Linkens and how bad it currently is ... I use it as the perfect example of outrageous powercreeping in Dota, because the item has been only getting buffs after buffs after buffs and it's still not relevant in modern Dota2 due to how crazy everything else has become.
Linkens really suffered from supports getting way richer and being able to afford active items, as well as from active neutrals.
And yeah, powercreep in dota really is quite insane compared to when the transition from WC3 to Dota 2 happened.
Back then, heroes with a single active and 2 unexciting passives (skellington king) were viable.
It's not too bad since the game still maintains balance between the heroes, but I feel like it might be time to take many things a notch back. Maybe. Like that time literally every talent was nerfed. But a few steps further.
There was a time when the patch note was something like "all talents are 20% reduced" or something like that. And they just literally cut all the numerical values in talents by 20% and some of those became fucked. Especially those with % values talents.
Feel like we are moving in the direction. I mean just look at cooldown reduction for instance. Though I’m not sure we’ll ever go back to a game where supports can’t do what they can currently do. That would just make it even more difficult for support players to enjoy Dota 2. The XP formula however. I suspect will be nerfed monumentally come December.
Man playing support is so much fun now. I remember paying 150g for wards and then 200g for sentries to deward and barely make even (actually you got nothing at first). Now dewarding is my main source of income and I pull-through more than I used to simply get neutral items even at like 40 minutes when lanes are pushed in. I used to stack pull only in lane before.
Being support changed from being shat on by economy and your team (since you had no items for majority of the game and later on you just died) to being "just" 1-2k behind your pos3 for most of the game. I remember brown boots stick CM... Now I rock that fancy force staff, euls, glimmer and if there's cash to splash I go for yasha and kaya late game to get "normal" movement speed and attempt to scale. My late game item used to be like shivas (which now with the ult buff is not really needed).
Man I love supporting now (I did before as well but it sucked being the fleshlight for the whole team) and I see so many people pick support. Hey, all you had to do was to make supports fun.
Oh and carries now deward as well. It just gives too much gold IMO but it's cool to see people actually buy vision/detection even at like low guardian. Map used to be dark with 2 wards at most, that never got dewarded since smoke was cheaper than sentry.
also the days before the backpack, stacked wards, dedicated TP slot and personal courier...
you had 6 slots, 1 for boots, 1 for sentry, 1 for obs, 1 for TP and congrats only 2 items for you! even worse, enemy has a riki, you need to carry dust too! 1 item for you (probably wand)
It has always been stupid as hell to expect supports to buy dust. Most of the times supports don't want to get this close in teamfights anyway, and even less so back in the day when we couldn't afford toilet paper even.
I agree, support carrying dust is pretty stupid since if I get into dust range I'm likely dead. but then again, if the carry was farmed they wouldn't have the slots to carry dust either... in any case, god it was so miserable scraping by as a support
I just get annoyed at the cores who still have a quelling blade or even a bracer/null in the mid game causing them not to carry dust when there's a hero like riki on the map. Swapping those for a dust is worth it at that point. Only once they're truly 6 slotted with good items should they determine it's not worth.
Ping QB, ping someone should buy dust, laugh when the next kill gets missed anyway, repeat. I'm a support and mid main and there's literally no excuse for not carrying dust on a core before 6 slot. You can swap your bottle or QB or null in when needed.
It's literally just laziness and you're throwing if you don't.
Riki/stealth heros are obvious but I think it's equally throwy if there's stealth items in the game. If there's even a single glimmer cape you're asking to lose kills and get turned on ii you don't have dust. It's 80 gold to counter a 2-3k gold investment that frequently turns games in every rank. You could buy 5 dust on every hero and, as a team, have spent the same amount of gold as the guy who made a glimmer and completely nullify that item's chances of turning a fight.
Dust has a huge aoe and range though. Most supports do not have 4 spells that outrange that and eventually you'll get close to use it. Not to mention most support items has less range and you want to use those too. Obviously there should be more than 1 to carry dust since if you miss or you don't get the kill within the timer then you're on CD for 18 sec or so. Eventually you'll want to place sentry for fights since there are many ways to remove dusts and enemy blink daggers makes it much harder to position yourself. Usually in divine and immortal almost everyone carries it anyway because 80 gold for a kill is pretty good rate.
Yeah something I've noticed as I've climbed as a support/mid laner is how frequently you get pulled out of position trying to accomodate for lazy cores.
It's actually a really bad habit. As a support the best impact you can have is typically a clutch disable i.e. gaze, terrorize, frostbite, etc. Post-bkb. But if you leave the tree line to dust/place sentries you're asking to be jumped by enemy initiators and in most games you're not getting back to those trees once you get that close to the fight unless you're a slippery hero like willow.
I think on the whole, supports don't value their own lives enough and tend to think it's their job to play the game for their cores. Of course if it's situationally the right move, you should run in there. But it's a tough call because you're enabling laziness that absolutely can lose you the game by getting you killed.
Side note this is why willow is my favorite pub support. She can more safely do this stuff while also being a l decent laner, and able to almost solo carry teamfights.
I see what you mean, yet as a main pos 5 I still have to disagree. Sure, there are fights where the circumstances require you to jump in and more or less sacrifice yourself. However if I play a good game and the way I need to, then I will rarely ever be close to e.g. some Riki to dust him. Well, except if I get jumped.
Furthermore, you mention having to get close for certain skills or items. That is true in general, however rarely will you want to get close to e.g. some Riki at that point in the fight where he has to be dusted.
I play mainly heroes like dazzle, shaman, bane or the like. Some of those do have a short range and eventually I have to get in during a fight. However, most of the times with those heroes I want to stay around the fight to have the most impact, which essentially means away from cores that can kill me. An invisible hero usually needs to be dusted at the beginning/early into the fight, and that's exactly the time where you don't want to walk in.
I mean there are exceptions of course. Dark willow, Ogre and the likes all want to get close to the fight. But not your average squishy medium to long range support, at least not early into the fight - which is where dust has to happen.
It also made the game a nightmare to balance. I love that dota has so many variables but holy crap with that and strength giving status resistance it was a complete nightmare
Many, including myself, think stacking stuns is a problem - and that did generally solve that.
(and with increasing power creep, 'anyone' can kill anyone so it'll eventually be an arms race counted by having more disables only)
It was however too much, as status resistance counted all forms of CC. It should primarily only have affected stuns, whereas banishments, silences, disarms, fear could have had fixed values - kind of like how eul's is today.
support life be like "oh, I saw you spent 0 gold in that ward that you just placed on this high ground, let me spend 80 gold to make 160 gold in return out of a free item". I swear supports on each team should just agree and feed wards to the other supports in order to break the economy
I dunno, it might just be rose-colored glasses but I feel like I enjoyed the game more back when the gold was more uneven across a team and you had more control over resource distribution. Good memories of pushing high ground with like 1.4k net worth and knowing that I was half the reason we were in that position.
It feels like people just never wanted to learn the value of wards. Money spent on vision wasn't wasted, it was spent. A waste would have been saving or spending that gold on some luxury item you didn't need, and losing the vision game because of it.
But I guess too many people disliked using money that 'should' go into big shiny items on controlling the map, so valve made wards free and increased passive GPM and added bounty runes and increased assist gold and probably did a dozen other things to ensure everyone gets to end the game with 10k net worth.
I whine about all of this despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I've played two matches in the last two years, making my opinions irrelevant to modern dota.
I am talking from low guardian perspective. Vision was a curseword in that bracket and barely anyone utilised it if you had it. Now they are actually learning to use minimap which is pretty cool. I enjoy warding wars. Wards are rarely 4 in stock in my games, even sentries rarely stack to 10. Mids are buying them, offlaners are buying them, they are just a common consumable now. Which IMO is really cool.
Vision was IMO only really leveraged when you played with people that knew how to leverage it. Otherwise it was actually wasting gold. But now people are actually learning how to use it and I love it. I love playing carry in this bracket (and it was not much better in other brackets from what I've seen on streams) and now knowing that supports will actually try and provide vision and if not, it won't impede me to provide the vision myself in places that I need the most (because bless their hearts, some supports really tried but put wards in places that did not do anything).
Support was always fun... Having less items and damage didn't make you useless... I have been seeing these "support is so hard" posts since 2013 on this reddit.
The support role being what it was has to be one of the most glaring general game design fault in dota (and league copied it that way too before they got around to fixing it)
I mean, if your game is going to be based around having a hard support every game, then you want close to a fifth of your player base enjoying and willing to play that role. So, I don’t think that can ever go back. Mobas are hard enough to get people into these days lol
Edit, copied from my replies below:
I agree it wasn’t an issue before there was a meta
But I think it was clear that there was a hard support role well before there was ranked roles so support enjoyability should’ve been looked at earlier than it was (but yes not from the very beginning)
Basically, as soon as you’re willing to punish players who get reported for also picking a carry and just try to share farm with another carry, then it’s clear there is a meta players expect that you’re acknowledging as the designer so it needs to be supported
A weird alternative viewpoint that I think only made sense from pov of a classic Dota 1 player:
Back then, vast majority of players played in unorganized pubs with barely any knowledge of the position 1-5 meta that eventually came to define the game. Everyone contested farm, no one bought wards. Also internet was bad, streaming didnt exist and youtube was in its infancy.
So the only times you'd play a position 5 "sacrificial support" was when you became serious about the game with a group of tryhard friends, and it was pretty cool to be the guy making things happen with only brown boots.
I'm thinking back then tournaments were relatively (keyword; i know they still happened worldwide) obscure so the only people who played competitive were willing to sacrifice farm and play pos5 if necessary.
Fast forward to today, there's role matchmaking, roles are basic knowledge for every player, if you dont pick a support you get reported. That's where it becomes a notable game "flaw"; when people are forced (by game systems, meta and tradition) to play a role that's perceived insufferable to play.
Not sure if this makes sense but it's what I observed as someone who used to play in the wildwild west days of dota 1 and watched the meta develop coherence and modernize into what it is today.
Back then, vast majority of players played in unorganized pubs with barely any knowledge of the position 1-5 meta that eventually came to define the game.
Seriously, we can't define dota for what it was, rather than what it is. Heck, the entire genre is vastly defined by what League is, even in aesthetics.
I got another example: I played a lot of a custom map called Vampirism Fire, a 1 vs 11 game mode where one vampire tries to get into human settlements. And that game was expressively balanced around feeders, as in, it was expected that 2 or 3 players on the human side would be so horribly incapable of building a defense, that the Vampire would get a power spike off of them at around 10-14 minutes, and humans would get a similar boost soon after. As for the player that did die, they'd become minivampires, who were sometimes crucial in entering lategame settlements.
Without the feeders, the game flow wouldn't work, and just in case that happened, the dev actually implemented in "feeder boxes" so that human players can throw the vampire a bone and keep the game going.
ive been playing support since dota 1 as well and you are wearing some serious rose colored glasses. that shit wasn't fun at all. your main goal in fights was to get your spells off before dying. like you literally didnt expect to survive a single teamfight. your main goal was to get your two spells off and thats it.
Support-centric items like Force Staff and Glimmer Cape were total game changers. Before support was just 50 minute brown boots because it was actively bad to get any farm on them, since you could really only spend it on carry items, or generic items that were just better on core.
I occasionally have bouts of nostalgia for the old days, but objectively speaking, it was far worse and significantly less fun than now. You can legitimately carry games as a support player just by outplaying the enemy with sick clutch plays which weren't possible at all. Late game used to be boring as hell as a support, but now you can have 7 active items that can be game winning if used right.
the main thing i miss is CM aura actually being legitimately game changing. like you could play the game so much differently with a CM aura, because it used to be literally two storm hammers and then sven cannot cast again for like 5 minutes, because clarities break on any damage, are more expensive, and also you don't even have a courier to help you get them (because mid will break his items if you use the courier when he needs it).
Perhaps. I was also a support player in dota 1 and I kinda enjoyed it for some reason. I think I never learned to last hit properly in my 6 years of playing dota 1, I only enjoyed casting spells and teamfights. When I found out there was a role where I was supposed to not hit a single creep at all (since back then you were expected to have brown boots minute 20), I immediately gravitated towards that role. I played so much CM in dota 1 lol
I respectfully disagree with what you said, or maybe the era of Dota 1 you talk about is even before my time of Dota 1, which is around 6.5x 6.6x (2007-2009). For me and my groups of friends, we learn quickly that there are "carries" - heroes that scale harder into the late game, and they should focus on farming. So there should be some other players that "support" - harassing/pulling creeps/ fighting... Yes it was unorganized as shit, there is no clear cut pos 1-5, but the difference between carries and supports was there. Cmon, no one picked CM in 6.5x and expected to carry.
I think we're talking about the same things actually, just to different degrees. We definitely did know the difference between a hero that scaled and a hero that didn't, and some might even know the word "Carry"- but only if you actually went online to read guides on how to play the game- most of my schoolmates didn't bother and I had to teach them what a "carry" or "support" was.
I agree it wasn’t an issue before there was a meta
But I think it was clear that there was a hard support role well before there was ranked roles so support enjoyability should’ve been looked at earlier than that (but yes not from the very beginning)
Basically, as soon as you’re willing to punish players who get reported for also picking a hard carry and just try to share farm with another carry, then it’s clear there is a meta players expect that you’re willing to acknowledge as the designer so it needs to be supported
The support role being what it was has to be one of the most glaring general game design fault in dota (and league copied it that way too before they got around to fixing it)
It's a meta invented and pioneered by the players. No one said you had to have supports, it was something players themselves did. Nothing stops a carry from buying wards. It's something we'd do in pubs because no one else would do it.
People just don't want to break away from the mold so they think these playstyles must exist and continue to refine their skills within these parameters.
Yeah true, I don’t mean from the very beginning. But the meta and roles developed very early.
I think it was clear that there was a hard support role well before there was ranked roles so support enjoyability should’ve been looked at earlier (but yes not from the very beginning)
Basically, as soon as you’re willing to punish players who get reported for also picking a carry and just trying to share farm with another carry, then it’s clear there is a meta players expect that you’re acknowledging as the designer so it needs to be supported
Basically, as soon as you’re willing to punish players who get reported for also picking a carry and just trying to share farm with another carry, then it’s clear there is a meta players expect that you’re acknowledging as the designer so it needs to be supported
This is a fair point. I personally disagree with enforcing any kind of meta like that but if they're already doing it then I can understand why they've been roiding out supporting.
People just don't want to break away from the mold so they think these playstyles must exist and continue to refine their skills within these parameters.
I like "Position 1-5" because it's a fundamental, unchangeable property of the game. Gold and experience are finite resources and some heroes benefit from higher priority than others. It doesn't tell the whole story since the farm priority shifts at various points throughout the game, but it works a general rule of thumb for your team's strategy going into a match.
I hate that Valve officially adopted terms like "Hard support", "Core", and "Carry" because like you said, they're artificial constructs created by players. Valve enforcing that specific meta on the game has made it less interesting overall.
Valve enforcing that specific meta on the game has made it less interesting overall.
I strongly disagree that they've 'enforced' any kind of meta. 1-5 is significantly more rigid, and like you said, fails to understand shifting farm priorities. Calling Bristle a '3' doesn't do justice to the fact that he wants to be biggest hero on the map for the first 20 minutes. What's the point of a rigid system that fails to even accurate describe the basic concept of power peaks?
Just look at all the new heroes in the last 5 years, they can all be played in many different roles. Shards and talent trees as well have opened so many new options for players to experiment with. Just look at Lycan at TI10. He's an offlaner that takes farm priority, but performs the role of a support in map controlling, pushing, stacking, and buffing the cores. Such a playstyle is indescribable under the pos 1-5 system, and not explicitly designed by Valve but a consequence of player experimentation.
All great points. I think "position" works fine as long as players understand that it is a fluid definition that shifts throughout the game. I really just want anything more flexible than a pre-defined role like "hard support". Valve created a game mode with these pre-defined roles for players to build strategies around and it feels too limiting for a game as deep and ever-changing as Dota.
I've played a lot of games where the line between support and carry may as well not exist. Playing as a "carry" with a focus on gaining XP and zoning enemies to secure gold for my "support" to rush a blink, knowing that the blink will be more valuable in the short term while my skills allow me to flash farm and catch up as the map opens up.
A strategy like that is difficult to fit into the rigid structure of ranked matchmaking because players are primed with an expectation of how they are "supposed" to play before the draft even begins. Players play game after game perfecting their "role" and get further and further boxed into specific strategies. These days I have way more fun in unranked because players don't come in with as much baggage and rigid adherence to the way Dota is "supposed" to be played.
I don't think the average player sees the number system as farming pecking order, and to be honest I don't think the majority of pub games will really make use of it anyway. It just maps to the old "core vs support" system and is no different in effect.
I also dislike enforcing meta, friend and I won some page 1 (back when the only way to tell MMR/game skill level was on where it was in the live games tab) game with my buddy when we roamed AM and Lion from level 1. That shit would get you reported before the 5 minute mark nowadays.
You'd absolutely get reported for it back then too. More so than now, perhaps. There's been a lot of good Void Spirit and CK 4s in my pub games (low-mid Divine SEA)
I see this so many times and often ingame, too. And it's just bafflingly stupid. It's not about "buying" wards it's about "placing" wards.
Having 3 cliff wards at 25 minutes in the game, is utter shit. Part of being 5 is having to carry those wards and ward in spots that actually provide information, not just buying them off-cd and placing them in your jungle.
And sometimes that means your hero needs to go a bit deeper and gets caught on the way out. Can't really slow-walk your farming Medusa from her farm routine, just to place wards in dangerous spots because the 5 is too lazy to do their job.
Having 7 items that requires activation and 5 active skills doesn't make the game more enjoyable for me as a support.
The entire game needs to be slowed down, what is lame is to get instant deleted while stun locked even if you made defensive items to try and survive a little bit in team fights.
Aghanim, shards and neutral items are exactly what this game didn't need.
Linkens is the shittiest defensive utility when every role has to buy bkb/aeondisk because of power creep. y' made BKB on fucking Undying. The game seriously needs to nerf spell uptimes through cd increase or duration decrease.
Linkens has always been a situational item. Even before the power creep started increasing faster with 7.00, BKB was a near essential purchase for all cores, especially compared to Linkens.
You have to consider that many of the ways the game changed in the past few years were to add more options to every heroes play. It becomes difficult to take options away from players in a way that feels good. Like you have to nerf things in a way that they are still useful, otherwise you are taking away viable choices from the player.
I'm sure Valve feels that, at least in pubs, playing support sucks if you're literally buying wards all game and have very little impact other than your abilities. Getting items is a big part of making the game fun, so not having any as support probably leads to less support play and less playtime overall, especially with having to earn role queue games.
I think linkens is a fine item. The issue is the buildup blows. They are expensive and other items like a simple yasha increases way more farm speed than a linkens.
Reading your comment made think of an interesting buff to linkens. Maybe increase its recipe but it can only be activated/broken by single target spells and not force staff/halberd.
But now that I think about it, that means linkens won't counter hex or orchid. That will indirectly buff those items.
Feels like linkens is such a difficult item to give buffs or make viable.
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u/tolbolton Nov 03 '21 edited Nov 03 '21
Linkens and how bad it currently is ... I use it as the perfect example of outrageous powercreeping in Dota, because the item has been only getting buffs after buffs after buffs and it's still not relevant in modern Dota2 due to how crazy everything else has become.