Why is it crucial for a team to have different roles?
In Dota 2, all heroes are unique. The skillsets they provide usually highly recommend a certain playstyle of that hero - as you can see by reading my hero guides, they cap at different points of a game and do worse or better at certain stages of a match. Also, they usually have different roles in fighting the enemies. For example, a Tidehunter's job would be to initiate a fight while Bane is taking care of one single high value target and stops them from dishing out damage. Then again, your Phantom Assassin wants to use these setups to kill off enemies with her high single target damage output. A good balance between those roles makes a good Dota 2 draft. If your team consists of Phantom Assassin, Slark, Anti-Mage, Chaos Knight and Bristleback though, you have no one to fill the role of an initiator neither do you have any crowd control to kite enemy heroes to stop them from killing you. This is, in general, why the idea has come up to pick specific heroes for these roles. A good team usually always consists of at least one tanky hero that soaks up a lot of damage, at least one hero to provide a high damage output by right-clicking opponents and at least two heroes that provide any kind of crowd control with stuns, may it be single-targeted or area-of-effect based. Furthermore, one hero usually tries to set a games' tempo with a power-spike usually during mid-game. Often, one hero will fill not one but two of these roles partially, and many times a hero is picked just because he does play very well against an enemies' hero or lineup while fitting into a role needed.
General idea of farm dependency in a draft
In Dota 2, you will usually order the farm dependency from position 1 (= hero with highest farm priority) to position 5 (=hero with least farm priority). In most scenarios, this will mean the following order:
Position 1: your safelane carry (Anti-Mage, Slark, Phantom Assassin, Spectre, ...)
Position 2: your solo midlane (Templar Assassin, Invoker, Outworld Devourer, Viper, ...)
Position 3: your solo offlane (Slardar, Nature's Prophet, Clockwork, Tidehunter, ...)
Position 4: your level-dependent support (Shadow Shaman, Bane, Silencer, ...)
Position 5: your lane support (Lion, Vengeful Spirit, Crystal Maiden, Rubick, ...)
However, not always does a team run their position 1 hero in the safelane. Take for example Medusa: She's a hero that does play decently fine as a solo mid. Regardless, she'll still be your position 1 as she excels best in lategame. Therefore, your team should pick a safelaner that can control the tempo rather than another classic farmer. A good fit would be Chaos Knight, as he comes online with his level 6 and naturally doesn't farm fast, hence not taking away precious gold from your midlane Medusa.
In another scenario, a team will try to lay more focus on contesting the enemy safelaner by running an aggressive trilane. Therefore, the solo offlane will be placed onto the safelane. This works well against heroes that need a good start but cannot contribute a lot to a lane (like Anti-Mage or Spectre), mostly because they start off very squishy. Since the enemy offlaner is likely to be a melee hero, pick accordingly and place your offlane Timbersaw or Axe into your safelane giving them a good matchup to start off the game. This can help to make sure your team wins at least two out of the three lanes. Even if the trilane vs. trilane ends up as a wash, you're gonna be happy to disrupt the enemy safelaners' item timings by a few minutes.
Regardless of which scenario it's gonna be, remember this concept and try to pick a hero that fits what your team needs most. If you see a weak laner picked up by your enemy, always keep in mind the option to go aggressive by dual-offlaning or aggressive-trilaning. Of course, you cannot control what your teammates are gonna do, but knowing about the concept of farm dependency will improve your drafting by a lot - either playing solo or party matches. By now, even in the lower brackets, it has gotten very common to pick dual lanes or safelane trilanes in solo queues. It is though harder to convince your team to go on an aggressive trilane, therefore you should probably only consider it when playing with a five stack.
Common things you might run into and some general advice
- The position 5 is often referred to as the "ward bitch" as this hero's priority is the lowest in the team. Therefore, the position 5 will buy most of the wards throughout the game, babysit his carry during most of the game aswell as share tangoes to the midlaner at the start of the game. Nevertheless, I highly recommend to share the burden of buying these support items with the position 4 hero. Me myself, I mostly buy the sentry wards aswell as Smoke of Deceit on position 4 heroes. If you see that your position 5 cannot afford the items, just go ahead and buy them because your team will still need vision!
- The support heroes should almost always make sure that someone is within the vicinity of their 1 position hero. Not only can they save their carry from ganks, they can also make sure that there are safe places to farm by stacking jungle or ancient camps and of course, pulling and stacking during the laning phase. It's almost always worse to lose your Anti-Mage than your Batrider, so if Anti-Mage doesn't accidently run into a five-man-smoke, have a teleport scroll at the ready to make saves happen! Of course, saving your Batrider to ensure he collects his Blink Dagger is very important either. There's no recipe to this, you'll just have to play a lot to get a good feeling of where to be at which moment.
- Although their priority is not as high as others', make sure that Tome of knowledge is bought for your supports. Especially a greedy position 4 hero like Ancient Apparition or Shadow Shaman will profit a lot from that early level 6. If they cannot afford it themselves, the cores can certainly give away 150 gold for the benefit of winning a teamfight (just think about this aspect for a moment!).
- The position 2 offlaner is a fairly common role and shows up every once in a while in the pro scene. It's unlikely that you'll see this in a 2k or 3k MMR match though. Basically, AdmiralBulldog made this known to the scene by playing heavy damage dealing heroes on the offlane (Broodmother and Lone Druid deal a ton of damage, Nature's Prophet can certainly be played with high farm priority too). Another good hero for this would be Timbersaw, as he becomes more of a damage dealer the longer the game. To make this work though, a team has to use some resources towards creating the space for that hero to farm up items and push the enemies' safelane towers. I highly recommend to play space-creating offlaners and big ultimate offlaners instead (Clockwerk, Faceless Void, Tidehunter etc.). If you want to try it though, it usually works best if given a 1v1 matchup.
- The classic ppd / syndereN position 6 support: I know, there's only five heroes per team. The position 6 support term is an exaggeration of someone self-sacrificing for the greater good. Often you'll see a team randomly picking four core heroes leaving that unlucky last guy to play the position 6 - having to buy the couriers, all the wards, all the sentries, etc. It's very common this player has Brown Boots and a Magic Wand at 30 minutes into the game. Nevertheless, you should watch some of Evil Geniuses' and Escape Gaming's matches and understand the benefit of having a position 6 support. Basically, you free up space for the position 4 hero and can get away with a really greedy draft. Not only that, but you're still gonna have impact on the game by not only buying the support items, you can still cast your ultimates and stuns anyways! If you're playing Bane, you don't really care about having a Necrobook, Veil of Discord or whatever you want to buy. It's only important to have a decent position in the teamfights and getting off a good full-duration Fiend's Grip. Got it?
- If your position 1 or 2 hero doesn't have any flash-farm abilities (e.g. Spectre or Chaos Knight) don't walk into their creepwave and nuke it. These heroes are desperate for farm and stealing their precious free gold really hurts your team. Instead, go help them farm by setting up jungle stacks and nuking them to half HP so they can get all the last hits. If you accelerate your carry's farm, you accelerate the tempo of the entire match and get an earlier power spike than your team would've had.
If you have any questions or thoughts regarding the concept of farm dependency, feel free to share your information!
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