Support Heroes in Need of Buffs

The current support gameplay is exceptionally rewarding. The impact both position four and five supports can have on the game extends far beyond the laning stage and far beyond simple saves and disables. There are some supports, however, who really don’t fit into the current meta and could really use a buff or two.

Underpowered Supports

The reason we are grouping these three together is quite simple. They are very much playable in the core positions, but they are exceptionally underpowered as supports. We would love to see them return to the viable support pool.

Being Universal makes them excellent at dealing damage in the later portions of the game. Almost every single Universal hero gets to be a right-clicking core if built correctly and both Dazzle, Snapfire and Wyvern are no exception.

The problem is, they received some heavy nerfs to their starting attributes and attribute growth. They now have less HP and Armor, as well as less Mana to work with, which is critical for support heroes. The added benefit of extra attack damage is lost on them, so the end result is they are strictly worse off.

Dazzle with his reworked ultimate is especially weak as a support: he needs both HP and Mana sustain to function and a support Dazzle simply can’t afford enough items to make it work.

Wyvern is in a better state, and we feel like she is mostly simply out of meta for meta reasons. If the patch starts favouring right-clicking physical cores, Wyvern might make a comeback as a situational pick.

Snapfire probably just needs some direct buffs to her abilities. They don’t offer enough for how fiddly and unreliable they are, while her kit in general is kind of counter-intuitive: she needs to be both in the middle of the fight to maximise damage output and crowd control, but she also needs to be far enough away to use her ultimate.

Weak Lane Presence

With Puck being dominant in this patch, the absence of Skywrath is extra baffling, but there are good reasons the hero isn’t being picked by high level players and in high level pubs.

He is extremely weak in lane against most meta supports, due to his low armor. He doesn’t offer much later on, since most heroes itemise against magic damage by default or are too tanky for Mystic Flare to be relevant. Finally, his utility is extremely limited and gets trivial to deal with as the game progresses.

We feel like we’ve already touched on this topic in our previous post, but the current HP and EHP pools are getting out of control slightly. It makes many “burst damage” heroes feel irrelevant and Skywrath is one of them.

Even with the talent, Mystic Flare is only 2000 damage over 2+ seconds and it can be split between opponents. We are not saying that it needs to deal more damage, we are saying that in the current patch it is not enough and in many cases will barely even register: given how it is a damage over time effect, Eternal Shroud fully stacks pretty quickly and late game, even a core solo target is unlikely to lose more than half of their HP with the Shroud.

Meta-Irrelevant Heroes

Lich did get a couple of smaller buffs in the last patch, but for the most part the hero is still meta-irrelevant. When it comes to lane dominance, Crystal Maiden is simply better, offering more control, damage and scaling. Crowd control-wise Lich has always been below average and, similar to Skywrath Mage, his ultimate is more or less ignorable in the later stages of the game.

What the hero has is his Frost Shield, which is still incredible when it comes to dealing with strong right-clicking heroes. Once again, though, we are returning to the fact that the current meta is mostly ability-based and Shield is kind of irrelevant because of it.

We are not hoping for too many direct buffs for the hero, but would rather like to see some global changes, namely the HP on the heroes and the return of right-click, at least on some heroes.

Potential Changes for Supports

Here are our picks for the supports that most desperately need some changes to the game to become relevant. What do you think of it? Do you agree or do you feel like there are other heroes who are even weaker?

Share your thoughts in the comment section below.