Really makes you 🤔

I feel support is more enjoyable to be honest. Cheaper obs and sents you can stack, cheaper courier, free upgrade (used to cost you a boots of speed), etc etc. It does create a better QoL than the boots + wand they used to be

However, on the other hand I do agree that there should be better alternatives to GPM XPM talent just like they manage to find better alt to reduce respawn time. What is it, unfortunately, I don’t know yet. They’re not broken, just can be better

I'd go out a limb and say that most of inflation in average GPM and XPM is due to improvements in the economy of supports. Years ago it was pretty normal for a pos 5 to be around level 4 past the 10 minute mark and have only brown boots and a wand to their name 25 minutes into the game. Nowadays either generally means your game is going pretty badly.

Most of the changes in economy seem to me a part of the program to incentivize players in pubs to actually play support roles. Tons of quality of life improvements, lower gap between cores and supports in terms of farm, wider array of support items all contribute to that.

Naturally, cores are also affected by stuff like bounty runes and killstreak gold, but to a much lesser extent, I think.

Weren’t there bounty runes before 7.00? Pretty sure there were

Maybe other thing that differ from the past, now bounty rune affect all team member. This will inflate the overall gpm and improve support's economy

@ETdAWESOME Probably team bounty rune to prevent the 0:00 incident.

I used to play core back in the days before forced to adapt (and eventually love) playing support. It's like parenting. Back in the days, our parent suffer from declining economy but nowadays it was easier (but that doesn't mean supporting/parenting is easy).

#ETdAWESOME there were, but not in the four new spots (and later becoming team rune)

Yeah but the way Canuck says it is confusing, makes it seem as if bounty runes were introduced in 7.00 itself.

Very good article!

This is a great article with a really in depth look at the current game state. But I have to say, there are a few holes that I think should be addressed. As a support player, I think our scaling tools have been increased almost as much as carries. The "team Bountys" effect a support significantly more than it does a carry, we now get gold for stacked camps taken as well as the XP we already got, denies now give money which means when we pull in lane we gain even more side gold while in lane. While this doesn't sound like a lot, before 7.00 we were relying solely on tick gold, kills, and the occasional creep in the jungle.

I completely agree that the game has accelerated in terms of GPM and XPM. I just don't think supports are in this slump. I would argue that even without GPM/XPM talents, talents have created an environment for supports where they can hit significant power spikes more often than just big items (which are inherently hard for supports to acquire). I feel that the early game acceleration of supports in the current meta has led to a game where the 3,4,5 roles can thrive all the way up to 30 min. Rotating around runes and buying cheaper wards to make space and kill enemy cores.

Honestly, I sometimes even wish the game could slow down a bit. I think support was harder when laning was more meticulous and focused on maximum core efficiency. Those are just my thoughts.

Very interested and well-thought article. It's clear that you've developed these thoughts a while and have nice stats to back it up. I don't know what the devs can do to slow cores down and keep supports competitive with them, but now this'll be on my radar in patches to come. I'm interested to see how this question is played out.

@ETdAWESOME Calling me out. For some reason I thought bounties were introduced in 7.00. I guess it was just the change to the team bounties that had me confused. Bounties before that were kinda just a consolation prize to the midlaner that guessed wrong on the action rune though, so they hardly affected anything before that. :D

Really great article, very interesting perspective. As someone who's played very little DOTA in general, and only for the past few years, this was an interesting read for me. I don't know what DOTA was like pre-7.00, and this put it in perspective a little.

@pnapls One of my long-standing ideas for a passion project, would be to use the custom game tools to create a "Dota Time Machine" mod that allowed players to go back and play on any patch in history. Just use the changelog data from the Dota wiki, and go back one patch at a time reverting all changes and try to recapture previous metas. It's probably a ton of work for very little payoff, especially in patches where the map or items changed, but I think preserving that history is important. My girlfriend just got into Dota in the last two years, and every once in a while I think about the fact that she has never once experienced a cliff-jungling prophet, or a bottle-crowing mid magnus, or iron talons and it really strikes me.

Kudos! A great read, with minor mistakes, that doesn't overly extrapolate.

Been working on drafts that implement these factors since before TI9 -- stacking is more important than ever -- very few teams capitalize on this correctly.

Currently, the best course of action is the support staying away and taking the least possible amount of XP from the core, all while, harassing, securing ranged creeps and stacking if possible ; which allows the support to get the instant benefit of the gold from stacks and the XP from the lane once the core rotates out to clear the stacks.

This means the drafts need to focus around heroes who can:

#1 easily clear stacks or help achieve that
#2 easily stack camps without moving too much or stack multiple camps at once

Magnus is a prime example of how the game has changed.
He has been considered a p2-3 since the DotA days, but now he's p4 even p5 for exactly that reason.
Its a terrible idea since he brings literally nothing to the table except empower and needs to stick like glue to a core to provide it.
He's much better off as a real p1 that is self-sufficient ; he clears camps extremely fast, provides that benefit to any other melee core and doesn't want to be the main initiator anyways.
This also means he can solo RP the important targets -- honestly great against those filthy Brood/Lycan/Visage pickers.

KingeY

somebody explain the screenshot to me

Jungling is something many will miss, whenever I think about old dota, that iron talon was the game for both supports and cores. Now, the focus is the laning, so many skills were being adjusted to make laning easier for both supports and cores. Roaming is not as common as before, so you are kind of imprisoned in your own lane until the 5 min mark where you are forced to contest for the rune. I suggest valve bring back jungling and that will bring back more old players. Currently, I feel that options are dwindling, even with those talents, there is really nothing to choose from.

Patch suggestion:

a) backpack renamed utility belt; can only contain tangos, shared tangos, mangoes, clarities, salves, dust, smoke, wards, and TP
b) TP no longer has its own slot
b) TP and BoTs back to sharing cooldown, but CD is 10s lower if it was BoTs that were used (i.e., BoTs 10s CD less than TP).

I also had an idea similar to the guy above except keep the backpack and dedicated scroll slot but include one or two more side slots for utility items like wards, smokes but also blink daggers (basically items that give no stat benefits)

Lol "skills not being changed" meanwhile heroes are literally getting their skills combined and adding a brand new skill into the slot