they know EXACTLY how close they can get
• You're sitting behind the creep wave and your carry, so you cannot make a move without obviously telegraphing your motives
• You aren't creating pressure
• You are barely doing anything

If you are MIA, the offlane AND MID both need to be cautious. You could be setting up a kill on either lane, which would be doing something. You can also be pulling, which is controlling the wave without being seen.

Be Do

A lot of supports think warding and "harassing" is doing something. If that were true, you could write a really stupid bot to replace pro supports.

There are 3 things that really fuck up an offlaner:

1. Zoning -- if they cannot get close enough to farm, or get XP, they will have very low impact and be very easy to kill
2. Ganks -- these take them basically from 100% to 0% very quickly and result in kills. Tickles of harass can be helpful for putting them into a killable state, but if they drop too low, they fall back and regen --> now your kill opportunity is gone.
3. Pulling -- if done at the right time, pulls destroy an entire wave of XP for an offlaner, making a huge XP gap. If they are the same level or lower than your supports, they are easy feedbags.

You should always be doing something. Supports need to create pressure and maintain map control. Warding is one mechanism for map control, but pressure comes from rotation and utilization of information/vision.

If your lane is fine, go create pressure elsewhere. The more lanes you win, the higher the chance is that you will win the game.

Farm

You need farm too. That means you need to be good at last hitting. Many supports fall way too far behind because they don't last hit anything.

Aim for minimally 1 CS/minute.

Every time you pull, last hit most of the neutrals. If you get a full camp of gold, that's a set of wards.

Don't take lane farm unless the lane is empty. However, you can kill creep camps, especially if you are on your way back to the well or full on mana -- just use some spells if you need to.

Getting farm on every hero is immensely important, more so than most new players realize.

Don't Buy Stupid 

A lot of supports also buy things they don't need.

One of the biggest culprits is Magic Wand. Notice I said wand, not stick. Magic Stick is a great value. Magic Wand is unnecessary, especially if you're pressed for gold.

Another common one is Ring of Basilius. Supports, especially lane support, do not get this. 9 times out of 10, you'll have a carry or mid that picks up Ring of Aquila or Vladmir's Offering. This is redundant and a waste of 500g for you to get one. Even if no one is getting one, you don't want this in your inventory because you aren't going to turn it into Ring of Aquila or Vladmir's Offering(there are exceptions, but the vast majority of supports do not get either).

Get TPs and Smokes

You should have a Town Portal fairly early (~4 min in) so you can immediately rotate if necessary. Now an important thing to keep in mind is that you can also walk a lot of places. Like if you die, walk back to lane. Don't use your Town Portal unless you need to get somewhere ASAP.

Smokes increase your efficiency because:

• A) your MS is increased while smoked --> get to the lane you want to gank sooner --> less time wasted
• B) your gank has a higher success rate --> didn't waste time on a failed gank

Also note that while you're Smoked, you can place wards. This helps make your warding less obvious and therefore less easy to counter-ward. You can also put wards up in more dangerous to access places while smoked up.


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