You have no choice but to be the initiator as earthshaker. It is by far the best thing you can do... and if you don't everyone who knows ES should initiate will be waiting for you to go and won't do anything unless you do. Meanwhile, if you wait too long the enemy will initiate and its likely to be a very bad fight for you.
You need to look for the right time and place to attack and be ready to go. Waiting for others to go first as ES is very bad because they are likely to pop bkbs negating almost all of your damage.
Attack when there are creeps to amplify the echo slam. When some of their heroes are standing in a creep wave at a bottleneck that is the best time to attack.
Place your fissure to divide the enemy team. Block 2 or 3 of them on the side with your team and the other 2 or 3 away from your team. This makes it easy for your team to get kills and very hard for the other team to counter attack.
Pick out the most important target to kill and blink directly on them so you hit them with fissure no matter which way you cast it, you hit them with aftershoock for all 3 spells, and you hit them with the enchant totem attacks.
Ideally you should time your attack so that you can enchant totem before blinking in and do two enchant totem hits on the primary target. Enchant, blink, echo, attack, fissure, enchant, attack again. That is almost certain to kill the primary target from full health unless you are 40k gold behind the other team. Even if you can't kill them, if you do this right they are stunned for 6 seconds and if your team is so bad that they can't finish off a nearly dead hero stunned for 6 seconds then nothing you could possibly do would win anyway.
If you are concerned that your team is not ready to fight, say something like "get ready I'm going in". And pay attention to where your team is and whether they have mana when ganking. You can ping all you want and yell at them but if they don't have mana they will not be doing much of anything in the gank.
If there are two enemies and one has a counter stun... kill them first. If you kill the support, while blocking the path of the other hero with fissure they will both die... unless they can blink over it.
It's exacly as you did, if you are behind in farm and simply lack your initiation items then there is no point goin in first, acting as counter initiation is just fine.
However you shouldn't play ES has a 5th pos, since he does need farm in order to get more effective. If you need a 5th pos support, then consider dazzle, omni, Wyvern etc.
So here is your process in playing ES:
- Stack camps, farm them later or let carry farm them.
- Use fissure offensively or passively depending on your mates and lineup
- If you are behind and can't get farm, the use fissure passively and don't force anything.
- If you are ahead, go in first with blink and go ham.
- Try to farm blink/forcestaff as fast as possible. If you find yourself in a situation where u have a really hard time getting farm, go for forcestaff.
- Once you got blink/forcestaff, try to initate/counterinitate at the perfect time, if people don't group up, then use one of your teammates as bait.
....
Profit.
if u r the only initiator on ur team, consider buying a force staff(possibly glimmer) after dagger. then u can jump in and force urself out fast again, while ur team catches up to u. then u hopefully wont tank all the damage.
If no one is willing to initiate or there are no other initiator, then you gotta initiate as a shaker if you at least have a blink. Tell your team you're going in dry, it doesn,'t matter if you only catch like two enemies and a bunch of creeps as long as you DO SOMETHING instead of waiting for perfect echo slam and get initiated on instead. You will die but the fight should be won, if not, time to flame your teammates.
as much as I usually disagree with relentless his walls of text can be very useful to beginners, i just dont like when hes stubborn in discussions vs 6k players
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So I've been playing a couple pubs with shaker, and playing him on the role of roam/support with the lack of support character to buy the needed items. Apart from teammates unable to hold their own lane while I try to gank mid heres another question that comes, they want me to jump in and initiate fights.
I've always seen myself as waiting it out being 2nd or maybe even 3rd to jump into the fight, with support shaker being pretty fragile and especially without items, and low on mana pool to be free casting fissures and echo slam. But the scenarios I've played with no one wants to take on the initiation and everyone is just waiting on everyone else to start and jump in to finish.
Your thoughts? Are there just times when you jump in first when no one is willing to do so. Usually in pubs its like you jump in and the team bails on you even after a perfect 4, 5 man slam. The enemy shrugs it off and continues to push highground