depends on bracket.
The higher the MMR the more important the support player becomes.
In any bracket its the inconsistent core, ofc. Support dying 1 time in a bad spot: Shit happens.
Carry dying: Delayed farm, more consequences.
shit supports ruin games because they have less items to make up for their being shit
After introduction of comeback mechanic it doesn't matter how much of advantage or disadvantage supports create in early game. Only skill of your carry matters.
From what I've seen Blunt is correct.
Generally support heroes are harder to play. They have more actives, more skill shots, more sensitive positioning... and have to do everything with very low networth against heroes with far greater networth.
At lower MMR levels, just being able to lasthit is the most valuable skill. Supporting carries who can't farm any items is futile. You have to take towers early so they get their core items since they missed so many creeps. So at lower MMR you need the carry to be good.
But as MMR increases, carry players become more competant so anyone would be fine being the carry and game is increasingly won and lost by the support play - because it is actually the more difficult role.
what blunt said but in all lvls of pub games ud better have a shitty support with a decent carry rather than vice versa
@Relentless
You say that it's useless to support carry who can't last hit, but you forget that carry in opposing team has the same lasthitting skills.
Ask yourself: how a close game turns into complete disaster?
I have an answer: it happens when your carry goes 1v5 and dies in late game. Mistakes of a carry has much more dramatical impact.
In my experience I can save idiot carries from their 1 v 5 late game mistakes, unless they actually dive into the fountain. But I can't make them get items. I play a lot of vengeful spirit and VS can save truly terrible positioning errors.
In low MMR games the carry that is fed is the one that wins. Both suck at farming.
I can stack camps, but I can't make them get the farming item needed to clear the stack. I can give them free farm, but a 2.5k MMR carry will still have only treads after 10 min of free farming. Or worse... yesterday I played with a sniper who took his free farm and managed to get mask of death and regular boots at 10 min.
I can play omni-knight, but I can't make them get a bkb or use it at the right time. I think we agree about these things.
All I am saying is that at lower MMR the carry is unlikely to get those important decisions right. So it is extremely hard to support them. Meanwhile it is relatively easy as a carry at lower MMR to just get the wards yourself when the support player is incompetant. But at higher MMR everyone can basically play a carry - though still only a few can play support well because most people climbed MMR playing carry and didn't learn support. So the support role matters more the higher the MMR.
Either way if you are very underated you can win with any hero 60% of games or more.
@Relentless
But when everybody are underfarmed and have no idea when to use BKB it's easier to make impact with a support.
You can't just say support or carry matters more, it depends on individual game and picks on both sides. Like if your team is built around team fight with enigma and enigma fucks up his black hole then his inconsistent play matters, but if your team is built around a carry medusa and she gets caught out then it's carry. It also depends on if you have early vs late game carries and if enemy team forces fights early or late etc. Like if enemy team is passive your supports might not have to do much at all.
@Soultrap ppl in very low MMR games always get items because of the many feeds. You need to do lots of dmg to win in 2k to 3k MMR range. That could be a tinker or zues, or it could be a PA or a Riki... but its very hard to win with a defensive support.
Consider this game I played this morning.
https://www.dotabuff.com/matches/1908878296
My team fed a lot at the start. We lost map control for almost an hour. They got 45 runes, we got 7.
But making clutch save after clutch save dazzle and I were able to prevent total collapse and eventually we had 3 divine rapiers and we are able to push out past the super creeps, through all the buybacks... and win the game.
I got Force Staff, Linkens, and Lotus Orb and with those tools I was able to get people out of being hooked into trees, dueled and ulted by necrophos... When I finally completed Hex, that was the nail in the coffin, we teamwiped them the next fight (taking back divines the carries lost!!) and won the game. In my opinion it's not easy to apply a linkens buff as they are casting an ult, but its possible. It's not as if the core heroes did nothing right, they did make some good plays... but only after making a lot of mistakes that nearly lost the game about two dozen times.
@Dire Wolf
Enigma is not a support.
BTW, you don't expect consistent 5-man Black Holes from Enigma, right?
@Relentless
"I were able to prevent total collapse"
That is some over 9000 level of self-esteem for 19 deaths Dazzle...
Like: "At some point I decided to stop feeding and that prevented total collapse" =)))
um... "dazzle and I were able to prevent total collapse "
reading much? I was lich.
Dazzle was pretty good with his graves really. But every mistake he made he died because he was the weakest hero.
I saved ppl as much if not more than dazzle, and I did almost as much hero damage as the 2 divine rapier medusa. My KDA is nearly double all other heroes on either team.
No, dazzle was never feeding. The bristlback was feeding constantly. Medusa was also feeding. Viper played well if he was attacking but kept getting hooked.
Feeding is an action anyway, not a score. Dazzle died because after he would save the idiot bristleback, legion would blink duel dazzle. He did the same to me twice before I got linkens and put a stop to that. I dodged pudge and clock hooks all game, they never got me. But I can't doge blink-duel.
Yes. Medusa did eventually win after we miraculously recovered the divines she fed away. She did have the sense to hit towers when it mattered. Medusa got 737 creeps by autoattacking mutli-targets with high attack damage for well over an hour. So after she was saved a dozen times from terrible positioning, she did finally autoattack her way to victory.
This medusa had a 0% winrate with medusa before this game. She made, and lost all 3 of the DR in this game. I think she died losing a DR 4 differnt times. She would port into fog, to the opposite side of the map from support and lose them.
@Relentless
Ok, Medusa was bad. But she is a carry, good hard carry that will eventually win you the game if it lasts for more than 1 hour.
Now look at opposing team. They have no carry at all. Lesbian Commander with 3 damage items, no BKB, no Blademail... She is a kind of ganker or semi-carry at best. It looks like Lina decided to be a carry with her Butterfly...
So, lets move to the point: your team won because you had better carries.
Legion had +330 damage from duels and and he did get a bmail early, but dropped it to pick up the divine rapiers. Lina also adjusted to carry and used to have divine rapier when she decided to get that bfly.
They had vastly more physical dps during two critical fights when they had the DRs. We won anyway by graves, blocking ults with linken stacking - reflecting lina's combo on lotus orb, fstaffing 20 hp heroes away, etc. The carries sucked. Viper was 400 MMR below the game average but he was far better than bristlback or medusa.
We won because of supports. My point is it was extremely hard to force bad carries to win. I think this game would have been much easier if I was a carry trying to cover the support role, instead of a support trying to do all the dps for the first 45 min of the game while still having to save ppl from feeds. Even by the end Medusa is just barely ahead of Lich in hero dmg.
As a carry in a low MMR game, its fairly easy to just spend a couple hundred gold here or there and get wards up when the support can't do it. As a carry it's easy to port into fights and win them when supports don't help. As a carry its not too hard to gank, although if I don't have a disable its tricky. So I think at low MMR its much easier to cover for a bad support with a good carry than to cover for a bad carry with a good support.
But at the highest MMR levels it gets reversed. When people are all good at dota the supports control the game and the carry only has to farm and actually attack during fights. It's far easier to be a carry at 6k or 7k MMR than a support. The hardest thing for carries is maximizing their dmg output during fights and a pro level carry is really very impressive doing that... but I think what the pro level supports do is much harder.
@Relentless
I can see that Lesbian Commander with +330 damage from duels and another +330 from rapier slowed by Poison Attack and Skadi (not to mention Frost Blast, Goo and Poison Touch)...
Yeah, he should have got bkb... but even then he would get kited.
One reason I love Lich is that all 3 of his slows go through magic immunity. He would blink-duel, but eventually we got 3 linkens so that was not very effective. The damage does not, but the slows do and they stack.
Idk what you are smoking if you think enigma in pubs is not a support. At best he's a 3, but most games you'll jungle enigma, so someone will pick a semi carry offlane like clock or doom or bristle, hc + support safe, carry mid. Enigma will become a 4. Of course I don't expect 5 man black holes, I lay into people for holding black hole so long. If you can black hole one carry and garuntee a kill I say use it, but I've also had enigmas blink in and black hole right in from like lion or shadow shaman and get hexed instantly cus they are fucking stupid.
My point is you can pick all sorts of games where support play matters more and others where carry play matters more. Either can get you then win.
@Dire Wolf
Exactly, if you farm jungle you are not a support. Supports have many other things to do in early game.
@Relentless
I have an example match for you too:
http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/1897900550
This is ~4.6k MMR match. I did nothing there as a support Disruptor. Literaly nothing. I may be just AFK with same results. Mirana and WD from opposing team were not much better.
It looks like you got carried by Doom and Wraith King this game while the enemy supports tried to farm instead of actually supporting.
But I can't see the details of the match right now. What is your take-away from this game? Are you saying that the core heroes performance overwrode the mistakes of the support heroes?
Disruptor gets a lot done with correct glimpses and it doesn't show up much on in-game stats. I doubt you have a 63.4% winrate for Disruptor for nothing.
I would prefer a shit support to a shit carry. You have to be more cautious early/mid game but you can wear off the mistakes of a support if you drag it into a late game scenario or use them as bait to pull eager cores out of position.
It depends from which perspective cause a good support equally can run a game themselves till about 20-30 minutes where they will rely more on the cores to allow them the buffer to cast shit.
To make it clear:
- my first point is that core heroes have much more impact because of comeback mechanic. No matter how big advantage in early game was one teamfight or few pick-off can turn everything around;
- my second point is opposite to what Blunt said. It's much easier to have impact as a support in lower MMR brackets. There are no big gap in farm between core and support heroes, because nobody can farm properly. Higher MMR support needs only to not feed and provide vision/detection.
i mean if u base support off farm priority then enigmas not a support he gets like top 3 networth always.
Well I prefer having good supports cus I prefer to be the shitty carry!
But for soul trap, for your second point, if a carry did know how to farm, then wouldn't they have the bigger impact and thus more than a support? A carry who can find farm on their own probably does have most impact.
@OP What do you mean by "inconsistent" plays ?
Regardless, its always about the Carries (which I will refer to as cores). The job of the support it to either enhance your cores above enemy cores OR depress enemy core below your cores. But by definition supports just can't win the games themselves.
Games can be won with terrible support. Games can be won with terrible cores. Games cannot be won by support unless they effectively turn core.
Most pubs have 3-4 cores so yes a support can be carried by the cores because they make up most of the team. The overall impact they have on the win is higher than one core no doubt because they run the early game AND they still provide map control and late game disables. 6 slotted AMs do not just pop outta nowhere and solo the other team at 30mins
I honestly say its both. Like a support/spacemaker can drag the game out long enough for a moronic carry to finally get items but the carry can't be so fucking stupid as to get moronic items or go out and push out a lane alone and die horribly or somehow get only 100 lasthits in a 60 minute game as bfury void.
I think this question is actually pretty stupid in general sense. If there's any organization in the game and there's work for every player to do, so I'd say:
Games are won by people doing right things at the right time, or opponents doing the opposite.
I played a lot of Haunted Colosseum recently. In one match I had Weaver in my team. He ended game with S&Y and 2 (two) Hearts of Tarrasque (BTW, we lost). I know, it's very extreme example, but it shows what your carry can do with his farm even if he gets some.
You generally have two supports and two heroes that can carry the game, mid and safelane. But the problem is, even if one of the supports is bad, the trilane will suffer immensly while if your mid or carry is bad, the other still can carry.
well if we're trilaning i usually tell at least one support to fuck off and go do something else 
Most people in higher brackets actually main support -- I can list more 5k-7k players that essentially play support over core roles ; simply because supports are usually more active in terms of what they do during the game.
Of course these 5k-7k guys that play support... can wreck any sub 4k5 player on a core role.
Current patch is all about picks & destroying safe lane with dual offlane. The strongest role in this patch is offlane for sure. The weakest safe lane carry. Skill doesn't matter much in pub, who gets less retards/stronger draft wins. That's why I gifted my account to my friend & stopped playing Dota at all. I might comeback in 6.86. This is the worst pub patch in Dota's history, it's too hard to solo carry games.
Finally someone in agreement! I have been saying forever that skill in dota doesn't mean shit cus in 2k,3k,4k maybe even 5k the players you are matched against are all generally close in skill. Picks matter more than anything else, pick a good team, execute and win. It's all about the picks man!
It's not universally true but chen, meepo, morph, those heroes have sub 50% win rates for a reason. Pubs never win with them. Conversely if you pick brain dead easy heroes like wraith king, omni, spectre, necro you have a good shot of winning.
Dire Wolf - it only applies to current meta. Also there is a big difference between 3k & 5k players, but now it's much harder to solo carry the game. Also why did u mention Meepo ? This hero is broken in pubs & is probably still the easiest hero to climb if ur good at him.
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Do you agree that inconsistent support plays will generally lead to team loses over inconsistent carry plays? or you think otherwise?
That high level support gameplay will lead to victory even if you have an average carry?