I’m 9k mmr EU support but after TI I have been slowly losing mmr and now I’m close to 8k mmr. I’ve been actively playing ranked since New Frontiers update and I always pick meta heroes so there isn’t much variance in my performance. I also win like 90% of my lanes and contest lotuses, power runes, wisdom runes etc. at early game. Laning stage hasn’t really changed in a long time so playing early game as a support is still fine in current patch.
The problem is mid game and it’s because current support meta is very one dimensional. Muerta, Grimstroke, Weaver, Pugna, Treant, Furion, AA, Willow, Phoenix (Bara is always banned or core). All these heroes are a follow up hero that requires your core to initiate so you can follow up. Or if your core isn’t an initiator, like Necro for example, your job is to camp behind your 4k HP core hero and use him as a bait so you can save him / counter initiate to turn the fight around. Either way you are very dependant on your cores. Supports are forced to first pick anyways so you can’t adapt to picks. You are forced to pick one of the meta heroes so it either gets banned or to even have chance to win the game.
Grimstroke is best example of this problem. It’s one of the best heroes right now which you must first pick if it’s in the pool. If you let enemy pick it uncontested, you will never be able to gank or burst any single enemy hero in entire game because the shard is that OP. Also Grim + any initiator will kill every hero in the game in one stun combo for first 15 minutes of the game. The hero is so good that you must pick it so it atleast can get banned. But it doesn’t, now you’re playing as a Grim, you are good Grim player so it’s fine. Then you see your core picks, they pick Luna, Necrophos, Dazzle. Three heroes who can’t initiate with Ink Swell. You instantly know your job isn’t to gank with Ink Swell combo, your job is to get shard and camp behind one core hero and hope you can turn the fight around with shard. Doesn’t feel fun or impactful at all. You learn from your mistake and next time you don’t pick Grim, you pick active support who can initiate if your team once again has no stuns. You pick Rhasta, enemy supports pick Grim and Treant. You instantly regret your pick, you realize they have so much save and their cores will have 2k HP at 15 minutes so you can never reliably gank any core hero, you need atleast one or two heroes with you to kill a core. Once again you’re very dependant on your cores.
So what can you do in a game where you have passive cores? You can setup vision and farm too, hope that your cores are good enough when they get their items. But as we all know, late game Dota is a coin flip in pubs. One of your core gets picked off outside of base without buyback and you lose 2 lanes for it which then snowballs into a loss. Once again you feel like you had 0 impact after laning stage, all you could do is play warding game and hit creeps.
How is this a problem now? Why are all the meta supports follow up heroes? I’m not entirely sure but I think it’s because of the tank / heart meta which is caused by BKB nerfs. Previously you could play assassins who could almost solo burst cores (Nyx, Hoodwink, Rhasta, Lion, Techies) and have impact even if your cores were all farming. It was rare to play tanky heroes because BKB active made cores gods. But if you managed to catch them before they used BKB, you could kill them, almost solo. Now that BKB is nerfed, everyone is picking tanky heroes or building heart so they don’t get bursted in one stun. Now everyone has 2k HP at 15 minutes so even if you pick an assassin, you don’t do enough damage to kill a core, you need one or two heroes with you.
Whatever the case is, I have never felt this dependant on my cores and I don’t like that. I want supports to be more independent once again so I can have impact in games, even if all my cores are passive. It’s very bad combination to be dependant on your cores while at the same time being unable to adapt to their picks.
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at least this patch supports dont have to buy courier, wards are free, dont have to run around wth naked boots at 20mins
that’s you as a high mmr player, but mostly when it comes to low mmr… supports are thriving because the meta is mixed with brawl and farm fest… which turns supports as late game carries too and have much fun about it…
waever and sb as supports are still thriving in low-mid mmr because the people here just cant end the game early
I take it with grain of salt.
Some people actually get higher mmr (talking about 10k+ supps) during the patch and I recommend dubu coaching grubby, opened my eyes on couple of things
It goes the other way around too, game is just very team dependent - yesterday I had a rank 1100 pos5, enemy had sub rank 200 support, guess how the lane went. I tried to communicate what needs to be done, but the guy was just doing everything half a second later, lane was over lvl4. Went glimmer first item in a game with 5 kills at 10 minutes total. He wasn’t griefing, he was just slow and bad that day.
How often are you buying Midas? I’d bet not enough. Plan to scale, adapt to be aggressive if the enemy are bad that game and your carry can afford to be aggressive without losing 50% HP or miss 2 out of 5 creeps in 3 waves. Also Venge is still good pos5 in certain games, doesn’t require midas, you can have plenty of impact in the game.
I even lose games as CK because team doesn’t know how to group up and push highground correctly
Honestly highground is what pisses me off more than anything. It is SO fucking hard to end the game, and unless you are up 40k all it takes is one bad push
There is so much power creep now and since supports have so much more gold, items and levels than they used to you can’t just 1v5 a game anymore like you used to after a lead
so you are not 9k support eu support, you are 8k eu support
I found a workaround as a 6.8k support currently still gaining mmr slowly this metapick either WD or Jakirothese 2 heroes are meta by their own, no need for them to be highly contested for ban/pick to solo carry gamesthey destroy meta heroes like CK/WK/BB/Kunkka/Primalall you need is good positioning in the teamfightI got:last 14 games 12 win 2 lose WDlast 14 games 12 win 2 lose Jakiro
what I do in game is focusing on winning the lane, then playing with that one core who has power spike and wants to fucking play the game and let the other 2 cores farmroflmao didn’t expect to say this anytime, dota2 all time long used to have gang creating space for the crying baby hard carry, and now all 3 cores are crybaby hard carries farming all the game, anyways there is one core that is ready or about to be ready to take fights, stick to them
Next, farm and keep your items up to date, as Jakiro I hit item timing like an early glimmer into scepter min 25, if I find myself on low farm, I will focus more on split pushing and farming jungle to hit the 25 min scepter mark, sometimes earlier if I got couple of kills
I will not consider fighting at lvl 5.5, I will farm my lvl 6 and ignore any teamfightroflmao before only cores were going to hit timings, now this is real
I will check if I am the target to be killed in the fights to get a protection item, or my team lacks damage to get a damage item like refresher for jakiro
if your enemy carry has 25k net worth and you have 8k net worth, you will be foodbut if you are also a core from support and have 15k net worth, the enemy carry will take forever to kill 5 of your teammates each sup with many escapes/damage abilities and each core with 5k hp blade mail heart
its boring meta for sure and the hardest part is to identify as a sup when to fight and enable cores and when to farm and enable yourself cus you are also a core, yes you areroflmao again :(
edit: for reference, https://www.dotabuff.com/players/210930679/matches?hero=jakiro
ignore the last few matches I got people leave at min 5-6 for two times, very unlucky
below it there is a 18 win + 2 lose in the last 20 matches and all of them during this metafunnily enough, a couple of months ago around the time after bali major ended, support players were having good times and saying things like " Oww there’s so much thing a support can do now" . which are things that OP listed , theres lots of stuff for supporta to do in the first 15 minutes, after that it basically goes back to whatever shit that’s meta.
I guess all it takes is a TI and some pros breaking the game meta to make the game so unbearable huh
i stopped playing ranked because i was a hoodwink player and i love being able to kill with her abilities despite low itemization/playing as support. Now, I can’t even kill anyone with a bracer once i hit level 6 with my full combo. lol.
God I love sniping with deadshot and calling it supporting
Sadly, I actually love that this is happening to you at such a high MMR, because it reveals a real problem with matchmaking in general.
The only viable Support heros that I figured in the current meta are: Ogre, Jakiro, Warlock, Shaman. Warlock and Shaman can really push towers well. Ogre spits out crazy damage in team fights. Jakiro does everything and is a good counter to CK.
With those heros, you are useful in pubs, without relying on cores doing anything.
(3k scrub) I went from a ~70% in ranked in 7.33c only supporting to having a <30% win rate in 7.33d. I just can not play this patch. Either luck, not adapting (Feels impossible to come back and try to change momentum of a game as a support when down), out skilled, bad draft, people throwing and or a combination of all has led to me to have a worse win rate in Dota than when I was 1 mmr 7+ years ago. I really hate this patch and I hated how it’s been one of the longer patches we have. I can confidently say that this is my least favorite patch of all time. I try to not let it affect my performance but it sucks as a support knowing that the game feels over 15 in and spending the next 20 minutes defending high ground with a support and a core or two if I’m lucky. I know it’s not coming today but I wish the patch dropped
How are Tofu and Seleri at top 10 rankings on leaderboard then
i just want them to mix up pick order. it has been YEARS like this and it fucking sucks. we have to first pick a support BLINDLY, EVERY GAME. in a game with 120 heroes support players have essentially NO ability to counterpick or strategise with their hero choices, it’s literally “pick 1 of the 3 meta heroes for the role and hope your cores dont pick trash”
im so over it. i am worse at core and cant play it at my rank, but support is so tiresome now.
Great points, i think one other issue that you didn’t mention is how meta picks now completely destroy supports. The best support heroes are pretty much all food for the meta heroes, think AA, SD, Grim, WD, Jakiro, willow, they are all squishy spellcasters
Spectre, CK, bristle, kunkka will just run over you and there’s nothing you can do about it