General DiscussionAnalyse my match

You had 1 reliable stun, your Zeus got countered by Silencer. your weaver was retarded. You had no late game, and im gonna guess you didnt rosh early or at all. They had a ganking team. Clockwerk and mirana will rip you a new one, the BH helped feed the spectre with track.

I'm not talking about this match specifically. The title is deceiving in that regard, sorry.

I was hoping for more like, tips on the laning phase because regardless of how good our lane combo seems to be, I seem to be unable to win my lane and end up losing or BREAKING EVEN against something like clock and BH? Like what the fuck were they gonna do in lane, I don't know? We still didn't win the lane though. I don't know how the frick that happened.

The problem is your friend did not pick spectre so you lost. Pretty simple.

You also didn't buy sentries as a starting item when you knew there was a bounty hunter in the lane, or to give your mid hero a sentry to put down in case he was going to be ganked. The enemy silencer bought sentries at the start because he knew they would be up against a weaver (and got kills on him as a result). You didn't get any sentries till 4 minutes in.

Instead you bought a ring of protection to build into an aquila. Your troll also bought an aquila, your weaver also bought an aquila.

12 minute flying courier.

Veno is a super easy pick off for Bounty Hunter and or Clockwerk because of his low HP and low movespeed. Also bad against Spectre for similar reasons. Heck every support is bad against Spectre.

If you absolutely must play support while your friend picks a ranged carry like troll then pick omniknight. He's good against spectre. If he wants to play a melee carry then play necrophos support. You damage the enemy just by standing still.

http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/2173042712

In this game you were playing Spectre+dazzle with a jungle lc vs undying+lich. Jesus himself couldn't win that lane.

http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/2170683887

In this game your OD lost you the game so it doesn't really matter how you played.

Still, your teams draft was terrible.

Whenever my friend picks Spectre I try to go dazzle or warlock because I find more success if we're able to just safely farm away and heal if needed. Undying and lich really suprised me with the power though. Like I expected endless Q harass from Lich. But Undying doesn't seem like something that makes a wombo combo?

That game was GG after the picks though. LC Jungle never goes well (my statistics are 25% win rate allied with LC and 76% win enemy LC)

But this discussion is about me, not what my team did.

treads aquila is a bad build on supports, there's more efficient ways to spend your gold. those stats are unlikely to save you because as a support you're going to be underlevelled and underfarmed.

also your teammates already had aquila so the basi that you bought is basically wasted, meaning you're just buying a wraith band, where a magic wand would be far more useful since you don't pick a support veno for it's right click damage.

also maxing gale is generally not a good build. maxing wards is by far the most safe build to go, it allows you to farm much faster and also the ability to slow down enemy pushes, which gives your core players more time to get items, and you still have the slow of gale from getting 1 point into it, your damage just comes from elsewhere. that's much better than a support veno maxing gale and only has damage and a slow, but no ability to push or defend pushes.

also the damage is more reliable because you're not always going to get 3 man gales for 550 damage each, compared to spamming out several wards in a teamfight and applying poison sting to everyone.

going dagon on nyx and no other items is not a good build either, having items like blink, aghs and aether lens give you much more utility through disable while your team provides damage on the disabled targets.

dagon is fine if you're snowballing but if you aren't, don't get it, or don't upgrade it if you already have it. the initial purchase is decent because it's 2700g for 400 damage and it provides something like 20 int, but the subsequent levels are 1250g for 100 damage and 3 extra int, which means if you can't keep snowballing, your gold income from kills is not going to be enough to keep increasing your dagon so that you can continue bursting down the enemy with your combo, so if you can't get kills with your dagon then that 8k gold you spent on it is basically worthless in comparison to blink, aghs and aether lens. aether lens and aghs increase the effect range of your stun, indirectly adding more damage. blink allows you to position yourself that your stun hits more heroes, also increasing your damage.

an urn is 875g and provides you with the sustain that you need to stay on the map and keep getting more kills, and the active is 150 damage. that's a far more useful item choice than getting another point into dagon.

my guess is that recent loss as nyx was due to not being able to offer anything in teamfights besides your dagon, since getting into range to stun just means you die to drow or dp silence, while having aghs + aether would allow you to spam stuns and mana from long range and most likely end up doing more damage than a dagon 5 would, both direct damage from your spells and indirect from your teammates being able to take advantage of the stunned enemies.

poor item choices, poor laning, poor farming, poor drafts, overfeeding. what else can u do? seems like u were trolling with troll beside u

Appreciate the input, Androgynous.

Small note about the ring of Aquila thing: I had no idea my friend was building Aquila on Troll. I personally never get it on him, so I assumed he wouldn't either. If I had of known / asked him, I wouldn't have bothered with it.

I have been intending to try the max wards build for a while but I've never gotten around to it. I'll make sure to try it out next time.

@bukkake

Unhelpful. Leave this thread.

EDIT: Looking at your profile you're not so hot either, comrade.

regardless of whether the troll did or did not get it, in my opinion it would be far better to spend the gold on aquila + treads (~2400g) on either tranquils + soul ring (1725) or arcane boots (1300g) and a wand (465g)

wand is one of the best early game items. far better than early stat items like bracer/wraith/null at least on supports. wand with full charges is 255 more HP and mana, that's far more game changing than the 6/3/3 stats seeing as wand gives +4 to all anyway.

also if you don't get aquila on troll then that's a mistake. aquila is an insanely cost efficient item for agility carries that you should pretty much always get it, with some exceptions like anti mage and meepo.

on troll specifically, who has the worst int game in the game (tied with PA), that makes aquila even better, as the static 0.65 mana regen that it provides is better on low int heroes and worse on higher int heroes. early game it's basically a void stone if not better in terms of mana regen, while also offering other stats, as well the armour aura which allows any carry to turn into an early pusher.

in the venomancer game your friend's troll build sucked too. maxing Q is crap because the bash chance is very low and because he's not getting fervor the average damage and bash duration increase is negligible compared to the extra slow and damage from both your whirling axes.

treads are worse than phase because troll has a very high attack speed steroid. same reason as windrunner and ursa. phase is only 15 more damage per hit which seems minimal but when you're attacking very quickly, the extra damage does add up, especially in the early game it can be pretty significant.

also phase allows you to get in range to use your ranged axes slow or to hit people and your Q gives flat speed which means it also benefits from phase's movement speed bonus. even if treads did theoretically give equal or more dps to phase in practice it doesn't because getting kited means your potential dps isn't being fully utilised.

see, i told u so. u dont have to be rude. just look at the mirror and ask yourself

@Androgynous

Thanks again for the insightful comments.

In regards to the way that my friend built troll warlord, I did tell him to max fervor first but he didn't listen apparently. >.>

EDIT: Having a look at all the high MMR / pro builds, I can see what you mean about the Nyx comment. Most people seem to completely ignore dagon! I'm going to have to practice a bit with these different builds...

In the laning stage its also important to know the limits of your heroes and the enemies heroes. This will let you know how to play. If the enemy has undying + any strong laning hero, you should know that they will pretty much just kill you if you're not careful so you have to play a lot more defensively. Against a Clock + Bounty hunter lane any pair of ranged heroes should be able to zone them out. Get sentries so the bounty can't do anything and just attack the clock every time he comes near a creep.

Knowing how to harass enemy heroes without attracting creep agro is important as a ranges support. If you don't know how to do it, check out some youtube videos on it and practice it.

Also get into the habit of checking your allies items and the enemies items. This stops you doubling up on things like aquilas, meks and urns. Checking the enemies items will let you know how much regen they have left and if they've gotten sentries to deward your sentries. A lot of people forget that you can eat wards with tangoes so if the enemy tries to deward your sentry you can just instantly eat his if you're waiting for it. Trading 2 of your tangoes for 2 of his wards is definity worth it.

Weird thing with that game as Spec / Dazzle; we were playing super passive in the lane phase and we were still getting completely destroyed. Usually we take a passive approach and just get spec the farm she needs, but this game was something else completely.

Was F.U.N.

farm heroes instead of farming lanes. focus on objectives. you're wasting too much time