Three Dota 2 support plays to screw over the enemy carry

Don’t trust your safelaner to carry the game? Give him a boost by turning the enemy carry’s game into a nightmare.

Both support roles have an interesting relationship with the carry position. The hard support wants to keep their safelaner nice and safe in the early game. The soft support wants to mess with the enemy’s carry as much as possible. It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of a farmed enemy carry, but supports can still do a lot to slow down the enemy team’s farm.

Here are three ways for supports to dunk on the enemy carry all throughout the game.

Cut creeps to deny waves

Denying creeps waves is a major part of Dota 2’s laning stage, but one technique pushes that idea to its logical extreme. Next time you play support in a tough off lane, try sneaking behind the enemy tier one and pulling the creeps around behind your own tower.

When it meets with your creep wave, the two groups will battle it out. Your off-laner can safely last hit while the enemy carry watches his creep score go down the drain.

Moving the creep clash between your towers effectively denies an entire wave from the enemy carry. If the enemy lane does try to contest, they’ll become sitting ducks for TP Scroll rotations. This means that the enemy lane misses a full waves’ worth of gold and experience.

Even if you die in the process, it will push the creep equilibrium in your position three’s favor. If you’re particularly daring, you can even loop back around and pull two enemy creep waves at the same time.

Smoke warding the enemy jungle

Is the enemy Sven carving through his jungle every minute? Rev up Smoke of Deceit, grab a few sentry wards, and get ready to go where few supports have gone before.

In Dota 2, creeps are unable to spawn in jungle camps with a ward inside them. By placing sentries in enemy jungle camps, you can effectively remove those neutrals from the game. Characters affected by Smoke of Deceit don’t appear on the enemy minimap. The enemy won’t even realize their camps are blocked until it’s too late.

Let’s look at smoke blocks from a pure numbers perspective. A Smoke and five sentries costs 300 gold. Let’s also assume the worst-case scenario where you die in the process. You’re down 400 gold and two minutes of your time. The enemy team is now down at least five jungle camp spawns.

Assuming your wards last two minutes, that’s an average of 920 gold denied to the enemy. That number quickly grows if they don’t clear them out immediately. At best, the enemy team must spend 250 gold and a lot of time to clean up the jungle. Meanwhile, your own carry can take dangerous farm because the enemy supports are stuck on their side of the river.

Keeping enemy lanes pushed

One simple way to mess up the enemy carry’s farm is to simply shove waves as fast as you can. A carry’s goal is to amass as much experience and gold as possible before joining their team around the map. The most efficient way to do that is to jump between the lane and the jungle. That’s easy to do in the laning phase, but once the mid game opens up, farming patterns become much more complex. A big creep wave can quickly threaten a tower if left unchecked.

When the creeps come knocking, the carry is forced to make the difficult decision of letting his tower take damage or abandoning his farming pattern to deal with it. By moving the creep wave forward, you’re also gaining valuable map control. The carry has a much harder time farming the enemy jungle when creeps are knocking on his tier-two towers. Almost every support can push waves, but Winter Wyvern, Treant Protector, and Jakiro are the best at doing so safely.