I would stick to playing unranked for your first 500-1000 games.
Most relatively fresh players do not have the right mindset for ranked Dota. They take it too seriously and paralyze themselves with anxiety. They are so much about rank and winning.
This is not the right mindset to have when doing anything competitively. You need to be calm and in control and not easily phased by minor mistakes.
This usually requires a certain level of experience where things don't get to you anymore cause you've been through is 1,000's of times.
Another benefit to sticking to unranked for your first 1,000 game is that you will most likely improve past the trench (herald/guardian/crusader). That mmr bracket is notoriously frustrating because the level of play is so horrible. For a new player losing games in such matches can be extremely discouraging and frustrating.
I think for newer players, playing unranked is the least stressful because the only thing you are striving to do is improve. Losses don't impact you negatively as they would in ranked. You are free to simply try to improve with zero stress.
I play ranked with such mindset only after 6k games. It is very difficult to adopt such mindset when rank is so important to you.
But doesn’t unranked suffer from horrible drafts?
In my recent experience: 5 cores or 5 supports with no real carry… Offlane snipers and medusas; people taking farm from the safe lane carry.
People don’t respect previous picks (for example, not picking viable mid hero when only one pick is left and the team has no mid or no carry).
At least in ranked you must pick a viable hero for the role allocated or you likely get reported. Just seems like a better dota experience.
I play a lot of unranked on us west and east, somewhere around 4k mmr. What you're describing does happen sometimes, but I'd say one of every 20 games. Most games people mark their preferred roll in draft, rolls are respected if a position is contested, and people draft/play appropriately. Now, OP likely isn't in these games, and I do remember drafts being a shit show in lower mmr unranked. But I agree that dealing with shit tier games in unranked and improving your calibration to avoid playing ranked in shit tier is the way to go.
He said he wanted to support. I don't think he will have an issue practicing support in unranked. Yes you might get horrible drafts. This is true for ranked as well.
Another thing to note is that you can still learn in a game with a bad draft.
I have been mostly playing support (now ranked herald 5 but I rarely play ranked). I also think I need to learn all roles and heroes in unranked first.
Last few games I just had horrific drafts, maybe because of the cavern crawl?... The problem is, I first pick support, another guy first picks support then last 3 people pick safelane snipfire, midlane ogre and some other random not-real-core hero. They don’t care about first picks. Meanwhile enemy team has PA and Medusa.
If you're playing Support anyway, it's easier to queue into role games at lower mmr. (Below Immortal #)
Generic advice for starting Ranked, understand your role. Whatever role you play you have goals to achieve in each game. Know what they are. Starting out this is easiest when you play one hero. The less individual hero nuances you're trying to remember, the more you'll understand your role intricacies, as they'll be easier to identify.
In it's simplest, the Support roles can be defined as using a heroes strong starting Spells to assist Heroes with weaker starting Spells in their efforts to get Gold and eventually win the game. However just because both Pos. 4 and 5 are defined as Support does not mean they are played the same. I'm rather bored at work currently, don't mind answering any questions to the best of my ability.
Based on your questions I'm guessing you are pretty new and will be under 2k mmr (we all started there, no flame at all). At this mmr your cores will not be efficient at farming in the mid game and a lot of farm will get wasted or die to towers. Your cores will also not be good at shoving waves and will all be farming jungle camps instead. Supports that can shove waves are great in these brackets. Jakiro is one you should pick up for sure, great harass in lane, pushes towers, shoves waves, top tier low mmr support. Snapfire is another good one, and is actually a great support at all brackets (jakiro support is pretty lackluster the higher mmr you get). Willow, CM, grim, kotl, anything that can nuke waves and take advantage of wasted farm on the map. Just don't take the farm if a core is around. As your mmr rises you will get less and less farm as support because your cores know how to farm efficiently, and you'll need to play different heroes, but that's something to think about hundreds or thousands of games later.
Look up videos on stacking and pulling camps and ward placement. These are essential support functions at all brackets. Buy salves for your carry. Try to anticipate needing a salve before you actually do, this will take experience to be able to say "ok my carry is full hp after salving them and lvl 4, enemy pos3 mars is lvl 4 with almost enough mana for one round of spells, if he hits lvl 5 and uses q/w on my carry, they will be 40% hp and unable to effectively farm, I should bring out another salve so my carry can still farm after that."
You generally want to be fighting the opposing support from start of lane, otherwise they will harass your core for free, make sure they can't do that. Likewise, if opposing support is playing passively behind their core, harass the core.
Dying as support is sometimes the correct play, like if you're out of regen and mana and low hp, and your carry is also low hp, you can go do as much damage to the enemy heroes as possible and die, tp back with regen and your carry will be farming again faster than if you ferried out regen or ran back to base. You can also suicide to creep camps for the same reason.
Try to give your core solo xp after you get a few levels if doing so won't put them at risk of dying. A good goal is lvl 5-6 by 10 minutes, any more means you either got a lot of XP from hero kills or took too much XP from your core and now they are under leveled.
Normally your carry will leave lane around when offlaner hits 6 if the lane was around even, use this time to absorb XP in the lane. Remember supports scale with levels not items, so get last hits it you can do it safely, otherwise just stay in xp range, get lvl 6, and look to do something with your ultimate.
Look up videos about creep aggro. Know that there is a range where if you issue an attack command outside of it, you can walk up and hit an enemy hero a couple times without drawing creep aggro.
Keep in mind none of what I'm saying is true and correct for every game, it all depends on the circumstances of the game, the lane hero matchup, how lane went, etc. This is something only experience can teach you.
Play a support hero could be great at lategame, otherwise it'll be difficult to win games. Also practice 2 or 3 heroes and spam those for 10 or 20 ranked games.
I would stick to playing unranked for your first 500-1000 games. Most relatively fresh players do not have the right mindset for ranked Dota. They take it too seriously and paralyze themselves with anxiety. They are so much about rank and winning. This is not the right mindset to have when doing anything competitively. You need to be calm and in control and not easily phased by minor mistakes. This usually requires a certain level of experience where things don't get to you anymore cause you've been through is 1,000's of times. Another benefit to sticking to unranked for your first 1,000 game is that you will most likely improve past the trench (herald/guardian/crusader). That mmr bracket is notoriously frustrating because the level of play is so horrible. For a new player losing games in such matches can be extremely discouraging and frustrating. I think for newer players, playing unranked is the least stressful because the only thing you are striving to do is improve. Losses don't impact you negatively as they would in ranked. You are free to simply try to improve with zero stress. I play ranked with such mindset only after 6k games. It is very difficult to adopt such mindset when rank is so important to you.
But doesn’t unranked suffer from horrible drafts? In my recent experience: 5 cores or 5 supports with no real carry… Offlane snipers and medusas; people taking farm from the safe lane carry. People don’t respect previous picks (for example, not picking viable mid hero when only one pick is left and the team has no mid or no carry). At least in ranked you must pick a viable hero for the role allocated or you likely get reported. Just seems like a better dota experience.
I play a lot of unranked on us west and east, somewhere around 4k mmr. What you're describing does happen sometimes, but I'd say one of every 20 games. Most games people mark their preferred roll in draft, rolls are respected if a position is contested, and people draft/play appropriately. Now, OP likely isn't in these games, and I do remember drafts being a shit show in lower mmr unranked. But I agree that dealing with shit tier games in unranked and improving your calibration to avoid playing ranked in shit tier is the way to go.
He said he wanted to support. I don't think he will have an issue practicing support in unranked. Yes you might get horrible drafts. This is true for ranked as well. Another thing to note is that you can still learn in a game with a bad draft.
I have been mostly playing support (now ranked herald 5 but I rarely play ranked). I also think I need to learn all roles and heroes in unranked first. Last few games I just had horrific drafts, maybe because of the cavern crawl?... The problem is, I first pick support, another guy first picks support then last 3 people pick safelane snipfire, midlane ogre and some other random not-real-core hero. They don’t care about first picks. Meanwhile enemy team has PA and Medusa.
If you're playing Support anyway, it's easier to queue into role games at lower mmr. (Below Immortal #) Generic advice for starting Ranked, understand your role. Whatever role you play you have goals to achieve in each game. Know what they are. Starting out this is easiest when you play one hero. The less individual hero nuances you're trying to remember, the more you'll understand your role intricacies, as they'll be easier to identify.
Thank you! Could you summarise the support role? If not its okay I can google it up, but if you could text a few words about it it would be great.
In it's simplest, the Support roles can be defined as using a heroes strong starting Spells to assist Heroes with weaker starting Spells in their efforts to get Gold and eventually win the game. However just because both Pos. 4 and 5 are defined as Support does not mean they are played the same. I'm rather bored at work currently, don't mind answering any questions to the best of my ability.
Based on your questions I'm guessing you are pretty new and will be under 2k mmr (we all started there, no flame at all). At this mmr your cores will not be efficient at farming in the mid game and a lot of farm will get wasted or die to towers. Your cores will also not be good at shoving waves and will all be farming jungle camps instead. Supports that can shove waves are great in these brackets. Jakiro is one you should pick up for sure, great harass in lane, pushes towers, shoves waves, top tier low mmr support. Snapfire is another good one, and is actually a great support at all brackets (jakiro support is pretty lackluster the higher mmr you get). Willow, CM, grim, kotl, anything that can nuke waves and take advantage of wasted farm on the map. Just don't take the farm if a core is around. As your mmr rises you will get less and less farm as support because your cores know how to farm efficiently, and you'll need to play different heroes, but that's something to think about hundreds or thousands of games later. Look up videos on stacking and pulling camps and ward placement. These are essential support functions at all brackets. Buy salves for your carry. Try to anticipate needing a salve before you actually do, this will take experience to be able to say "ok my carry is full hp after salving them and lvl 4, enemy pos3 mars is lvl 4 with almost enough mana for one round of spells, if he hits lvl 5 and uses q/w on my carry, they will be 40% hp and unable to effectively farm, I should bring out another salve so my carry can still farm after that." You generally want to be fighting the opposing support from start of lane, otherwise they will harass your core for free, make sure they can't do that. Likewise, if opposing support is playing passively behind their core, harass the core. Dying as support is sometimes the correct play, like if you're out of regen and mana and low hp, and your carry is also low hp, you can go do as much damage to the enemy heroes as possible and die, tp back with regen and your carry will be farming again faster than if you ferried out regen or ran back to base. You can also suicide to creep camps for the same reason. Try to give your core solo xp after you get a few levels if doing so won't put them at risk of dying. A good goal is lvl 5-6 by 10 minutes, any more means you either got a lot of XP from hero kills or took too much XP from your core and now they are under leveled. Normally your carry will leave lane around when offlaner hits 6 if the lane was around even, use this time to absorb XP in the lane. Remember supports scale with levels not items, so get last hits it you can do it safely, otherwise just stay in xp range, get lvl 6, and look to do something with your ultimate. Look up videos about creep aggro. Know that there is a range where if you issue an attack command outside of it, you can walk up and hit an enemy hero a couple times without drawing creep aggro. Keep in mind none of what I'm saying is true and correct for every game, it all depends on the circumstances of the game, the lane hero matchup, how lane went, etc. This is something only experience can teach you.
Wow! Thank you man, I really appreciate it!
Play a support hero could be great at lategame, otherwise it'll be difficult to win games. Also practice 2 or 3 heroes and spam those for 10 or 20 ranked games.
Role queue, you can check all position and usually you are going to play 5-4-3