Study

Every team needs a good support, a sacrificial lamb to protect the more important heroes and their wallets. Their abilities don’t necessarily have to all be heals, but should be effective without powerful, expensive items. This leaves heroes playing the support role in a position to buy important items that benefit the whole team.

Crystal Maiden is a frosty sorceress who can command ice to damage and slow her foes. Beloved for her ability to root her enemies and give continuous mana regeneration to her team from the global Brilliance Aura, it’s difficult to go wrong with a Crystal Maiden pick.

Crystal Nova is a relatively big area of effect spell that damages and slows any enemy unlucky enough to be caught within it. It has has the added effect of slowing their attack speed, making scary enemy right-clickers a little less, well, scary. 

Frostbite on the other hand is a single target root. It freezes the target in place, preventing them from moving or attacking, while also dealing damage over time. Not even teleports will save heroes from its icy grasp.

Her ultimate is a challenge to get right. Freezing Field is a huge AoE around her that does massive damage for a long period, but must be channelled and is cancelled if interrupted. It also slows all enemies trapped within. It can turn fights, create easy rampage-kills and even slow advancing enemies - you just have to nail the positioning for a big payoff.

Omniknight is a holy human paladin, sworn to protect the weak and smite evil. He’s hard to kill, and can extend that strength to his entire team. What you might call a traditional support, he has healing and protection abilities that directly buff his allies. 

The Purification spell allows him to heal his allies quite regularly, and also damages enemies if they’re near the target. This is good for killing creep waves but also means heavy damage to enemy melee heroes surrounding your allies and nets you a nice two-for-one effect if used at the right times.

His Repel ability is the most interesting one in his repertoire, making either yourself, an ally or even an enemy magic immune. Casting this with precise timing can save your allies life in situations where you can anticipate huge damage. Sneakier uses can prevent enemies receiving heals at a critical moment, but make sure nobody on your team was planning to throw out a disable at that point.

If that wasn’t enough, his Guardian Angel ultimate makes all nearby allies immune to physical damage for a short time. His Degen Aura slows enemy movement speeds meaning they can’t escape this invulnerable deathball. It’s not quite as overpowered as it may sound, since Magic and spell damage play such a huge part in how Dota fights go down, but it is a deadly battle-turner and very effective against certain attack-focused heroes.

An undead necromancer with little respect for his creep-friends, Lich is capable of putting out some heavy damage. While his actual support abilities are fairly weak, his utility to a team cannot be underestimated.

This mostly comes from Sacrifice, which allows him to kill a friendly creep, turning it into mana for him and experience for any team-mates nearby. That might not sound like a big deal, but along with meaning he can stay in lane for as long as his health pool lasts, it means Lich is denying experience to his opponents automatically and granting it to allies instead. That’s a huge swing early in the game.

On top of that he has a Frost Blast nuke, a small AoE around a designated target which does reasonable damage and slows. It doesn’t have great killing potential but will allow more deadly allies to close. Meanwhile you can keep them healthy with the Ice Armor ability, granting (surprise) additional armour and a slow effect to any attackers.

His ultimate, Chain Frost, is a team-fight all-star. A high damage nuke that then bounces to a nearby target, if cast on two heroes that can’t quickly move apart it will ricochet between them doing incredible work on their health-bar. Nicely for new players it’s generally effective no matter where it’s thrown out, but good timing will help a lot.