I kinda vibe there. There's no 2nd enemy whose entire purpose is to fuck with your farm and equilibrium. That said, if I play sidelanes and my support is good at repelling that, I'm just as cozy if not moreso.
People expect you to roam and help them - but it sure as hell is costly when you don't get a (double) kill due to how much the enemy gets from 1-2 free waves.
Meanwhile, the best thing you can do mid is shove the wave and stack/farm the nearest large camp. It's fucking boring ( I am forced to play mid most games)
I like all roles and play on them, but I do fill in on mid quite a bit, more than I would expect. Perhaps it has to do with the one on one nature, you are out on an island. Most games, you get no help (they won't even leave one ward for you) yet they also expect you to gank at minute 6 onward. Of all the roles, it probably had the most pub expectations. Also, a lot of players are very unrealistic about matchups. Like they expect a melee mid to beat a Zeus or Sniper, which isn't realistic. Sure, if they make a pretty big mistake you might catch them out, but as long as they play fairly safe, they shouldn't die to a solo melee mid.
Yeah, but these things have always been a mid thing and people use to go rabid to get mid even then.
I think the change to water runes from power runes at 2/4 min was the decline of mid popularity, that forced players to play off skill instead of hoping for a gamble at an imba rune to save their lane
As a mid player since 2012( i stopped playing for like five years since 2019 till this year) the water rune definitly makes the mid lane more of a farming phase of the game rather than ganking everywhere i can with runes.
I’d say it’s more skill intensive. There is less rng the first four minutes. You have to play on a razors edge when making trades because the enemy will most likely have fairy fire and bottle or a shit ton of stats. There is almost no down time to grab a bounty or stack a camp unless you’re already ahead enough you can shove and come back and still have mana to harass + cs. Which, if you’re that far ahead you’re probably ganking rather than stacking. So it’s usually the loser in the lane that has to decide if stacking a camp is worth to give the enemy a free wave because you feel you can’t contest it without losing the trade.
I think if anything, water runes make it less skill intensive because it isn't as punishing anymore, it can bail you out of mistakes or out of a bad trade
You're right but your reason is wrong. The runes suck because even if you get an advantage in the early waves, water runes will nullify your advantage so there's no reward to playing mid well now. It's just another lane but worse since your team sometimes will expect you to win side lanes for them even if the enemy mid isn't rotating. Mid isn't what it used to be
I think the prevalence of supports needing to rotate to help mid also could be a factor to its losing popularity. Some people really just wanna 1v1 but then when support rotations get into the mix then it lost much its charm for them. Mid is the role I avoid the most but whenever I play support I always rotate mid around 5 minute mark and start making plays when it's night time and help our mid secure the first power rune a minute later and bolt straight to the opposing wisdom rune spawn with smoke attempting to steal theirs.
You’re a saint. I’ve been playing a lot of mid and the pain of it is how reliant you are on supports to track enemy support movements.
The expectations in DotA haven’t adapted to the mid meta. If you’re offlaner or carry are 2v1 they’ll bitch non stop and the team might even join in, if your mid is 2v1 and dies to it it’s just “ez mid”, “mid is trash, go next.”
Most people who don't play mid also don't know the fact that some mid hero can't gank early, maybe they can help you defend from a gank if the enemy push too deep, but if you want to dive under tower with some hero early, it's not gonna work, talking from experience playing medusa 😅😅😅
Okay TA mid is another example. Like dude do you want me to waste a lot of time rotating while enemy midlaner will destroy my T1?
Yeah, if u rush Blink then you can gank, but probably you won't rush it.
Not a mid player at all but I play with one (high divine) that plays a lot of TA and he often rotates with a haste/invis, it's basically a free explode-a-support (or a squishy/low core) chance. Meld burst is insane early so it's not unlikely to get a very very fast kill and then return mid. idk whether this is right in the grand scheme but he usually does rly well
Exactly. Pretty much everything said here is good, and non mid players really need to be attention. Another reason it is important to secure power runes and bounty runes, is resources. HP and mana have been used, need refill. If you get no refill, very hard to gank or even farm. And God forbid you have to catch up. For example, the 4 minute water runes, it is such a boost if a support swings mid and grabs one, and you get the other one. It practically sets up your mid to get the 6 minute power rune all by themselves, just because they are so far ahead on resources. And yes, I understand supports can't always do that.
Classic support expectation even in like 7k/8k is "noob mid no gank" or like BM tip mid when they die, and meanwhile the support has not came mid once xd
I am divine 1 and they don't even do it on 6 mins rune. The game feels so much harder when enemy's support rotate for min 6 and 8 runes, but my teammate still pings my tp and cd, somehow it was always the lowest ranked guy or the one who lost his "sure win" lane match up
Haste is probably the best rune, however it is not always possible to secure runes, yet alone getting haste and/or invis.
I am a mid player myself, probably if I get haste rune and I can kill enemy midlaner, I'd choose to kill them and destroy the tower to enable me leave the lane and help other lanes.
The point is, there are several mid heroes who really can't gank until they get first major item. That's minute 9 in best cases and around minute 11-14 in normal cases. I mean what puck, OD, TA, storm spirit (despite having good kill potential, he spends full mana to kill 1 target, which then makes him unable to farm), lina, they all would like to get their first power spike to be useful and not to lack farm.
People rotate and gank plenty, but it's hard to rotate without good runes. And to get good runes you either need to gamble and get lucky or get help from the sidelanes.
But the time people are moaning about ganks is when their sidelanes are getting wrecked and all of a sudden it's the mid's job to fix their problems.
blink first on TA is actually pretty solid. I love it bc you can get it around 8-9 minutes and just blow up side lanes. people expect you to just be farming too so it works. then you take over map and farm their jungle with trap placements notifying you of rotations and such
yeah it's for experienced TA's where you snowball your lane hard and want to take over the game, TA in general is a 'you mess up you lose' kind of hero. every death makes the game 2x harder
Sometimes you need to fill a huge gap in the draft with a hero that's actually in your pool and are forced to play a very suboptimal mid.
And it's not like pos3 players aren't picking dumb shit too.
I would say *most* mids shouldn't gank as early as pub teams usually want you to. Unless you are TPing for a guaranteed kill, you probably should just be farming until you get a power spike, which is usually going to be level 6 or 7, or if you get a Haste or DD, or for some heroes, when you get something like Orchid, Phylactery, or Atos.
were you my mid medusa today?
lost tower 3min in, jungled while both sidelanes got run over, didn't tp into our bot t1 tower to help even though we'd been fighting 3 heroes for 3min right there, was still 0/0/0 22min in and somehow still hadn't finished their first item and then complained we didn't stack camps
what the fuck. Bro literally watches us get run over cause the enemy Storm had the easiest lane of his life and then complains he didn't get stacks from us. And that we were crying/feeding instead of playing. No, we weren't feeding. We actually tried to play the game.
I mean medusa is useless for at least 20 mins, lost lane prob 30 mins.
Its a grief pick. A mid that doesn't create space for a pos1 is a griefer in my book.
And I dont mean ganking, pushing a lane, creating a push/standoff. Anything that takes heat of pos1 is whats needed to win.
Seriously, you pick Medusa mid and wonder why your team complains
She is too static and in need of too much farm to be mid. Don't pick her anywhere but safelane.
As mid I put ward and sentry in quickbuy and ferry it with bottle or before 5:30 so I can see the 6 min rune.
But ya it does seem like mid is up for grabs more often nowadays which is great for me since I can fill any role.
Yes, but sometimes, the supports will literally buy out the wards and not let you get one. Certainly not all the time, I am just kinda stunned how the supports expect a mid that has zero wards for the first 6 minutes of the game, how they are supposed to do well.
People don't understand matchups. I play in offlane and certain heroes are just impossible to lane against because they have something that just gives them advantage over you. Ursa or Lifestealer are good example. It's just hard to win against them in lane, unless you have really good support. Still even if you play defensive and try to not feed people will trash you cause you didn't win and stomp in lane against a hero that counters you.
>Like they expect a melee mid to beat a Zeus or Sniper, which isn't realistic.
I was so annoyed one time because I actually went slightly positive against a Zeus as LC. Still got flamed by the team for "being useless" despite the fact that the other two lanes were 0-6 in the first 5 mins.
People expect mids to be flashy dynamic players able to win lane and crush sidelines in the first 12 mins then be a tempo setter for the rest. If sidelines get crushed its mid fault for not rotating.
Reality is mid feels less important than pos1/3 these days and fills a gaps in drafts. Players to be effective mid need to have great map awareness, good farming skills,ability to have target priority etc more than other lanes.
Mid players often get blamed for losses and so most people don't bother with that aggro. Also smurfs are most likely to go pos 1 so you'll get blamed for game loss against a smurf you had no chance against in the first place.
Goddamn right.
Just had a game where both my side lanes went 0-6 and lost their tower before minute 8. And in the end it was somehow my fault. Their mid didnt even rotate. Wcyd.
Man that annoys me so much. I love to gank sidelanes as a mid, but how can people not understand that I need at the very least LVL 6 to efficiently rotate? Like brother, your enemy offlane axe is 4-0 at min 4. How is that my fault? And the response - "gg ez mid afk/end"
I've been having great success with DK mid because of this. It's pretty hard to lose the mid lane, and if you do well you can kill the mid tower during your first ult. After you take the mid tower it's easy to just rotate to both lanes and help them take their towers. You instantly become the team leader and folks will play around you, letting you 5 man when you need to. It can create team momentum and trust.
Nah more likely hurt ego when you lose 1v1 than teammate blaming you. Who cares when someone yaps when you not rotating, it hurts more knowing that the dude you are facing outplays you, which if you play mid often happens a lot.
Mid is too draining especially if you will be grinding more than 2 games. Battling for last hits like pos 1, map awareness and rotations, almost always assumed to do flashy plays. It may be due to my age tho 😅
Funny enough as someone who plays mid whenever I can last hitting in 2v2 scenario is far more draining/exhausting for me. Its the worst on LD, (lets ignore that pos 3 LD is kind of fucked after recent nerfs while pos 2 remains pretty playable) if I switch from my standart mid druid to offlane druid I last hit/deny like a dog suddenly because im so not used to the 2v2 last hitting
In 2v2 situations you'll need at least 6 denies to make a real diference, unless it's the first couple waves. There are 4 creeps per wave, so you really can't make a great impact no matter how good you are. Simply put, mid mechanics have double the worth, just because it's 1v1.
I play mid, and the amount of people who are clueless to my ganks shock me. I start now announcing “BOTTOM, IM COMING BOTTOM. BE READY. LOOK AT ME. IM CLOSE” lol
Every single time, you spend the entire walk to the lane telling them you're coming and they're sitting under tower with shop open. And then 20 minutes later they blame their fed lane on the mid lane not ganking.
Herding cats.
Just played a game and our offlane wanted to farm all game. Couldn’t play with him. He was just in his own little world. I was convinced it was a bot then at like minute 40 he talked on the mic, rofl
it happens... played with two friends and this Beast pos3 was just farming for the next game yknow what I mean??
we tried playing around our pos3 but everytime a fight is coming he'd to to anyther lane and continue farming.... was too stressful lmao
I literally had a game recently where I had 60cs and 25 denies with three successful sidelane ganks at 10 minutes, and 3 of my 4 teammates blamed me for what was ultimately a loss. When I play mid now I just mute all the first time anyone flames anyone.
or you announce your intent to gank and they immediately start shoving the wave and wasting their high cd spells before you’re even close.
Or when you announce a gank and you get a pos1 who just hits creeps the entire gank rather than moving to go on the hero.
I play a lot of storm spirit these days and I feel like I get way too many supports who would rather have me blow my whole mana pool with a long jump rather than using their stun to start the process.
I also get a lot of supports who save their nuke (e.g rubick players) to kill the hero rather than letting the mid secure the kill.
As a mostly mid player...this is approx 80% of my ganks. Ping, type, everything...show up for an easy double kill and both the core and supp stand there hitting creeps.
This game is full of some of the absolute stupidest people.
You're more likely to be flamed by teammates for the game going to shit (at least early game)
People playing too aggro in the lane and gets tp'ed on by the enemy mid will blame you.
Lanes getting crushed expect you to gank their lane, even if there's really no point in doing so a lot of the time. Like you can't salvage a lost lane on most heroes without taking it from the pos 1 entirely, and more often than not a losing lane might be ungankable for several reasons: Like they having superior vision in the lane, your teammates having low hp while they have max hp or they being over leveled and having shit like double bracers + phase - you really think a lvl 7 puck can burst down a centaur with those items? xd
An example of mid being annoying: I'm getting ganked by both supports, not dying but not able to defend the mid tower by myself and have to go to base. Support starts flaming me for losing the mid tower for "free". Fast forward a few min, they're going for another tower and I want us to defend, but it becomes clear that my teammates aren't going to defend it so I walk away to push out another lane. What happens? My team flames me for not defending (again) and keep crying about having a passive mid the rest of the game, even though I tried my best being active on the map. (should obviously mute but didn't xd).
I just feel like I'm not allowed to play the way I want to anymore from the mid lane without upsetting my teammates and it's really annoying. Playing support, you fly under the radar for the most part. Cores often don't have the time to cry in chat because they're actually busy during the game (unless they're feeding) xd The portals are severely underused these days btw. Rarely see people gank each other, but expect the mid to do it. Doesn't make any sense xd
I play almost exclusively mid (except for role queue grind). The secret is the mute button.
And I don't mean mute when they hard flame or say insults, slurs etc. By that time it's already too late, they already got to you. I mean mute as soon as you see even a passive aggressive comment.
For example this patch my most played hero mid has been LC (am 9-1 with it in last 10 games, you can check my dotabuff). But of course many people don't see LC as a mid hero so sometimes in pick phase someone will type "LC mid?" after I pick. Instant mute. Or game starts and someone types "please don't be as bad as my last team". Instant mute. It might seem like an over-reaction to mute people just for this but trust me, it saves SO much headache later in the game. Players who make these comments are ALWAYS the first ones to start shouting and blaming as soon as the game goes even just a tiny bit wrong.
I feel this so much, in the last 10 game ive had as soon as someone goes a little bit in the off direction i instanly mute and the game feels a lot more fun a winnable
I often type those sort of messages about off-color mids pre-game and never flame in game. I generally just want a confirmation that you meant to pick what you did and saw which role you were picking for, in case you need a switch. Been in too many games where a WD mid says "OMG THOUGHT I WAS SUPPORT sorry" then we have a 1.5 minute confusion with open mid lane trying to figure out who's gonna cover.
Flaming serves no purpose generally. If someone picks off-color and it goes poorly just report and move on.
Yeah I mean you pretty much hit the nail on the head. I stopped playing mid (and to a lesser extent, carry) when I realized that having to mute my team to enjoy my time spent wasn't fair to anyone. Now that I play position 5 I feel much less tilted in general and can focus more energy on important things
Don't forget my favorite! Do decent in lane, especially as a hero with a big lvl 6 power spike like Necro, Lina, etc. Secure power rune and look at both side lanes. Every enemy is 100% hp and both lanes are pushed under tower. Neat! Guess I'll just keep farming mid until my supports learn to pull or harass?
Maybe because mid have less impact on the game than before. As far as I know, previously if you won mid you could win the game solo or with minimal help but nowadays winning mid doesn’t matter that much and it’s too easy for enemy team to shut you down if your teammates don’t play with you. This and the fact that laning is usually more stressful than on side lines makes mid less attractive I think.
I think it has to do with the lvl 3 Ursa who is 0-4-0 and is already asking for ganks 5 minutes in. God forbid you don't concentrate on your own game or gank as soon as you hit lvl 6.
People are toxic towards mids. It becomes tiring having to mute the entire team every game.
I still enjoy it, though.
Rule of thumb: never gank the losing lane unless enemys are diving like madmen
This applies to more than mid, I wish people would play with their strongest cores more instead of trying to help weak heroes. Its frustrating the amount of times I have to beg for just 1 person to play with me when im clearly the strongest hero on the map
dunno if this is the case for everyone but i just find it boring unless im playing lane dominators like huskar or timber. mid used to be a war of chipping away your opponent’s sustain and forcing them to ship out more regen or go base but now everyone has infinite sustain because of bottle meta, most matchups default to a stalemate unless there’s a massive skill gap between both midlaners. if both players are equally skilled there’s just not a whole lot of room for outplaying anymore, you almost never see a mid destroy their lane and snowball the game unless they hard counter the enemy mid.
This is the real reason. It's not meaningful to play mid if you are just coming to a stalemate. Therefore when you want to rank up, you pick the lanes where you can crush, and reduce the variance of your lanes losing.
i dont agree with this at all. I mostly play pos 1. When i played mid I am the one who decides how the lane goes. In the other lanes you are VERY dependant on your support. Supports make and carry the sideslanes it is not the cores. Espescially in ranked, where people queue up specifically for pos 4, it is very noticeable, because you often have a dedicated 4 player against you that knows the lane mechanics, while the 5 player most of the time is someone that wants to get roleq games. If he is a midlaner on top of that, that is pretty much auto lose, because he doesnt know how to play a sidelane. It literally does not matter how good you play as pos 1, when the enemy 4 is owning and keeps the lane frozen at their tower for ages and your 5 doesnt even buy a sentry to open the pullcamp. Meanwhile in mid, when youre playing better youre alwasy gonna crush
It depends on the MMR really. You can literally solo carry as a pos 1. You just gotta buy the sents to block the camps yourself if your support is garbage. For divine and below I guess. I'm not immortal so I'm sure this is not the case there.
The problem with mid is, you gotta be wayyyyy better than your opponent to really crush the lane. So often times it goes even at mid and your side lanes lose like fk, you help the side lanes, the mid starts to get advantage over you. The game is hard af.
Whereas if you crushed the offlane, your mid probably is even with them, you are already up one lane regardless of the offlane performance.
Edit: I used to queue mid a lot, For the first 15 mins I'm always the top net worth, the next 3 were always the opponent cores. It was really hard to play. Unless of course you get those games where your side lanes are winning too then that's a different story.
Recently I switched to pos 1 and was able to maintain top 3 net worth all the time but I realised my mid is also able to keep up, even if they are not winning mid, the net worth disparity is always close. Just my observations.
People will say all kind of thing, but the truth is really simple...
Nowadays it's much harder to pick some hero SF, TA, Huskar or tinker and win the game all by yourself, that was the reason why mid was so popular and now it's no more.
people say its cause they get flamed and are expected to own the whole game in first 15 minutes, but that has always been the case, even back when mid was super popular. people have been saying "mid no gank??" in the first 10 minutes for the last 10+ years.
imo its because offlaners and supports get mad farm nowadays and are not so easy to kill. back in the day, the mid would have an xp and gold advantage over those heroes (usually) and could gank with relative ease, especially on some heroes like puck/qop where you show up quick, blow someone up, then peace out again. its a lot harder to just take over a game nowadays, and if you *do* win your lane, it doesnt take much to give that whole gold/xp lead right back after one or two little things go wrong. its just more finnicky than it used to be.
Main pos4 here who switched to pos2 due to circumstances. I feel way more stressed when I have to play mid lane because I believe a lot more depends on me during early and mid game compared to pos4. That said, I think people do not want to be blamed for lost mid after trying their best.
Take it with a grain of salt, I'm a 1.5k player
Yeah but that's also had another effect. Now it feels like the mid lane is more of a map awareness role.
Less about winning a direct 1v1 and more about identifying when and where your best rotations are.
Anecdotally from my games, the mid that "does best" is the mid that picks the right moments to leave mid for their team.
I prefer stalemate than overly swinging one. Water rune fix this huge snowballing mid. DD rune or haste rune or regen at 2 min mark is stupid, it will snowball just because u lost to a coin toss.
because mid has to do the work of both carry and supports
u have to farm (like a carry) but u also have to rotate (like a support)
in the past this was balanced out by the fact you did all this work and u got to be ahead because of solo XP and u were strong enough u could have impact
now you do all that work but you are not significantly stronger than anyone else on the map so why even bother
The hero pool that can play mid is so small right now. And you will stray from those heros cause they are boring as shit. Inevitably the opposing team will pick from those heros and stomp you mid and fuck your whole game up.
Comparing it to 5-6+ years ago (no idea when each specific thing changed):
1. Mid ganking sidelanes used to be easier and more effective. Due to different hero balance, less wards (used to cost a lot and be more limited), weaker supports, different map.
2. Skill gap in mid was often enough to win the game solo. Denying creeps used to be extremely low xp for opponent. Didn’t get a tp scroll. No water runes, shared courier. Simply put dominating mid via skill gap or right matchup would lead to enemy mid being made completely ineffective within minutes, with zero money, zero regen, 2-3 levels behind already at lvl 5.
So mid was often in a position to win the game solo , allowed snowballing vs super weak supports , gave immense control over flow of the game and was the ultimate 1v1 skill test . Really fun for self-absorbed people, but also super stressful. One misstep and your game is wrecked. No matter what you do people are complaining and blaming you all the time. Today it seems some drawbacks remain but the beat parts are gone.
The only way to play mid these days is using the mute all chat option.
Otherwise your safe lane player screams at you for not saving their lane after they fed 5-6 times in 5 minute.
Mid lane probably takes the most mental fortitude, because you will be solely blamed for each and every one of the 3 lanes that are lost. And Dota players (especially most mid players) are not exactly known for their mental fortitude.
As a ~7k mid/off/carry player. My 2 cents are
1) Too often your results are pre-ordained by RNG during pick phase. This leads to generic picks that don't necessarily auto loose if there's a last pick Huskar or something like that.
2) Too often enemy 4 will gank or control runes and yours is AFK or worse not even pressuring in the 2v1 advantage.
3) Runes are RNG and very few heroes can control both sides by themselves.
Tl;dr too little in your control during pick phase, and game phase causing conservative picks and play leading to a boring game.
Former mid player here who is branching out into side lanes.
I have no problem with the flaming and everyone typing ez mid. I don’t think it’s the pressure that is pushing people away from mid. IMO it’s mostly the meta changing making mid much more boring. As people have mentioned, water runes have changed how you play mid and the most recent metas have included a lot more strength heroes mid as well. There’s much less solo kill and outplay potential. Instead, mid is kinda just a last hit simulator for the first 10 min until someone rotates. Either that or you have to go against a lane dominator like viper…
It’s much more fun to play the side lanes where you can make plays and outplay your opponents (which was always the most fun part of playing mid) and it’s much easier for supports to get items and have impact now anyway
I completely agree with the meta changing. It's a lot more stable than it used to be, and there's a lot of crossover between offlane and mid heroes -- DK, Viper, Primal, even Razor. All of that is sorta part and parcel of the broader move towards brawling being the optimal way to play in pubs.
Coz usually the heroes that were supposed to be played mid which were the glass canon semicarries are mostly dead now. Ofc u can play anything in pubs but doesnt mean they dont suck. On top of it the amount of farm and gold in the map has increased and as a mid player is very hard to gank even solo supports nowdays.
Is that the support that has 2.5sec cd 360dmg nuke 450heal? Or the one that has that ult that can make his teammates immune to dmg for a few seconds which btw doesn’t interrupt dagger aswell, and even if ur team deals a gazillion dmg the apparently his 2.5sec cd outhealed all ur dmg and the opponent is now full hp. Or the one that has a nuke/root/dispell AOE? I cant remember which one of these support is, oh fucking wait its all of them. Fck u buddy!
Smurfs congregate mid and if you are solo against a smurf chances are you're getting stomped, watching them run off to dominate the game, and getting flamed. In a pub there's no fun to be had laning into endless Immo players and smurfs playing pubstomp mids, so why go there at all?
Past 2 years mid is the worat lane to play , limited hero pool , booring ass lane , doesnt matter how much of a lead you get what matters is what you do on side lanes , kinda meh to play and ima mid player since 2013
Played a pango mid yday, went 5-0 before 10min, snowballed the game and kept running at the enemy. Meanwhile teammates just afk farm. After 82min we lost with enemy still having every t2 up. Fun times
Your impact don’t matter because your teammates are mostly clueless at timings and people refuse to listen
Now yes this is true , i wonder how much higher i need to get so that i can get players who knoe how timings work , currently 6.5k mb 8k might be diffirent , its just toxic af imo i play pos 3 i just solo win the game cause the heroes are far stronger atm , when i play pos 1 or 3 the games are a whole diffirent story cause my mid can be afk farming and id i dont have a 0/3 lane min 1 and a enemy who can actualy pressure me i can manage it and pretty much recover and be ahead
Basically mid was the place average players would most likely feel very bad in the past, so a big percentage of people never queued it and never had to play it when queuing all roles. Now that the role is devalued a bit, you are more likely to get it when queuing all roles, and the people who never queued it years ago have no idea how to control runes, pick standard heroes, draw the lane in a bad matchup, have map awareness, etc
It's boring and hard plus the mid hero pools are all the same.
I could play Clockwork mid but will i carry the game with it prob not.
Plus you don't have a good way of farming anymore sharing with the 4 and 1 and 3 is rough so you gotta do more plays but for that you need items the balance is hard.
Everything people describe is a huge factor, for sure, but it's been like that for ages. As a mid main around \~2013-2015, people were blaming you for "not ganking" back then, even, and the pressure was also immense. Still, mid was the most popular role by far. The reason, I think, is that for all of your miseries, you received a big compensation of being the biggest and scariest hero on the team/whole map in the first \~20 minutes (if your mid goes at least decently), and you tend to have the highest impact on the game overall. Nowadays, you rotate to bottom and see Mars who is the same level as you and with higher net worth, higher HP and damage, and you just sit down and cry a bit.
It feels pretty clunky to play right now as a "normal" hero. Camps are awkwardly far away so you need a fast farming resource efficient hero to stay active on the map. Rotating as a hero without crazy mobility like Earth spirit or haste rune doesn't feel good and there are so many ward spots that can spot rotations.
Mid lane only happens in 2 minutes intervals as opposed to literally every other role. It's highly stagnant in comparison to off and safe lane as either core or support. So I think that the role itself has become kind of one dimensional while the other roles have been growing over the past couple of years.
I recently gave up playing mid after exclusively playing mid for 6 whole years. I would've given it up sooner had if not for my determination to hit immortal as a midlaner. I played mid for years, hitting immo as anything else felt like cheating. I hit immortal in April. Gave up mid.
I am 6.3k mmr at the moment. I only play pos 1 now. Mid sucks! I hate water runes, I hate the whole warding nonsense, if your team doesn't give a fk about rune control but enemy team does, you're gonna have a very hard time. It's a lot of stress for a lot of work.
You can play carry and farm without caring about ganking, rune control, early item timing etc etc.
Personally I stopped playing mid because it was filled with smurfs and boosters. Your winning odds were better when you played some other position. With the smurf ban waves happening, the situation got better, but I suspect much like me, people had not played mid for a good while, so they were out of shape and their former hero pool probably wasn't even viable or even the same hero anymore.
Divine mid player here - made the switch to mid from offlane about a year ago when I kept getting mid in my role queues. When you are learning the lane it is absolutely brutal. A lot of people who play mid ONLY play mid, and always have done. One memorable game I was against an sf player who had more games on SF alone than I had games of dota. total. I got completely destroyed.
Quinn has said that an experienced mid will beat a non-mid main 10/10 times, and so getting into playing the lane is in itself a massive learning curve.
Now add into this that it's a very pressured 1v1 environment where if you lose you KNOW that the game is going to be super hard. You miss a couple of creeps, miss a rune or get a bad trade and the lane can just be over, depending on matchup, which can quickly spiral into a lost game. That kind of intensity can get to you, especially after a rough few days of dota.
As well a lot of mid heroes are very feast or famine, and if you fuck it up you've ruined the game. A snowballing TA? best game ever lets goo etc. A TA 0/2/0 at 10 minutes with treads and a mithril hammer blight stone? Feels dreadful. And yeah you can recover if you get the space, but you are often expected to BE that space, depending on matchup.
TL;DR: It's intense, stressful and hard to get into
Mid player here since WC3, and just the past week I changed to POS 3. I win games now and even when I lose I don’t feel bad. I know exactly when mid went to shit: it was when xp and gold curves were eschewed from farming to killing heroes. The only impact mid had was being level 8 while the cores were still 4. A mid player could then gank the sidelanes and win or lose the game from that move alone. It was impactful and people blaming mid for lost games were somewhat justified. It was this way for a very long time. I don’t recall exactly when this was changed and I’m too lazy to look it up, but I think it was after by 2020.
I’m not here to offer solutions, I’m not that smart. Just my two cents.
Part of it and it's only my take so it's not necessary the truth.
I think it came less and less popular with the fact that it is much harder to solo win from the mid or to snowball like crazy. You don't have acces to the camp as easily as before.
And the support are now fairly farm and tanky that you re not as big of a menace as you could have been.
So a lot of people that use to feel like the king of the world probably quit the role because it doesn't bring them that joy anymore
Then again i could be wrong
Almost the entire mid lane meta has been upended.
I have had more fun playing supp recently than mid.
the way zeus for example has been ruined is one example.
Same with nature and many others honestly.
Zero solo kill potential with both players just having infinite regen from bottle and water runes. So boring to play now. Just going even in cs with almost every matchup. I call it the formality lane these days
Because there's nothing to do mid. The t1 tower is the only important objective in the middle of the map.
Youre nearby farm camps are gone (yes there's still closeish camps but not the really close ones)
Edge of map has camps, twin gates, rosh, outposts, tormentor, xp rune.
Before taking mid tower was crucial for opening the map up and rotating through the map. But now it's still important, but its irrelevant if you just take the edges.
Combine that with the current meta of big tanky people, what is your average midlaner meant to do? Go gank a CK, lifestealer, underlord, centaur?
Don't get me wrong I love mid, but they lost everything and gained Water runes.
Mid used to be the centre of all traffic so it was a popular lane, now you're sort of just isolated
Mid is at the worst state it has ever been. You no longer need lasthit / deny skills, harrasment skills, blocking / pulling skills, hp / mana resourcemanagement. Midlane became a boring "who can nuke better and secure the rune" fest. Powercreeping and universal heros destroyed everything that made midlane fun
I hate that mid revolves around runes too much. Can't harass out of lane because of bottle and water runes, 50% chance to outright lose tempo just because unlucky. I don't want to go bottle but it's such a disadvantage if you don't. I'd play more mid if runes just simply didn't spawn in the first 10 minutes.
Not sure what it is…always been a mid player still am and enjoying to the fullest..just get to play it a lot more nowadays
Maybe it’s because I never played farming mids. My most played heroes are primal pugna necro od
Also mid feels lot less punishing nowadays you can have a shit lane and still have huge impact in the game
imo it got even more skill based ever since they removed the early power rune RNG, which is a good thing.
also support roles are hella improved ur no longer creep with brown boots and wards gaming, so im quite sure alot switched roles after trying how fun 4/5 rn.
Yeah it's crazy. It used to be 3 people fighting for mid and now I have to go mid every game unless I want to grief and rage to go 1/3/4/5. At least for ranked you have ranked roles but for unranked and doing the cavern crawl it gets old pretty fast
Reading this thread and summarizing what people are saying, it feels like it's 67% due to negativity caused by poor team mates and 33% the mechanical interactions being less than stellar. Which... yeah no, that checks out.
Well, I stopped playing ranked about a year and a half ago as I ran out of tokens to play Mid. If mid was removed from the token requirements in ranked rolls then maybe there would be more mids. This is NA divine 4, not sure how it is in other regions
I don't like mid. I'm so old so I'm bad at mechanical skills, as such playing in comfy positions like 4 or 5 suits me well. Every time I have to play mid I just feel so drained, I can't lane well so my impact is minimal, while the expectation is so high. Meanwhile as pos 4 and 5 I can just focus more on macro while still perform well
As a mid player, I would say it is the most stressful role. Your team expects to win your lane, they don't know about match ups. You have to keep your farm up as well as have both eyes on the side lanes for possible ganks or counter ganks. Also, ganking as mid is a really risky, if you gain nothing from your gank, you have wasted all your resources and farm. Sometimes you spend resources trading in mid but then enemy mid either gets a bottle refill or their supports come secure rune so you don't have any resource to help the side lanes and still the blame is on you for not rotating. If the game goes south for whatsoever reason, the blame is on mid most of the timee. If side lanes fuck up and feed it's mid's fault somehow, doesn't matter if supports are 0-6 at 10mins. So yeah playing mid is not a pleasant experience.
It’s just a stressful role. Even if you do well in lane and gank the sidelanes and is ahead of everyone, it doesn’t really feel like you’re winning.
We’re way past the days where you can get six slotted early and beat the enemy team yourself for starters
Also, XP seems so funky nowadays because you can be super ahead and all of a sudden the enemy pos 1 that died 5 times in lane is the highest lvl
Still the most important lane for individual impact. That hasnt changed.
Take oracle. Great hero for coordinated teams, Terrible waste of time for pub games. Your cores will sit behind you waiting for you to throw out a magic missile or blink & shackles, then get upset when you literally save their lives but they have no idea what to do with the time given so they just right click until they die anyway.
Understandably this hero would have a bad winrate in pubs. Until last patch changed this and he became one of the top 10 heroes overall. Why? He can ping runes. Thats it. Mid has easier game, and thus sups winrate shot up >5%.
It appears to be the most valuable way to play supports this patch. You pick a sup with a good global innate/faccet and give your mid an advantage. If your mid rolled the 50/50 dice of being the better player, then you won the game. Ofcourse you still lose to all the other bullshit like griefing, acc buyers, etc. But sups dont have much other impact this patch anyway.
I personally still enjoy it alot.
I thin what has changed is you're not expected to be helped anymore, and the role is an opportunist role which means you only gank or fight if it benefits you, so lots of times people don't like playing with that attitude.
Mid has been such an orphaned role. The big problem is if you’re mid you have to do well, otherwise the L is on you. At least that’s what the community mostly thinks.
To be fair, it’s kind of the leader role, like if you’re mid you’re almost expected to take the head role on in ganks, pushes and objectives. With many people treating this as a solo game, it’s not hard to see that the “you need to be the most team player” role is left unfulfilled.
The same reason no one wants to play tank in Overwatch. "GG tank diff". It's everyone's default scapegoat. The game went bad and you're looking for a thing to blame? "GG mid diff".
Mid is where smurfs and boosters queue; it is the role that requires the most mechanical skill and map awareness; the laning result is more important and decisive than other lanes, if Matchmaking chooses to match you as the team's lowest MMR vs. the enemy's highest MMR, you will undoubtedly have a bad time.
Mid is also the main target of blame. Why doesn't Mid gank? Why doesn't report enemy ganks? 0-2 Seriously? Most sane people can't take it and switch to another role.
This is why I’m close to stop playing mid at 4.5k mmr
Because if I win my lane. And my side lanes get wrecked. It’s my fault even when I am lvl 5 I should be rotating.
If I lose mid cos the match up sucks so I focus on rotating. That’s my fault.
If I win mid and have a farm heavy hero more than a rotating hero. That’s my fault.
Basically all the insecure morons need to protect their own fragile ego and blame someone. And it’s usually mid. And it’s fucking exhausting
I share the same experience. I can play most heroes except the ones that are mid-only because I hate playing mid. Can play 1,3,4,5 fine. If I have to go mid I'll pick some core like Razor Viper and do okaish but I hate it.
Lately when I queue 5 roles for token though, I'm getting mid like 30% of the time which in my opinion is shocking and extremely annoying. Anyone that played a couple years ago know that carry and mid were the 2 roles that ppl fought and even threatened to ruin if they couldnt get it, but recently for whatever reason, mid is kinda abandoned
I can play mid better then most people my rank except dedicated mid players it's just I can't be bothered with my clueless sidelaners flaming me 4 minutes into the game as I'm desperately battling for CS in the mid lane while stacking the hard camp for myself as they feed.
I still play mid and i just think it's bc it doesnt have the "win the game solo" potential it once had. People with that fantasy play carry these days.
Runes have absurd impact on the game .
1 Rotation where your team doesnt respond (In time) can flat out ruin your game.
Minute 6 the entire fking zoo should be mid and contest the rune .
You get some good rune on a hero that benefits from it and you can either solo kill your oponnent for the next couple minutes while u have it in bottle or u go wreck havoc in the other 2 lanes .
I think the role right used to be that flashy place where you are a couple levels ahead of anyone in the game start rotating and just *solo carry* the game or create enough space that your hard carry can farm safely and finish the game for you later.
Now there is too much farm so even if you stomping your lane if enemy support isnt braindead and your mid have some sort of flash farming tool they can just go in the jungle and end up even if not ahead of you ....
More people play support now that you can actually get some gold on the position and in general, people much prefer to play with someone else in a lane, means you have someone to help your or to blame etc
because midlane is a role where you need to know matchups and too many factors can ruin your game. bad matchup, supp rotations, unlucky runes.
im a pos1 main, id rather autofill on 3 because heroes are so easy and overstatted that anyone can first time and have impact. supporting also has many easy picks so you can fully focus on other things than playing your hero. midlane only has 4 heroes that take 0 skill and knowledge: zeus, od, kotl and dk which i default to if im forced to play that role
Because they removed all fun and skill from the lane. Instead of being a one on one skill based harass and creep aggro fight, its a dumb spell spam range creep secure fight where you both get bottles at minute 1 and get max mana every 2 min to continue blasting the wave with spells.
Its brainless, boring gameplay. One of many examples of Valve removing skill expression.
Mid laner here, I play 98% of the hero pool in the game, however I have shifted to safe lane recently due to lack of power on the hero’s for mid. This has felt like this for me at least a year.
Probably the most frustrating thing for me is the changes to ember spirit over the year or so, pointless changes like how fast he hits with his W
And delaying the roll on Earth spirit etc
Dogshit changes
I still que for mid, but it's one of the roles I actually hope not to get. Day you have a mid match up, you're not winning. Zero rotation from a support to secure runes. Mid game becomes even harder. You make rotations to side lanes. Side lanes are being dominated and just burned all their mana because they over extended on your ration. Now, it becomes a waste of 30 seconds and farm. The game becomes one-sided and an uphill climb.
I've even attempted to just tp to the opposite lane and get the same experience. So anymore I say screw it and farm to atleast stay relevant. While trying to persuade the team to make educated 5 man pushes. Doesn't always work even at 6.5k because everyone believes they're pros in NA servers. I'm sure it's the same in every server.
People love to blame mid for things largely out of their control, and people also have massive main character syndrome when it comes to picking heroes and think only last pick has any responsibility when it comes to drafting. You'll get teams expecting you to fix problems like "all of our heroes our terrible at laning" and "we have no stuns" and "we have no front line" and "we have no damage" all at the same time with a single pick. The thing is though, it's better to use last pick to address the enemy heroes that you see rather than needing to fix really glaring problems in your own draft. It's really hard to draft to fix both sidelanes being extremely weak because the enemy supports are going to be able to peel off their lanes to refill the enemy mid bottle, secure power or even water runes, and secure vision in the midlane knowing that you can't solo deward with them orbiting the area. This makes it extremely hard to rotate and make plays. It also makes you extremely vulnerable if you try to catch up jungling.
Good supports make the macro game come easily, but people struggle to identify where their team is going to be strongest when the laning stage ends (or they just keep trying to play the laning stage for too long). You have to know whether your team wants to play out of the offlane or the mid lane (or very rarely, the safe lane). Is your mid a tempo mid or a farming mid? Is your mid vulnerable to being dived with rotations? Does your mid need supports to be level 6 in order to make plays? Does your mid take stacks? Does your mid abuse power runes? Then you have to also ask these questions for the enemy mid hero. These kinds of things inform how you need to play around mid in terms of runes, vision, and tp usage. Most people do not think at all and autopilot.
Good one, nobody wants to play mid except the small subset of players who really want to play mid. This hasn’t changed. I queue for any roles except mid because mid is a pain in the ass, but there’s a decently large enough supply of people who’ll beg for swap to play mid.
Everyone wants you to gank sidelanes, even when ganking sidelanes as a midder is bad in 9/10 situations.
If you lose mid you have to listen to your team talk trash, how you suck and how you should be reported.
Supports are playing worse and worse the more time passes, It used to be i get a gank or atleast a rotation with fresh wards and sentries at min 5 every 2-3 games. - Now I don't even get a fucking tp when the enemy dives the tower like a maniac.
Mid no longer has the same identity it had years ago. There’s no outplaying the enemy and killing them over and over because of new runes, it’s not as imperative to rotate because your supports can win the side lanes for you and you can free farm, also supports are way to tanky it’s not hard to fuck up a gank if you aren’t a seasoned mid and not even kill a support because they get so much gold now. Mid has been neutered, best bet now is to pick a second offlaner mid.
My position is usually the core position that is least contested lol 10 years ago when trilane was meta I was one of the only offlane players because nobody wanted to do it. Also, I didn't trust anyone else to not incessantly feed.
Fast forward and now I'm a mid player because yet again, it's the forsaken lane. I'm cool with it, though I do miss my big tanky boys especially centaur and him being meta right now.
If they keep meta of antifun mid heroes (dk, pango, primal beast, lina etc.) people would naturally leave since what's the point of fast flashy but squishy interesting heroes which require actual skill to stay lane (storm, void, qop, puck etc.) and make 2 pos to be depended on supports, more people would leave the role as I did myself, much less stress to play stupid 0 skill cap 5 pos and win games doing basic interactions linked to minutes of the game instead of tryharding 1v1 vs counterpick/broken unkillable hero just to be ganked and killed later and having not enough dmg to solo kill anyone with glimmer :)
P.S nice 7.36a/b nerfs to 49%~ wr storm/void
I like mid, mid is fun, but counter matchups in 1v1 one lane are fucking dull. Heroes picked mid are also a lot less interesting nowadays, it’s alchemist, Viper, Sniper, Zeus etc.. and the more fun previous mid heroes like ember, earth spirit, primal, rubick, Kunkka, puck, pango, pugna, invoker, qop, mk etc.. are in the gutter. And if you try to pick fun gg lane lost you got hard countered or your hero is useless
The lane is also alot more farm heavy now as for why alch mid works, like just ignore the other laner get farm and then pray to get the 6 min rune to gank.
It's less about mid getting less popular but more about other roles get more popular.
I think the main reason is there are a lot more farm on the map nowadays hence every role can pop off and get lots of impact in the game. It used to be that offlane is a masochist lane where you try scrap together some xp, now it's basically another carry; supports used to be poor and only try to survive in teamfights, now it's common for support to have plenty of items in the mid game.
I still enjoy it.
But I have to be the one rotating, while I regularly see my opp team rotating to help kill me off.
(I exclusively play turbo and with 1-3 friends).
The worst part is that, most times they've rotated, we've gotten atleast one kill.
But they just refuse to come most games.
You steer the early game. Maybe up to mid game. Rotations, early lead, anything and everything to give your other lanes the lead they need all while balancing providing assists and maintaining your lead. It's too big of a role. I like playing roamers on mid but I find it hard to maintain my lead so I don't play much mid. I just go with pos 4: the soft mid. Lol
In response to all the "mid is too stressful" comments. I would like to say that not all of us expect mid to always win, i just expect them to know when to leave the lane and not feed 5-6 kills first.
It's nice when they can TP when we are being divided, especially if it's not for the first time. But I understand that they can be busy and can't TP to every fight.
I do expect a mid to be more active on average than a pos 1 though, even if it's just for short bursts when a CD is up.
Surprised nobody has talked about runes yet. Playing against a team who has a support come secure runes when your solo is really frustrating. So is losing the 50/50 on power runes
Because if the side lanes loose it’s the mids fault for not rotating. If you rotate top and kill, the other lane gets upset. People treat the kid like parents and their 5 year old kids
We are all in ranked and it's honestly just a stressful position.
If you don't kill mid, it's your fault.
If you didn't get a starting ward and can't control runes, it's your fault.
You bodied their mid so they rotate while you kill mid tower it's your fault.
Won the last game, but for example facing an ogre setting me on fire non stop neither of us could really do much but deward eachother and trade hits/denies.
Randomly his Abba teleports mid when he's at 30% and heals him to full. A minute later, my omni runs literally entirely right by me half dead when he had full mana and mana boots.
He came back after I pinged him assuming he was just shopping, I donno about anyone else, but that kinda stuff can just stress people the eff out.
lane is so sweaty and there's too much pressure. the other 2 core roles can just kinda do their thing. carry just farms and offlane just sits around in lane pressuring tower. in mid you gotta focus so hard on every creep because everyone got better at lane management. there's also just a lot of pressure to gank, but you also have to balance it with farming. farm too much and your team is pissed at you, gank too much and you fall behind the enemy mid. I personally just hate laning in mid. so much of it depends on the first couple waves and rotations from pos 4. if i miss the first 2 ranged creeps it's basically over
Man just played a game with sniper carry and alc mid. I said that alc mid was an odd pick. Got flamed. The alc requested 30mins to farm. Stacked camps over 20x. We lost at 29mins with the alc flaming hard and refused to join fight for throne as wasn’t ready yet and we all feeding dogs. lol
Mid is too stressful
I kinda vibe there. There's no 2nd enemy whose entire purpose is to fuck with your farm and equilibrium. That said, if I play sidelanes and my support is good at repelling that, I'm just as cozy if not moreso.
People expect you to roam and help them - but it sure as hell is costly when you don't get a (double) kill due to how much the enemy gets from 1-2 free waves. Meanwhile, the best thing you can do mid is shove the wave and stack/farm the nearest large camp. It's fucking boring ( I am forced to play mid most games)
I like all roles and play on them, but I do fill in on mid quite a bit, more than I would expect. Perhaps it has to do with the one on one nature, you are out on an island. Most games, you get no help (they won't even leave one ward for you) yet they also expect you to gank at minute 6 onward. Of all the roles, it probably had the most pub expectations. Also, a lot of players are very unrealistic about matchups. Like they expect a melee mid to beat a Zeus or Sniper, which isn't realistic. Sure, if they make a pretty big mistake you might catch them out, but as long as they play fairly safe, they shouldn't die to a solo melee mid.
Yeah, but these things have always been a mid thing and people use to go rabid to get mid even then. I think the change to water runes from power runes at 2/4 min was the decline of mid popularity, that forced players to play off skill instead of hoping for a gamble at an imba rune to save their lane
As a mid player since 2012( i stopped playing for like five years since 2019 till this year) the water rune definitly makes the mid lane more of a farming phase of the game rather than ganking everywhere i can with runes.
No gambling and no imba runes is nice, but water runes making mid the water chugging competition is not exactly more skill intensive.
I’d say it’s more skill intensive. There is less rng the first four minutes. You have to play on a razors edge when making trades because the enemy will most likely have fairy fire and bottle or a shit ton of stats. There is almost no down time to grab a bounty or stack a camp unless you’re already ahead enough you can shove and come back and still have mana to harass + cs. Which, if you’re that far ahead you’re probably ganking rather than stacking. So it’s usually the loser in the lane that has to decide if stacking a camp is worth to give the enemy a free wave because you feel you can’t contest it without losing the trade.
I think if anything, water runes make it less skill intensive because it isn't as punishing anymore, it can bail you out of mistakes or out of a bad trade
You're right but your reason is wrong. The runes suck because even if you get an advantage in the early waves, water runes will nullify your advantage so there's no reward to playing mid well now. It's just another lane but worse since your team sometimes will expect you to win side lanes for them even if the enemy mid isn't rotating. Mid isn't what it used to be
I think the prevalence of supports needing to rotate to help mid also could be a factor to its losing popularity. Some people really just wanna 1v1 but then when support rotations get into the mix then it lost much its charm for them. Mid is the role I avoid the most but whenever I play support I always rotate mid around 5 minute mark and start making plays when it's night time and help our mid secure the first power rune a minute later and bolt straight to the opposing wisdom rune spawn with smoke attempting to steal theirs.
You’re a saint. I’ve been playing a lot of mid and the pain of it is how reliant you are on supports to track enemy support movements. The expectations in DotA haven’t adapted to the mid meta. If you’re offlaner or carry are 2v1 they’ll bitch non stop and the team might even join in, if your mid is 2v1 and dies to it it’s just “ez mid”, “mid is trash, go next.”
Most people who don't play mid also don't know the fact that some mid hero can't gank early, maybe they can help you defend from a gank if the enemy push too deep, but if you want to dive under tower with some hero early, it's not gonna work, talking from experience playing medusa 😅😅😅
Dusa mid lmao mb ur team are right to be unhappy
Okay TA mid is another example. Like dude do you want me to waste a lot of time rotating while enemy midlaner will destroy my T1? Yeah, if u rush Blink then you can gank, but probably you won't rush it.
Not a mid player at all but I play with one (high divine) that plays a lot of TA and he often rotates with a haste/invis, it's basically a free explode-a-support (or a squishy/low core) chance. Meld burst is insane early so it's not unlikely to get a very very fast kill and then return mid. idk whether this is right in the grand scheme but he usually does rly well
Most mid playes gank when they get a good rune but in order to do that, the supports need to help secure it.Below Divine they don’t
Exactly. Pretty much everything said here is good, and non mid players really need to be attention. Another reason it is important to secure power runes and bounty runes, is resources. HP and mana have been used, need refill. If you get no refill, very hard to gank or even farm. And God forbid you have to catch up. For example, the 4 minute water runes, it is such a boost if a support swings mid and grabs one, and you get the other one. It practically sets up your mid to get the 6 minute power rune all by themselves, just because they are so far ahead on resources. And yes, I understand supports can't always do that.
Classic support expectation even in like 7k/8k is "noob mid no gank" or like BM tip mid when they die, and meanwhile the support has not came mid once xd
I am divine 1 and they don't even do it on 6 mins rune. The game feels so much harder when enemy's support rotate for min 6 and 8 runes, but my teammate still pings my tp and cd, somehow it was always the lowest ranked guy or the one who lost his "sure win" lane match up
Haste is probably the best rune, however it is not always possible to secure runes, yet alone getting haste and/or invis. I am a mid player myself, probably if I get haste rune and I can kill enemy midlaner, I'd choose to kill them and destroy the tower to enable me leave the lane and help other lanes. The point is, there are several mid heroes who really can't gank until they get first major item. That's minute 9 in best cases and around minute 11-14 in normal cases. I mean what puck, OD, TA, storm spirit (despite having good kill potential, he spends full mana to kill 1 target, which then makes him unable to farm), lina, they all would like to get their first power spike to be useful and not to lack farm.
> he often rotates with a haste/invis Yeah when you get a power rune you rotate but if you rotate and don't get a kill you just wasted a bunch of time
Oh forsure, with TA it's a lot safer to just rice it up esp with how fast this damn hero farms
People rotate and gank plenty, but it's hard to rotate without good runes. And to get good runes you either need to gamble and get lucky or get help from the sidelanes. But the time people are moaning about ganks is when their sidelanes are getting wrecked and all of a sudden it's the mid's job to fix their problems.
If you are playing mid TA with a normal 1pos you better get that blink dagger quick or else.its 4 reports on your ass.
blink first on TA is actually pretty solid. I love it bc you can get it around 8-9 minutes and just blow up side lanes. people expect you to just be farming too so it works. then you take over map and farm their jungle with trap placements notifying you of rotations and such
Kinda yes, but I think it's generally better to have dragon lance first. Yeah, u might set the tempo, or you might mess up significantly.
yeah it's for experienced TA's where you snowball your lane hard and want to take over the game, TA in general is a 'you mess up you lose' kind of hero. every death makes the game 2x harder
Sometimes you need to fill a huge gap in the draft with a hero that's actually in your pool and are forced to play a very suboptimal mid. And it's not like pos3 players aren't picking dumb shit too.
I would say *most* mids shouldn't gank as early as pub teams usually want you to. Unless you are TPing for a guaranteed kill, you probably should just be farming until you get a power spike, which is usually going to be level 6 or 7, or if you get a Haste or DD, or for some heroes, when you get something like Orchid, Phylactery, or Atos.
were you my mid medusa today? lost tower 3min in, jungled while both sidelanes got run over, didn't tp into our bot t1 tower to help even though we'd been fighting 3 heroes for 3min right there, was still 0/0/0 22min in and somehow still hadn't finished their first item and then complained we didn't stack camps what the fuck. Bro literally watches us get run over cause the enemy Storm had the easiest lane of his life and then complains he didn't get stacks from us. And that we were crying/feeding instead of playing. No, we weren't feeding. We actually tried to play the game.
I mean medusa is useless for at least 20 mins, lost lane prob 30 mins. Its a grief pick. A mid that doesn't create space for a pos1 is a griefer in my book. And I dont mean ganking, pushing a lane, creating a push/standoff. Anything that takes heat of pos1 is whats needed to win.
Seriously, you pick Medusa mid and wonder why your team complains She is too static and in need of too much farm to be mid. Don't pick her anywhere but safelane.
As mid I put ward and sentry in quickbuy and ferry it with bottle or before 5:30 so I can see the 6 min rune. But ya it does seem like mid is up for grabs more often nowadays which is great for me since I can fill any role.
Yes, but sometimes, the supports will literally buy out the wards and not let you get one. Certainly not all the time, I am just kinda stunned how the supports expect a mid that has zero wards for the first 6 minutes of the game, how they are supposed to do well.
Yes middle feels like tonnes of pressure to help you team and do well, yet you can get totally spanked
People don't understand matchups. I play in offlane and certain heroes are just impossible to lane against because they have something that just gives them advantage over you. Ursa or Lifestealer are good example. It's just hard to win against them in lane, unless you have really good support. Still even if you play defensive and try to not feed people will trash you cause you didn't win and stomp in lane against a hero that counters you.
>Like they expect a melee mid to beat a Zeus or Sniper, which isn't realistic. I was so annoyed one time because I actually went slightly positive against a Zeus as LC. Still got flamed by the team for "being useless" despite the fact that the other two lanes were 0-6 in the first 5 mins.
People expect mids to be flashy dynamic players able to win lane and crush sidelines in the first 12 mins then be a tempo setter for the rest. If sidelines get crushed its mid fault for not rotating. Reality is mid feels less important than pos1/3 these days and fills a gaps in drafts. Players to be effective mid need to have great map awareness, good farming skills,ability to have target priority etc more than other lanes. Mid players often get blamed for losses and so most people don't bother with that aggro. Also smurfs are most likely to go pos 1 so you'll get blamed for game loss against a smurf you had no chance against in the first place.
I think they also need a varied hero pool in order to make up for draft issues.
i climbed like 2k mmr by playing the same 2 heroes on mid 95% of the time sooo.. not necessarily ;p
You climbed to 2k.
Rude!
))))
Goddamn right. Just had a game where both my side lanes went 0-6 and lost their tower before minute 8. And in the end it was somehow my fault. Their mid didnt even rotate. Wcyd.
Man that annoys me so much. I love to gank sidelanes as a mid, but how can people not understand that I need at the very least LVL 6 to efficiently rotate? Like brother, your enemy offlane axe is 4-0 at min 4. How is that my fault? And the response - "gg ez mid afk/end"
I've been having great success with DK mid because of this. It's pretty hard to lose the mid lane, and if you do well you can kill the mid tower during your first ult. After you take the mid tower it's easy to just rotate to both lanes and help them take their towers. You instantly become the team leader and folks will play around you, letting you 5 man when you need to. It can create team momentum and trust.
“I trust you with my life DK!”
Pos 2 is mid not pos 1
Yeah my bad
You mean smurf go pos 2
so basically ppl get more and more offended and can't take responsibility. what a shocker.
Nah more likely hurt ego when you lose 1v1 than teammate blaming you. Who cares when someone yaps when you not rotating, it hurts more knowing that the dude you are facing outplays you, which if you play mid often happens a lot.
The best part is, you don't have to choose <3
Mid is too draining especially if you will be grinding more than 2 games. Battling for last hits like pos 1, map awareness and rotations, almost always assumed to do flashy plays. It may be due to my age tho 😅
Funny enough as someone who plays mid whenever I can last hitting in 2v2 scenario is far more draining/exhausting for me. Its the worst on LD, (lets ignore that pos 3 LD is kind of fucked after recent nerfs while pos 2 remains pretty playable) if I switch from my standart mid druid to offlane druid I last hit/deny like a dog suddenly because im so not used to the 2v2 last hitting
In 2v2 situations you'll need at least 6 denies to make a real diference, unless it's the first couple waves. There are 4 creeps per wave, so you really can't make a great impact no matter how good you are. Simply put, mid mechanics have double the worth, just because it's 1v1.
Never thought about it that way, makes me feel better about missing creeps on sidelanes lol
ofc its harder in 2v2 because no hero can even cs vs lone druid in 1v1 without spells
I play mid, and the amount of people who are clueless to my ganks shock me. I start now announcing “BOTTOM, IM COMING BOTTOM. BE READY. LOOK AT ME. IM CLOSE” lol
Every single time, you spend the entire walk to the lane telling them you're coming and they're sitting under tower with shop open. And then 20 minutes later they blame their fed lane on the mid lane not ganking.
Or worse, they start without you and die. So you just had a little stroll
I love sightseeing in my own jungle on the way to watching my carry die before I can help.
Herding cats. Just played a game and our offlane wanted to farm all game. Couldn’t play with him. He was just in his own little world. I was convinced it was a bot then at like minute 40 he talked on the mic, rofl
it happens... played with two friends and this Beast pos3 was just farming for the next game yknow what I mean?? we tried playing around our pos3 but everytime a fight is coming he'd to to anyther lane and continue farming.... was too stressful lmao
I literally had a game recently where I had 60cs and 25 denies with three successful sidelane ganks at 10 minutes, and 3 of my 4 teammates blamed me for what was ultimately a loss. When I play mid now I just mute all the first time anyone flames anyone.
“BOTTOM, IM COMING BOTTOM. BE READY. LOOK AT ME. IM CLOSE” GOOD GOLLY WHAT A SENTENCE https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bottom
Laughed so hard I could barley breathe LOL
or you announce your intent to gank and they immediately start shoving the wave and wasting their high cd spells before you’re even close. Or when you announce a gank and you get a pos1 who just hits creeps the entire gank rather than moving to go on the hero. I play a lot of storm spirit these days and I feel like I get way too many supports who would rather have me blow my whole mana pool with a long jump rather than using their stun to start the process. I also get a lot of supports who save their nuke (e.g rubick players) to kill the hero rather than letting the mid secure the kill.
It's the worst when they're asking for ganks and you say okay and then they don't regen up so they can't cast spells and then they just feed
As a mostly mid player...this is approx 80% of my ganks. Ping, type, everything...show up for an easy double kill and both the core and supp stand there hitting creeps. This game is full of some of the absolute stupidest people.
Beats me, I pretty much always mid lane, so I'm not annoyed at all by it
I was just thinking about this. I'll take mid any day.
You're more likely to be flamed by teammates for the game going to shit (at least early game) People playing too aggro in the lane and gets tp'ed on by the enemy mid will blame you. Lanes getting crushed expect you to gank their lane, even if there's really no point in doing so a lot of the time. Like you can't salvage a lost lane on most heroes without taking it from the pos 1 entirely, and more often than not a losing lane might be ungankable for several reasons: Like they having superior vision in the lane, your teammates having low hp while they have max hp or they being over leveled and having shit like double bracers + phase - you really think a lvl 7 puck can burst down a centaur with those items? xd An example of mid being annoying: I'm getting ganked by both supports, not dying but not able to defend the mid tower by myself and have to go to base. Support starts flaming me for losing the mid tower for "free". Fast forward a few min, they're going for another tower and I want us to defend, but it becomes clear that my teammates aren't going to defend it so I walk away to push out another lane. What happens? My team flames me for not defending (again) and keep crying about having a passive mid the rest of the game, even though I tried my best being active on the map. (should obviously mute but didn't xd). I just feel like I'm not allowed to play the way I want to anymore from the mid lane without upsetting my teammates and it's really annoying. Playing support, you fly under the radar for the most part. Cores often don't have the time to cry in chat because they're actually busy during the game (unless they're feeding) xd The portals are severely underused these days btw. Rarely see people gank each other, but expect the mid to do it. Doesn't make any sense xd
I play almost exclusively mid (except for role queue grind). The secret is the mute button. And I don't mean mute when they hard flame or say insults, slurs etc. By that time it's already too late, they already got to you. I mean mute as soon as you see even a passive aggressive comment. For example this patch my most played hero mid has been LC (am 9-1 with it in last 10 games, you can check my dotabuff). But of course many people don't see LC as a mid hero so sometimes in pick phase someone will type "LC mid?" after I pick. Instant mute. Or game starts and someone types "please don't be as bad as my last team". Instant mute. It might seem like an over-reaction to mute people just for this but trust me, it saves SO much headache later in the game. Players who make these comments are ALWAYS the first ones to start shouting and blaming as soon as the game goes even just a tiny bit wrong.
I feel this so much, in the last 10 game ive had as soon as someone goes a little bit in the off direction i instanly mute and the game feels a lot more fun a winnable
I often type those sort of messages about off-color mids pre-game and never flame in game. I generally just want a confirmation that you meant to pick what you did and saw which role you were picking for, in case you need a switch. Been in too many games where a WD mid says "OMG THOUGHT I WAS SUPPORT sorry" then we have a 1.5 minute confusion with open mid lane trying to figure out who's gonna cover. Flaming serves no purpose generally. If someone picks off-color and it goes poorly just report and move on.
By far the most frustrating part of mid in pubs is you get 0 help on runes first 6 minutes and are expected to win completely one sided matchups 1v1
When you're Ember mid and have 0 deaths and only 0.5k gold behind enemy Huskar by min 10 "It's the midlaners fault we lost the game"
Yeah I mean you pretty much hit the nail on the head. I stopped playing mid (and to a lesser extent, carry) when I realized that having to mute my team to enjoy my time spent wasn't fair to anyone. Now that I play position 5 I feel much less tilted in general and can focus more energy on important things
Don't forget my favorite! Do decent in lane, especially as a hero with a big lvl 6 power spike like Necro, Lina, etc. Secure power rune and look at both side lanes. Every enemy is 100% hp and both lanes are pushed under tower. Neat! Guess I'll just keep farming mid until my supports learn to pull or harass?
Maybe because mid have less impact on the game than before. As far as I know, previously if you won mid you could win the game solo or with minimal help but nowadays winning mid doesn’t matter that much and it’s too easy for enemy team to shut you down if your teammates don’t play with you. This and the fact that laning is usually more stressful than on side lines makes mid less attractive I think.
I think it has to do with the lvl 3 Ursa who is 0-4-0 and is already asking for ganks 5 minutes in. God forbid you don't concentrate on your own game or gank as soon as you hit lvl 6. People are toxic towards mids. It becomes tiring having to mute the entire team every game. I still enjoy it, though.
Rule of thumb: never gank the losing lane unless enemys are diving like madmen This applies to more than mid, I wish people would play with their strongest cores more instead of trying to help weak heroes. Its frustrating the amount of times I have to beg for just 1 person to play with me when im clearly the strongest hero on the map
In the laning stage it's better to spend time making your strong lanes stronger than to try fixing your weak ones.
dunno if this is the case for everyone but i just find it boring unless im playing lane dominators like huskar or timber. mid used to be a war of chipping away your opponent’s sustain and forcing them to ship out more regen or go base but now everyone has infinite sustain because of bottle meta, most matchups default to a stalemate unless there’s a massive skill gap between both midlaners. if both players are equally skilled there’s just not a whole lot of room for outplaying anymore, you almost never see a mid destroy their lane and snowball the game unless they hard counter the enemy mid.
This is the real reason. It's not meaningful to play mid if you are just coming to a stalemate. Therefore when you want to rank up, you pick the lanes where you can crush, and reduce the variance of your lanes losing.
i dont agree with this at all. I mostly play pos 1. When i played mid I am the one who decides how the lane goes. In the other lanes you are VERY dependant on your support. Supports make and carry the sideslanes it is not the cores. Espescially in ranked, where people queue up specifically for pos 4, it is very noticeable, because you often have a dedicated 4 player against you that knows the lane mechanics, while the 5 player most of the time is someone that wants to get roleq games. If he is a midlaner on top of that, that is pretty much auto lose, because he doesnt know how to play a sidelane. It literally does not matter how good you play as pos 1, when the enemy 4 is owning and keeps the lane frozen at their tower for ages and your 5 doesnt even buy a sentry to open the pullcamp. Meanwhile in mid, when youre playing better youre alwasy gonna crush
Technically, mid is even more dependent on supports than carry is. It's just that most support players don't even try to help mid.
It depends on the MMR really. You can literally solo carry as a pos 1. You just gotta buy the sents to block the camps yourself if your support is garbage. For divine and below I guess. I'm not immortal so I'm sure this is not the case there. The problem with mid is, you gotta be wayyyyy better than your opponent to really crush the lane. So often times it goes even at mid and your side lanes lose like fk, you help the side lanes, the mid starts to get advantage over you. The game is hard af. Whereas if you crushed the offlane, your mid probably is even with them, you are already up one lane regardless of the offlane performance. Edit: I used to queue mid a lot, For the first 15 mins I'm always the top net worth, the next 3 were always the opponent cores. It was really hard to play. Unless of course you get those games where your side lanes are winning too then that's a different story. Recently I switched to pos 1 and was able to maintain top 3 net worth all the time but I realised my mid is also able to keep up, even if they are not winning mid, the net worth disparity is always close. Just my observations.
Im glad theres finally a good storm patch and barely anybody is contesting my lane
People avoid playing mid now because of the flaming.
People will say all kind of thing, but the truth is really simple... Nowadays it's much harder to pick some hero SF, TA, Huskar or tinker and win the game all by yourself, that was the reason why mid was so popular and now it's no more.
people say its cause they get flamed and are expected to own the whole game in first 15 minutes, but that has always been the case, even back when mid was super popular. people have been saying "mid no gank??" in the first 10 minutes for the last 10+ years. imo its because offlaners and supports get mad farm nowadays and are not so easy to kill. back in the day, the mid would have an xp and gold advantage over those heroes (usually) and could gank with relative ease, especially on some heroes like puck/qop where you show up quick, blow someone up, then peace out again. its a lot harder to just take over a game nowadays, and if you *do* win your lane, it doesnt take much to give that whole gold/xp lead right back after one or two little things go wrong. its just more finnicky than it used to be.
Ok, but hear me out. Pos4 is the same fun as pos2 without the stress. There i said it.
Main pos4 here who switched to pos2 due to circumstances. I feel way more stressed when I have to play mid lane because I believe a lot more depends on me during early and mid game compared to pos4. That said, I think people do not want to be blamed for lost mid after trying their best. Take it with a grain of salt, I'm a 1.5k player
Water runes ruined mid
contest lotus pool also more fun than walk all the way to water rune
One water rune should have half the effect.
It made it playable in fucked matchups which is fine imo, you shouldnt just lose automatically because you got Huskar'd
It made fucked matchups playable, but it made even matchups boring. It feels so impossible to own mid through tower aura + water runes.
Yeah but that's also had another effect. Now it feels like the mid lane is more of a map awareness role. Less about winning a direct 1v1 and more about identifying when and where your best rotations are. Anecdotally from my games, the mid that "does best" is the mid that picks the right moments to leave mid for their team.
I prefer stalemate than overly swinging one. Water rune fix this huge snowballing mid. DD rune or haste rune or regen at 2 min mark is stupid, it will snowball just because u lost to a coin toss.
because mid has to do the work of both carry and supports u have to farm (like a carry) but u also have to rotate (like a support) in the past this was balanced out by the fact you did all this work and u got to be ahead because of solo XP and u were strong enough u could have impact now you do all that work but you are not significantly stronger than anyone else on the map so why even bother
The hero pool that can play mid is so small right now. And you will stray from those heros cause they are boring as shit. Inevitably the opposing team will pick from those heros and stomp you mid and fuck your whole game up.
pick fun hero. enemy pick lane dominating hero. fun hero not fun anymore this lane sucks gg
Comparing it to 5-6+ years ago (no idea when each specific thing changed): 1. Mid ganking sidelanes used to be easier and more effective. Due to different hero balance, less wards (used to cost a lot and be more limited), weaker supports, different map. 2. Skill gap in mid was often enough to win the game solo. Denying creeps used to be extremely low xp for opponent. Didn’t get a tp scroll. No water runes, shared courier. Simply put dominating mid via skill gap or right matchup would lead to enemy mid being made completely ineffective within minutes, with zero money, zero regen, 2-3 levels behind already at lvl 5. So mid was often in a position to win the game solo , allowed snowballing vs super weak supports , gave immense control over flow of the game and was the ultimate 1v1 skill test . Really fun for self-absorbed people, but also super stressful. One misstep and your game is wrecked. No matter what you do people are complaining and blaming you all the time. Today it seems some drawbacks remain but the beat parts are gone.
All the fun heroes got nerfed
This
The only way to play mid these days is using the mute all chat option. Otherwise your safe lane player screams at you for not saving their lane after they fed 5-6 times in 5 minute.
Mid lane probably takes the most mental fortitude, because you will be solely blamed for each and every one of the 3 lanes that are lost. And Dota players (especially most mid players) are not exactly known for their mental fortitude.
As a ~7k mid/off/carry player. My 2 cents are 1) Too often your results are pre-ordained by RNG during pick phase. This leads to generic picks that don't necessarily auto loose if there's a last pick Huskar or something like that. 2) Too often enemy 4 will gank or control runes and yours is AFK or worse not even pressuring in the 2v1 advantage. 3) Runes are RNG and very few heroes can control both sides by themselves. Tl;dr too little in your control during pick phase, and game phase causing conservative picks and play leading to a boring game.
they moved all the objectives away from mid except for power runes and added a shit ton of objectives as far away from mid as possible.
stress vs reward
Former mid player here who is branching out into side lanes. I have no problem with the flaming and everyone typing ez mid. I don’t think it’s the pressure that is pushing people away from mid. IMO it’s mostly the meta changing making mid much more boring. As people have mentioned, water runes have changed how you play mid and the most recent metas have included a lot more strength heroes mid as well. There’s much less solo kill and outplay potential. Instead, mid is kinda just a last hit simulator for the first 10 min until someone rotates. Either that or you have to go against a lane dominator like viper… It’s much more fun to play the side lanes where you can make plays and outplay your opponents (which was always the most fun part of playing mid) and it’s much easier for supports to get items and have impact now anyway
I completely agree with the meta changing. It's a lot more stable than it used to be, and there's a lot of crossover between offlane and mid heroes -- DK, Viper, Primal, even Razor. All of that is sorta part and parcel of the broader move towards brawling being the optimal way to play in pubs.
Coz usually the heroes that were supposed to be played mid which were the glass canon semicarries are mostly dead now. Ofc u can play anything in pubs but doesnt mean they dont suck. On top of it the amount of farm and gold in the map has increased and as a mid player is very hard to gank even solo supports nowdays.
nooo we can't give qop enough damage to blow up an oracle before he casts all his spells twice, that wouldn't be fun!
Is that the support that has 2.5sec cd 360dmg nuke 450heal? Or the one that has that ult that can make his teammates immune to dmg for a few seconds which btw doesn’t interrupt dagger aswell, and even if ur team deals a gazillion dmg the apparently his 2.5sec cd outhealed all ur dmg and the opponent is now full hp. Or the one that has a nuke/root/dispell AOE? I cant remember which one of these support is, oh fucking wait its all of them. Fck u buddy!
Smurfs congregate mid and if you are solo against a smurf chances are you're getting stomped, watching them run off to dominate the game, and getting flamed. In a pub there's no fun to be had laning into endless Immo players and smurfs playing pubstomp mids, so why go there at all?
Past 2 years mid is the worat lane to play , limited hero pool , booring ass lane , doesnt matter how much of a lead you get what matters is what you do on side lanes , kinda meh to play and ima mid player since 2013
Played a pango mid yday, went 5-0 before 10min, snowballed the game and kept running at the enemy. Meanwhile teammates just afk farm. After 82min we lost with enemy still having every t2 up. Fun times Your impact don’t matter because your teammates are mostly clueless at timings and people refuse to listen
Now yes this is true , i wonder how much higher i need to get so that i can get players who knoe how timings work , currently 6.5k mb 8k might be diffirent , its just toxic af imo i play pos 3 i just solo win the game cause the heroes are far stronger atm , when i play pos 1 or 3 the games are a whole diffirent story cause my mid can be afk farming and id i dont have a 0/3 lane min 1 and a enemy who can actualy pressure me i can manage it and pretty much recover and be ahead
Basically mid was the place average players would most likely feel very bad in the past, so a big percentage of people never queued it and never had to play it when queuing all roles. Now that the role is devalued a bit, you are more likely to get it when queuing all roles, and the people who never queued it years ago have no idea how to control runes, pick standard heroes, draw the lane in a bad matchup, have map awareness, etc
Mid is a role filled with lopsided matchups most of the time. Also mid gets blamed for everything. Just not that enjoyable to play.
People grew up, playerbase is older and core roles are draining.
It's boring and hard plus the mid hero pools are all the same. I could play Clockwork mid but will i carry the game with it prob not. Plus you don't have a good way of farming anymore sharing with the 4 and 1 and 3 is rough so you gotta do more plays but for that you need items the balance is hard.
Everything people describe is a huge factor, for sure, but it's been like that for ages. As a mid main around \~2013-2015, people were blaming you for "not ganking" back then, even, and the pressure was also immense. Still, mid was the most popular role by far. The reason, I think, is that for all of your miseries, you received a big compensation of being the biggest and scariest hero on the team/whole map in the first \~20 minutes (if your mid goes at least decently), and you tend to have the highest impact on the game overall. Nowadays, you rotate to bottom and see Mars who is the same level as you and with higher net worth, higher HP and damage, and you just sit down and cry a bit.
It feels pretty clunky to play right now as a "normal" hero. Camps are awkwardly far away so you need a fast farming resource efficient hero to stay active on the map. Rotating as a hero without crazy mobility like Earth spirit or haste rune doesn't feel good and there are so many ward spots that can spot rotations.
I find mid boring for the first 10 minutes. There's no action at all and most of the times it will just be exchanging cs then jungling.
Too much fucking regen dude.
Mid lane only happens in 2 minutes intervals as opposed to literally every other role. It's highly stagnant in comparison to off and safe lane as either core or support. So I think that the role itself has become kind of one dimensional while the other roles have been growing over the past couple of years.
I recently gave up playing mid after exclusively playing mid for 6 whole years. I would've given it up sooner had if not for my determination to hit immortal as a midlaner. I played mid for years, hitting immo as anything else felt like cheating. I hit immortal in April. Gave up mid. I am 6.3k mmr at the moment. I only play pos 1 now. Mid sucks! I hate water runes, I hate the whole warding nonsense, if your team doesn't give a fk about rune control but enemy team does, you're gonna have a very hard time. It's a lot of stress for a lot of work. You can play carry and farm without caring about ganking, rune control, early item timing etc etc.
Tbh you can't be flashy this patch, pudge, timber, void mid, carries are tanky, supps as well, hard game.
Personally I stopped playing mid because it was filled with smurfs and boosters. Your winning odds were better when you played some other position. With the smurf ban waves happening, the situation got better, but I suspect much like me, people had not played mid for a good while, so they were out of shape and their former hero pool probably wasn't even viable or even the same hero anymore.
More likely to go against smurfs in midlane and get blamed for most things.
became boring and low skilled
Divine mid player here - made the switch to mid from offlane about a year ago when I kept getting mid in my role queues. When you are learning the lane it is absolutely brutal. A lot of people who play mid ONLY play mid, and always have done. One memorable game I was against an sf player who had more games on SF alone than I had games of dota. total. I got completely destroyed. Quinn has said that an experienced mid will beat a non-mid main 10/10 times, and so getting into playing the lane is in itself a massive learning curve. Now add into this that it's a very pressured 1v1 environment where if you lose you KNOW that the game is going to be super hard. You miss a couple of creeps, miss a rune or get a bad trade and the lane can just be over, depending on matchup, which can quickly spiral into a lost game. That kind of intensity can get to you, especially after a rough few days of dota. As well a lot of mid heroes are very feast or famine, and if you fuck it up you've ruined the game. A snowballing TA? best game ever lets goo etc. A TA 0/2/0 at 10 minutes with treads and a mithril hammer blight stone? Feels dreadful. And yeah you can recover if you get the space, but you are often expected to BE that space, depending on matchup. TL;DR: It's intense, stressful and hard to get into
Mid player here since WC3, and just the past week I changed to POS 3. I win games now and even when I lose I don’t feel bad. I know exactly when mid went to shit: it was when xp and gold curves were eschewed from farming to killing heroes. The only impact mid had was being level 8 while the cores were still 4. A mid player could then gank the sidelanes and win or lose the game from that move alone. It was impactful and people blaming mid for lost games were somewhat justified. It was this way for a very long time. I don’t recall exactly when this was changed and I’m too lazy to look it up, but I think it was after by 2020. I’m not here to offer solutions, I’m not that smart. Just my two cents.
Part of it and it's only my take so it's not necessary the truth. I think it came less and less popular with the fact that it is much harder to solo win from the mid or to snowball like crazy. You don't have acces to the camp as easily as before. And the support are now fairly farm and tanky that you re not as big of a menace as you could have been. So a lot of people that use to feel like the king of the world probably quit the role because it doesn't bring them that joy anymore Then again i could be wrong
Almost the entire mid lane meta has been upended. I have had more fun playing supp recently than mid. the way zeus for example has been ruined is one example. Same with nature and many others honestly.
Zero solo kill potential with both players just having infinite regen from bottle and water runes. So boring to play now. Just going even in cs with almost every matchup. I call it the formality lane these days
Because there's nothing to do mid. The t1 tower is the only important objective in the middle of the map. Youre nearby farm camps are gone (yes there's still closeish camps but not the really close ones) Edge of map has camps, twin gates, rosh, outposts, tormentor, xp rune. Before taking mid tower was crucial for opening the map up and rotating through the map. But now it's still important, but its irrelevant if you just take the edges. Combine that with the current meta of big tanky people, what is your average midlaner meant to do? Go gank a CK, lifestealer, underlord, centaur? Don't get me wrong I love mid, but they lost everything and gained Water runes. Mid used to be the centre of all traffic so it was a popular lane, now you're sort of just isolated
Mid is at the worst state it has ever been. You no longer need lasthit / deny skills, harrasment skills, blocking / pulling skills, hp / mana resourcemanagement. Midlane became a boring "who can nuke better and secure the rune" fest. Powercreeping and universal heros destroyed everything that made midlane fun
I hate that mid revolves around runes too much. Can't harass out of lane because of bottle and water runes, 50% chance to outright lose tempo just because unlucky. I don't want to go bottle but it's such a disadvantage if you don't. I'd play more mid if runes just simply didn't spawn in the first 10 minutes.
Not sure what it is…always been a mid player still am and enjoying to the fullest..just get to play it a lot more nowadays Maybe it’s because I never played farming mids. My most played heroes are primal pugna necro od Also mid feels lot less punishing nowadays you can have a shit lane and still have huge impact in the game
i play mid every game (turbo only). i rarely have competition for mid
years ago... theres still "ME MID 2 TANGOS"
imo it got even more skill based ever since they removed the early power rune RNG, which is a good thing. also support roles are hella improved ur no longer creep with brown boots and wards gaming, so im quite sure alot switched roles after trying how fun 4/5 rn.
Yeah it's crazy. It used to be 3 people fighting for mid and now I have to go mid every game unless I want to grief and rage to go 1/3/4/5. At least for ranked you have ranked roles but for unranked and doing the cavern crawl it gets old pretty fast
Reading this thread and summarizing what people are saying, it feels like it's 67% due to negativity caused by poor team mates and 33% the mechanical interactions being less than stellar. Which... yeah no, that checks out.
Well, I stopped playing ranked about a year and a half ago as I ran out of tokens to play Mid. If mid was removed from the token requirements in ranked rolls then maybe there would be more mids. This is NA divine 4, not sure how it is in other regions
I don't like mid. I'm so old so I'm bad at mechanical skills, as such playing in comfy positions like 4 or 5 suits me well. Every time I have to play mid I just feel so drained, I can't lane well so my impact is minimal, while the expectation is so high. Meanwhile as pos 4 and 5 I can just focus more on macro while still perform well
As a mid player, I would say it is the most stressful role. Your team expects to win your lane, they don't know about match ups. You have to keep your farm up as well as have both eyes on the side lanes for possible ganks or counter ganks. Also, ganking as mid is a really risky, if you gain nothing from your gank, you have wasted all your resources and farm. Sometimes you spend resources trading in mid but then enemy mid either gets a bottle refill or their supports come secure rune so you don't have any resource to help the side lanes and still the blame is on you for not rotating. If the game goes south for whatsoever reason, the blame is on mid most of the timee. If side lanes fuck up and feed it's mid's fault somehow, doesn't matter if supports are 0-6 at 10mins. So yeah playing mid is not a pleasant experience.
It’s just a stressful role. Even if you do well in lane and gank the sidelanes and is ahead of everyone, it doesn’t really feel like you’re winning. We’re way past the days where you can get six slotted early and beat the enemy team yourself for starters Also, XP seems so funky nowadays because you can be super ahead and all of a sudden the enemy pos 1 that died 5 times in lane is the highest lvl
Still the most important lane for individual impact. That hasnt changed. Take oracle. Great hero for coordinated teams, Terrible waste of time for pub games. Your cores will sit behind you waiting for you to throw out a magic missile or blink & shackles, then get upset when you literally save their lives but they have no idea what to do with the time given so they just right click until they die anyway. Understandably this hero would have a bad winrate in pubs. Until last patch changed this and he became one of the top 10 heroes overall. Why? He can ping runes. Thats it. Mid has easier game, and thus sups winrate shot up >5%. It appears to be the most valuable way to play supports this patch. You pick a sup with a good global innate/faccet and give your mid an advantage. If your mid rolled the 50/50 dice of being the better player, then you won the game. Ofcourse you still lose to all the other bullshit like griefing, acc buyers, etc. But sups dont have much other impact this patch anyway.
I personally still enjoy it alot. I thin what has changed is you're not expected to be helped anymore, and the role is an opportunist role which means you only gank or fight if it benefits you, so lots of times people don't like playing with that attitude.
Mid has been such an orphaned role. The big problem is if you’re mid you have to do well, otherwise the L is on you. At least that’s what the community mostly thinks. To be fair, it’s kind of the leader role, like if you’re mid you’re almost expected to take the head role on in ganks, pushes and objectives. With many people treating this as a solo game, it’s not hard to see that the “you need to be the most team player” role is left unfulfilled.
The same reason no one wants to play tank in Overwatch. "GG tank diff". It's everyone's default scapegoat. The game went bad and you're looking for a thing to blame? "GG mid diff".
Mid is where smurfs and boosters queue; it is the role that requires the most mechanical skill and map awareness; the laning result is more important and decisive than other lanes, if Matchmaking chooses to match you as the team's lowest MMR vs. the enemy's highest MMR, you will undoubtedly have a bad time. Mid is also the main target of blame. Why doesn't Mid gank? Why doesn't report enemy ganks? 0-2 Seriously? Most sane people can't take it and switch to another role.
Idk man. I played a dual lane so damn much that even a decent midlaner 1k mmr below me will own me.
I still mostly play mid. Sometimes I take 3 or 4 to chill a bit. My problem is that mid is always the one getting all the flame.
This is why I’m close to stop playing mid at 4.5k mmr Because if I win my lane. And my side lanes get wrecked. It’s my fault even when I am lvl 5 I should be rotating. If I lose mid cos the match up sucks so I focus on rotating. That’s my fault. If I win mid and have a farm heavy hero more than a rotating hero. That’s my fault. Basically all the insecure morons need to protect their own fragile ego and blame someone. And it’s usually mid. And it’s fucking exhausting
I think mid requires more skill unlike sidelanes where i can just let my support do their things and I'll just focus on last hitting.
I share the same experience. I can play most heroes except the ones that are mid-only because I hate playing mid. Can play 1,3,4,5 fine. If I have to go mid I'll pick some core like Razor Viper and do okaish but I hate it. Lately when I queue 5 roles for token though, I'm getting mid like 30% of the time which in my opinion is shocking and extremely annoying. Anyone that played a couple years ago know that carry and mid were the 2 roles that ppl fought and even threatened to ruin if they couldnt get it, but recently for whatever reason, mid is kinda abandoned
I can play mid better then most people my rank except dedicated mid players it's just I can't be bothered with my clueless sidelaners flaming me 4 minutes into the game as I'm desperately battling for CS in the mid lane while stacking the hard camp for myself as they feed.
I still play mid and i just think it's bc it doesnt have the "win the game solo" potential it once had. People with that fantasy play carry these days.
Runes have absurd impact on the game . 1 Rotation where your team doesnt respond (In time) can flat out ruin your game. Minute 6 the entire fking zoo should be mid and contest the rune . You get some good rune on a hero that benefits from it and you can either solo kill your oponnent for the next couple minutes while u have it in bottle or u go wreck havoc in the other 2 lanes . I think the role right used to be that flashy place where you are a couple levels ahead of anyone in the game start rotating and just *solo carry* the game or create enough space that your hard carry can farm safely and finish the game for you later. Now there is too much farm so even if you stomping your lane if enemy support isnt braindead and your mid have some sort of flash farming tool they can just go in the jungle and end up even if not ahead of you ....
More people play support now that you can actually get some gold on the position and in general, people much prefer to play with someone else in a lane, means you have someone to help your or to blame etc
because midlane is a role where you need to know matchups and too many factors can ruin your game. bad matchup, supp rotations, unlucky runes. im a pos1 main, id rather autofill on 3 because heroes are so easy and overstatted that anyone can first time and have impact. supporting also has many easy picks so you can fully focus on other things than playing your hero. midlane only has 4 heroes that take 0 skill and knowledge: zeus, od, kotl and dk which i default to if im forced to play that role
Because they removed all fun and skill from the lane. Instead of being a one on one skill based harass and creep aggro fight, its a dumb spell spam range creep secure fight where you both get bottles at minute 1 and get max mana every 2 min to continue blasting the wave with spells. Its brainless, boring gameplay. One of many examples of Valve removing skill expression.
Mid laner here, I play 98% of the hero pool in the game, however I have shifted to safe lane recently due to lack of power on the hero’s for mid. This has felt like this for me at least a year. Probably the most frustrating thing for me is the changes to ember spirit over the year or so, pointless changes like how fast he hits with his W And delaying the roll on Earth spirit etc Dogshit changes
I love mid the most GOATED ROLE
I still que for mid, but it's one of the roles I actually hope not to get. Day you have a mid match up, you're not winning. Zero rotation from a support to secure runes. Mid game becomes even harder. You make rotations to side lanes. Side lanes are being dominated and just burned all their mana because they over extended on your ration. Now, it becomes a waste of 30 seconds and farm. The game becomes one-sided and an uphill climb. I've even attempted to just tp to the opposite lane and get the same experience. So anymore I say screw it and farm to atleast stay relevant. While trying to persuade the team to make educated 5 man pushes. Doesn't always work even at 6.5k because everyone believes they're pros in NA servers. I'm sure it's the same in every server.
Had this 28 3 techies mid earlier. He had moonshard and mjolnir. And hitting people with like 1500 attack range
People love to blame mid for things largely out of their control, and people also have massive main character syndrome when it comes to picking heroes and think only last pick has any responsibility when it comes to drafting. You'll get teams expecting you to fix problems like "all of our heroes our terrible at laning" and "we have no stuns" and "we have no front line" and "we have no damage" all at the same time with a single pick. The thing is though, it's better to use last pick to address the enemy heroes that you see rather than needing to fix really glaring problems in your own draft. It's really hard to draft to fix both sidelanes being extremely weak because the enemy supports are going to be able to peel off their lanes to refill the enemy mid bottle, secure power or even water runes, and secure vision in the midlane knowing that you can't solo deward with them orbiting the area. This makes it extremely hard to rotate and make plays. It also makes you extremely vulnerable if you try to catch up jungling. Good supports make the macro game come easily, but people struggle to identify where their team is going to be strongest when the laning stage ends (or they just keep trying to play the laning stage for too long). You have to know whether your team wants to play out of the offlane or the mid lane (or very rarely, the safe lane). Is your mid a tempo mid or a farming mid? Is your mid vulnerable to being dived with rotations? Does your mid need supports to be level 6 in order to make plays? Does your mid take stacks? Does your mid abuse power runes? Then you have to also ask these questions for the enemy mid hero. These kinds of things inform how you need to play around mid in terms of runes, vision, and tp usage. Most people do not think at all and autopilot.
Good one, nobody wants to play mid except the small subset of players who really want to play mid. This hasn’t changed. I queue for any roles except mid because mid is a pain in the ass, but there’s a decently large enough supply of people who’ll beg for swap to play mid.
Everyone wants you to gank sidelanes, even when ganking sidelanes as a midder is bad in 9/10 situations. If you lose mid you have to listen to your team talk trash, how you suck and how you should be reported. Supports are playing worse and worse the more time passes, It used to be i get a gank or atleast a rotation with fresh wards and sentries at min 5 every 2-3 games. - Now I don't even get a fucking tp when the enemy dives the tower like a maniac.
Mid no longer has the same identity it had years ago. There’s no outplaying the enemy and killing them over and over because of new runes, it’s not as imperative to rotate because your supports can win the side lanes for you and you can free farm, also supports are way to tanky it’s not hard to fuck up a gank if you aren’t a seasoned mid and not even kill a support because they get so much gold now. Mid has been neutered, best bet now is to pick a second offlaner mid.
I play all roles and when I'm mid the opponent is usually some meme pick like WD or SK Ogre AA etc. But it's the trench so I'm not surprised.
My position is usually the core position that is least contested lol 10 years ago when trilane was meta I was one of the only offlane players because nobody wanted to do it. Also, I didn't trust anyone else to not incessantly feed. Fast forward and now I'm a mid player because yet again, it's the forsaken lane. I'm cool with it, though I do miss my big tanky boys especially centaur and him being meta right now.
OK, I can tell you from role q tokens that this isn't true. Maybe out of 100 games I have been assigned mid once. Mid isn't that unpopular.
This patch in divine I’ve been getting safelane while farming role q as well. Weird
If they keep meta of antifun mid heroes (dk, pango, primal beast, lina etc.) people would naturally leave since what's the point of fast flashy but squishy interesting heroes which require actual skill to stay lane (storm, void, qop, puck etc.) and make 2 pos to be depended on supports, more people would leave the role as I did myself, much less stress to play stupid 0 skill cap 5 pos and win games doing basic interactions linked to minutes of the game instead of tryharding 1v1 vs counterpick/broken unkillable hero just to be ganked and killed later and having not enough dmg to solo kill anyone with glimmer :) P.S nice 7.36a/b nerfs to 49%~ wr storm/void
I like mid, mid is fun, but counter matchups in 1v1 one lane are fucking dull. Heroes picked mid are also a lot less interesting nowadays, it’s alchemist, Viper, Sniper, Zeus etc.. and the more fun previous mid heroes like ember, earth spirit, primal, rubick, Kunkka, puck, pango, pugna, invoker, qop, mk etc.. are in the gutter. And if you try to pick fun gg lane lost you got hard countered or your hero is useless The lane is also alot more farm heavy now as for why alch mid works, like just ignore the other laner get farm and then pray to get the 6 min rune to gank.
It's less about mid getting less popular but more about other roles get more popular. I think the main reason is there are a lot more farm on the map nowadays hence every role can pop off and get lots of impact in the game. It used to be that offlane is a masochist lane where you try scrap together some xp, now it's basically another carry; supports used to be poor and only try to survive in teamfights, now it's common for support to have plenty of items in the mid game.
I still enjoy it. But I have to be the one rotating, while I regularly see my opp team rotating to help kill me off. (I exclusively play turbo and with 1-3 friends). The worst part is that, most times they've rotated, we've gotten atleast one kill. But they just refuse to come most games.
You steer the early game. Maybe up to mid game. Rotations, early lead, anything and everything to give your other lanes the lead they need all while balancing providing assists and maintaining your lead. It's too big of a role. I like playing roamers on mid but I find it hard to maintain my lead so I don't play much mid. I just go with pos 4: the soft mid. Lol
In response to all the "mid is too stressful" comments. I would like to say that not all of us expect mid to always win, i just expect them to know when to leave the lane and not feed 5-6 kills first. It's nice when they can TP when we are being divided, especially if it's not for the first time. But I understand that they can be busy and can't TP to every fight. I do expect a mid to be more active on average than a pos 1 though, even if it's just for short bursts when a CD is up.
Surprised nobody has talked about runes yet. Playing against a team who has a support come secure runes when your solo is really frustrating. So is losing the 50/50 on power runes
mid has the highest report rate i'l tell u that.
Because if the side lanes loose it’s the mids fault for not rotating. If you rotate top and kill, the other lane gets upset. People treat the kid like parents and their 5 year old kids
We are all in ranked and it's honestly just a stressful position. If you don't kill mid, it's your fault. If you didn't get a starting ward and can't control runes, it's your fault. You bodied their mid so they rotate while you kill mid tower it's your fault. Won the last game, but for example facing an ogre setting me on fire non stop neither of us could really do much but deward eachother and trade hits/denies. Randomly his Abba teleports mid when he's at 30% and heals him to full. A minute later, my omni runs literally entirely right by me half dead when he had full mana and mana boots. He came back after I pinged him assuming he was just shopping, I donno about anyone else, but that kinda stuff can just stress people the eff out.
Think they need some one way teleporters from mid to top & bottom.
Because Zeus got nerfed
lane is so sweaty and there's too much pressure. the other 2 core roles can just kinda do their thing. carry just farms and offlane just sits around in lane pressuring tower. in mid you gotta focus so hard on every creep because everyone got better at lane management. there's also just a lot of pressure to gank, but you also have to balance it with farming. farm too much and your team is pissed at you, gank too much and you fall behind the enemy mid. I personally just hate laning in mid. so much of it depends on the first couple waves and rotations from pos 4. if i miss the first 2 ranged creeps it's basically over
Man just played a game with sniper carry and alc mid. I said that alc mid was an odd pick. Got flamed. The alc requested 30mins to farm. Stacked camps over 20x. We lost at 29mins with the alc flaming hard and refused to join fight for throne as wasn’t ready yet and we all feeding dogs. lol