General DiscussionWhich is harder? Being a good support or good carry

support for sure.

for me, ofc.

Generally, playing a good support is somewhat harder, but it's not as game changing to play a bad support than to play a bad carry.

its same shit actually. complexity of dota isnt about the role you play

harder to support, you have more duties than just hitting creeps

rune control
jungle stacking
PROPER ward placement (yes, this means stop warding the rivers every fucking time pls)
rotations
detection

supports are harder, they are squishy and poor throughout the whole game, they have to do multitasks all the time, like checking other lanes to prevent ganks, babysit their carry, gank so the enemy team has no space to get fat, place wards correctly according to the situtation's demand.

carries generally have to be good mechanics for last hit, the capability of getting farm even when contested or denied, and a good decision making to know when to teleport and join a fight or just keep farming

but its like in football dood, think of carries as the trikers and supports as the goalkeeper.. when it comes to impact, strikers generally have a higher impact in games... but honestly, if you ask me if i'd prefer to have the best supp in the world or the best carry in my team, i'd go for the supp no doubt

I do agree with support being harder to play. Just going to list the challenges of playing carry I see at my level:

Being able to change the game with a single spell in a right/wrong area.
Focusing the wrong hero will screw your team over
Defending your supports while killing the enemy supports
Item choice
Last hits
When to tp
Being able to sense a gank
Being able to farm ancients/jungle when lane is too dangerous to farm

its harder to carry obv, support just wards and stacks and uses some spells to gank sometimes, carry get caught = gg

^

dk if troll or just stupid.

A support is definitely harder but as Zano said, even if you play a bad support, you won't affect the game as much as a bad carry.

+1 Zano/Wizard

Support is harder. You dont get farm for your items, so basic items take you a lot longer. You have to buy items that dont help your stats like Wards, smoke, dust. You get most of the blame if a carry sucks. Supports you have about a 3-1 chance of getting blame rather than praise. Carry does something stupid blame the supports. Id much rather be a carry and get all the gold and items I need to mess things up

Depends what kind of hero it is.
Chen/earth spirit as support is harder than carry WK and sven, visage and enigma can be included but not as hard as chen/EarthSpirit

If you count all the heroes that are hard to play, most of them are carry i.e. Invoker, Meepo, Tinker, Ember, Morphling
And since most of the support require less skill to play, I prefer to say carry is much harder in general.

P.S.
At higher MMR some hero could be much harder than in lower MMR, take Keeper of the light for example, to be the best keeper of the light you need:
1. Crazy map awareness because if you have the highest map awareness skill in the team you can save your hopeless carry from gank
2. KOTL can't also throw his life away in the mid of battle or getting caught in the gank because He is one of the best anti push/push hero
in the team. So you have to jiggle your decision a bit unlike other support and try a bit harder to survive.
3. Successfully land a good illuminate you need to choose a very good positioning to make sure they don't know you are casting it.
4. Picking the best hero to cast mana leak to is require more hero knowledge skill rather than simple nuke that most support has.

i think the hardest part abt support in solo mmr is - u are playing with strangers, often for the first time
he is aggressive? tactical? does he prefer to show himself and farm in lane or hide in the jungle to not give himself away to the other side

Proper warding, gank, babysitting and positioning all this can be learned with time but you have at most 10 minutes before things go crazy in games
thats the hardest thing for me when it comes to support - good communication

Carry wise, i think the most important thing is reaction time.
The carry has the most impact per click so his reaction and thought process has to be the fastest
You can learn what item build will counter who, who to aim first and how to scold your support for feeding
Build improving your motor skills, thats tough

both is hard on their own way.

@Hearts
Compare it to rubick? you have to watch all of the hero that casting spell and steal it before they cast another spell,
so you basically had to have more reaction time than most of the player in the game

Ancient apparation whos the ulti need delay to arrived into teamfight need reaction time. Because it's easy to just watch a teamfight and click on it rather than predicting where willl the teamfight will be.

Chen, look how slow the creep walk is, If you have slow reaction time, your creep won't be able to cast the skill on the right spot and also choosing when to send your carry back to base safely.

Most important skill for carry to have is to
1. Survive since most of them need those to avoid losing gold/exp, if you could buy your very expensive item before you died it is
good, but if you died and losing 800 gold everytime, the hard work that has been done by support is useless. So this is the most
important skill to have
2. Last hitting skill, because the more last hit you get the more efficient a carry is and reduce the time for the support to babysit him

Most of hero that require reflex is support/ganker intelligence hero or any hero that require to use shift queue to make sure they land their nuke at the right spot, like tinker, storm spirit or meepo and magnus.

Depends, being a carry with shit supports is harder than being a support with a shitty carry

Being a support with shitty carry doesnt set yourself back
But being a carry with a shitty support that feeds,etc your life gets hard fast

I don't know which one is hardest, but I've been thinking that there are a couple of positions that are much, much easier to improve at.

I'd rank them thusly:

1. Mid
2. Carry
3. Solo offlaner
4. 4th/5th position support

My reasoning is, that it's much easier to practice mid, given that it'll almost always be within most of the parameters the competetive games, in that in both pubs and competetive matches from low to high MMR, it'll be 1v1.

My reasoning for carry is that it's primarily about cs'ing, map awareness and knowing when to stay close to/tp to fights or possible fights. All things you can practice even if you get stuck in shit lanes - being spectre 1v2 or 1v3 can teach you something even if it's not something you're likely to see among competent players.

Solo offlane being ranked 3rd primarily has to do with the fact that it can be bloody hard convincing anyone to leave you with a solo offlane in some matches, and sometimes it's just not viable given the lineup (especially in a heavy random situation). That and the fact that it can be difficult to get experience against killer trilanes, because you'll often find yourself up against a dual lane or a soft-core tri, which means it can be hard to improve on some of the essential skills of the solo offlaner such as transitioning from a difficult laning stage.

Support being last is mainly because I consider communication between supports to be really important, and that's just something that's a total coinflip in pubs - not to mention that you are possibly the only support, or maybe you are dual laning making ganks mid difficult. Supports should be smoke ganking, scouting things out, stacking when the lane is safe, zoning out shit etc. These are not more difficult to do than anything the other roles have to learn, but they can be more difficult to improve upon without proper communication.

EDIT: It's also easier to hide behind your team mates as a support when it goes to shit. Sometimes you'll see the supports blamed, but unless they megafed you'll often see the team blame the carry and the mid. That potentially means less pressure to recognize your own mistakes.

"map awareness and knowing when to stay close to/tp to fights or possible fights"
It applies to all role. Even if I play support it doesn't mean I have to always get into the fight even though I am alone,
on the contrary support and ganker mid/support need more awareness than carry.
Unless if I'm someone like carry spectre/nature prophet who can teleport anytime they want to contribute a good teamfight.
Some really hard carry should just stay in their lane, farm and push tower to distract the opponent.
A hard carry who constantly tp ing into teamfight is bad hard carry and should play ganker role instead or a carry that is flexible like luna.

Knowing which hero is missing and when to back up and stay at tower is like the most basic map awareness that every role should have (even babysitter support should too) and every lane usually call someone is missing.

If they don't back to tower after other lane call missing and died because of it, The player should go back playing with bot instead because it's impossible to play with someone like that because I know that the person is assuming players is passive bots who never gank or just muting everyone and troll the game

@Cat | Wizard

so are you going to try to make an argument or we'll just take your word for it? fucking retard go be shit somewhere else

they're both hard, a carry just has a higher impact so the repercussions of failing are worse

I play supports mostly, and for me it is harder to play carry. I was always impressed by good carry players, they can farm really fast and buy all the right items depending on what heroes we have in both teams. I think it is harder.

P.S. People blame me more often when I play carry... =(

being a good carry is obviously harder if ur terrible at support u can still compensate by being the ward bitch

the thing is, both the roles, carry as well as support are difficult in their own way.

The supports are babysitters(duh) and more or less control the early game, ganking with other heroes who are not carries, warding, dewarding, pulling, stacking,calling big purchases made by the enemy team(BkB,Smoke,Sentry) yada yada yada while protecting their own carry.

The carry, on the other side is concerned with taking last hits while protecting him/herself from being ganked. The most important part of being a carry, which most people miss out, is the assesment of the enemy team. A good carry player has to have the right judgement about the playstyle of his opponent atleast by 20 mins into the game. Does he play aggressively? does he play defensively? Are the enemy carries good farmers? or just plain farmers (pun intended)?Do they carry Tp scrolls (pushing opportunity)? Do they carry dusts?Smokes?What are their rotation routes?I know you might say,"that's the supports job right?you just said that" but these things DIRECTLY affect the carry.He is the one who is going to get ganked, out laned, harrased,etc,etc .

The second thing is Judgement.You dont want your Luna to dance around in twilight all alone do you? or your void to chronosphere nobody.You dont want your carry to dive into battle when it is already a lost cause. You want your carry to run away when he knows that nothing will happen if he goes into battle, other than him dying. You secretly want your carry to be a Douche! you want him to farm a 5 min midas into a 16 min radiance.you really do.

People seem to be stupid ofcourse the support role is the hardest not only because of positioning and the responsibillitys+ the fact you get no farm. But then again it simply depends on the sittuation for a new player its easyer to play support for a decent player that know how to lasthit its much simpler to play carry it sort of bounces back and forth depending on the skilllevel of your match. But i would definently say the hardest role is the solo mid role and the most game deciding aswell.

To put it simple with good support you can suck ass and still carry (Loda for instance or Dima) with bad support you can be XBOCT or Burning and still lose.

rofl this guy is retarded

every single role played properly is equally hard

hardest would be 4 with heroes like chen and so or 3 with furion (doing proper stacking with treants while scouting /etc)

I would just say that - it's easier to be a poor carry then a poor support. You can still kill someone alone as a carry, but it's way harder to do it as a support, cause you need to cooperate with your teammates. Supports are glue that hold the team together and are difficult to play really good. While carries are mostly focused on last hitting, supports have to create space, provide vision for the team, gank their midlaner/carry, etc. And if you're just a bit out of position, you can die very easily, which can lead to feeding their heroes and let them snowball.

Yes, it's a hard game to be a good support, but it's rewarding and can be a lot of fun if you know what you're doing.