This is a guide written for new players as well as low-rank players (Legend or below) such as myself.

There’s a lot of great guides out there by Jenkins, Elwono and many others to help us new players, and also comprehensive introduction to Dota by Purge which is amazing. This guide is a bit different. While all of those guides focus on how to actually improve your skill and get better at the game, the purpose of this guide is to entertain you and intrigue you with some insights about team composition. If you watch pro games, you may find this interesting, and it may answer certain questions about roles and lanes. I must provide a disclaimer and say that as far as pubs are concerned at our levels, 90% of the discussion below is absolutely irrelevant and will not do anything to improve your gameplay in any way.

So first, let’s try to categorize the 5 heroes playing in one team. There are 3 different ways we can think about categorizing heroes:

1. Lane – The setup of which hero going in what lane
2. Role – What are the key job(s) of each heroes throughout the game
3. Win condition – This decides the farm priority of the 5 heroes

We will use the 5 most played heroes in the last 12 months (other than Pudge) as examples: Lion, Ogre Magi, Invoker, Wind Ranger, Phantom Assassin.

1. Team Composition by Lane

The first is the simplest, and the one most familiar to most of us.

Let’s say you are radiant. The bottom lane is called the safe lane, and the top lane is called the off lane. Usually, the heroes on your team will play in a 2-1-2 laning formation which means 2 heroes top (offlane), 1 hero mid, and 2 heroes bottom (safelane).

Usually we will see an Invoker going mid. The PA is likely to go bot as the Safelane Carry. Windranger can somehow hold top, so she’s the Offlane. Ogre and Lion are supports – between them, Lion is not really that dependent on items early, and can afford to be more selfless. Ogre Magi is also not that much item dependent, but craves the Arcane Boot than Lion craves his first item. So that leaves Ogre Magi as the Soft Support and Lion as the Hard Support. So the team compositions by lanes is:

• Safelane Carry – Phantom Assassin
• Midlane – Invoker
• Offlane – Windranger
• Soft Support – Ogre Magi
• Hard Support – Lion

We will usually see the Soft Support go to the Offlane and the Hard Support go to the Safelane, though this is not always the case.

2. Team Composition by Roles

Now going by roles, Phantom Assassin is the carry of the team. The term “carry” means that this hero scales very well with gold (items) and levels, and is capable of carrying the team to victory in the endgame. PA is also capable of initiation, but that is not really her job int he team because there are at least 3 others who do it better.

Invoker is the CC (crowd control). Referring to traditional roles, you could think of Invoker as the Disabler, Nuker, Pusher, Initiator, and Counter-Initiator (Disengage specialist). Among these, Invoker’s primary role is Disabler and Initiator (Quas-Wex build), or Nuker and Pusher (Exort build). Invoker can control the crowd through Cold Snap, burn their mana through EMP, slow them down in the Ice Wall, disarm them using Deafening Blast. Invoker also deals massive damage (Nuke) with Chaos Meteor, and Sun Strike. It’s Forged Spirits and Alacrity are often great tools for Pushing lanes and taking objectives (buildings). Tornado is a good disabling spell, but you could think of it as Initiation or Counter-Initiation. Similar to Invoker, most mid heroes have some kind of heavy nuke power or at least some pushing power.

Windranger is our offlaner. It’s a bit of a weird choice to some because the Offlane role is often associated with a “tanky frontliner” i.e. a durable hero that can soak a lot of damage and enable its teammates to dish out damage to enemy. Essentially an Offlaner is any hero that can 2v1 or even 3v1 against the enemy, and deal with the annoying shit of enemy pulling their creeps etc. It’s windrun provides some survivability/mobility, and powershot lets it Nuke down creeps when it’s too dangerous to go near for the last hit. In this team, however, Windranger’s primary role is not a Nuker or a Disabler. Make no mistake, Shackelshot is a GREAT disable and Windranger can nuke heroes down as well. In the context of this team, Windranger is the de facto Initiator (as many Offlaners often are). With a Shadow Blade (or preferably, Blink Dagger), it can start a teamfight in a way most favorable to the team. Also, as the Offlaner, Windranger is able to create a lot of space for its carry (PA). Windranger does this in a variety of ways – it can gank enemy heroes and delete them, it can pressure a tower through its ultimate, it can make enemy heroes waste valuable time chasing it around in its windrun. This is why it’s not so hard to see why Windranger is a very capable and competent Offlaner.

Both Ogre Magi and Lion are capable of being Hard Supports, but traditionally, Lion is the less item dependent between the two. These two heroes have the role of Support and Disable. They are the primary disablers of the team. Once Lion gets its dagger, it arguably the best candidate for Initiator int the team, so that’s another of its role. Depending on the matchup, Ogre may decide to roam around and let Windranger solo the offlane. But Lion will stick to Phantom Assassin for sure, acting as a babysitting support against an aggressive lane, or a zoning support in general.

You can learn about all of the common roles here. But I will provide a brief summary below:

3. Team Composition by Win Condition

Once it hits its critical mass of level and items, Phantom Assassin can single-handedly take out the enemy heroes and win its team the game. This is why it can be called the Primary Win Condition.

In the event that PA does not get the job done, Invoker can pull off some amazing combos to kill heroes, and even take objectives very fast. This is why it’s the Secondary Win Condition. The hero scales quite well with levels and items.

Windranger scales well with levels and items too, but in this game, PA and Invoker scale better. So Windranger’s job is to create space so that PA and Invoker can farm really fast. To do this, Windranger can occupy the time and attention of multiple enemy heroes simultaneously, push lanes, hit towers, force rotations. Also, during “peacetime” in midgame, it is the job of Windranger to farm the unsafe areas of the map and overextended lanes, so that the two WinCon heroes can farm the 2 jungles efficiently.

Ogre Magi’s job in this game as the Core Enabler is to make rotations, make plays and do things that help its 3 WinCon heroes (known as Core heroes) to farm efficiently. Efficient farm = farm fast + farm safe. In this process, Ogre Magi might pick up some last hits and gold here and there.

The Position 5 Hero, Lion, is the no-farm hero of the team. What Ogre does for the 3 Core heroes, Lion does for all of its teammates. An interesting difference between the two would be – if there is a Mid Tower that needs defending (mid tower should always be prioritized at it provides enemy access to jungle), and the team is hesitant to go there because enemy heroes are nearby, then it is Lion’s job to go defend that mid tower. This is one scenario, and there are many other scenario where this hero makes risky plays, sacrifices, long walks, and buys time and creates space for the rest of the team. In this process it does gather gold over time. When it is near completing a very game-changing item (such as sitting on 1900 gold, about to buy Blink Dagger), sometimes the other heroes should let Lion get some farm to quickly get Blink online.

In some team compositions, due to the nature of the two supports selected (for example, an Undying and a Crystal Maiden), it is clear that Crystal Maiden will be the No-farm support. But in many cases, if two “eligible hard supports” are selected such as Lion and Crystal Maiden, then both can be thought of as position 4.5 from the beginning of the game – and as the game evolves, more farm is allocated to the hero that is likely to have great impact of the game (this depends entirely on what are the other heroes in the team and in the enemy team). Many core heroes can be played as a Position 4 support (Core Enabler) such as Weaver, Zeus etc. But only a handful of heroes can be played effectively as a Position 5 Support. A good litmus test to know whether a particular hero would be an amazing position 5 hero is to ask this question “Will this hero be able to contribute greatly to the team even if it has only brown boots at 12 minutes?” If the answer is either “no” or “maybe”, then this is NOT a position 5 hero. Sure, in most cases even the Position 5 hero will have some small items at 15 minutes like arcane boots, Tranquil Boots, Bracer etc. but a good Position 5 hero should be prepared for the scenario where that does not happen so that it can remain effective even without farm and not fall off the game or be a burden for its team.

Putting it all together

So below is the summary of the things I have discussed thus far.

It’s good to think about the TEAM in terms of Role (does my team have enough push, enough nukes, enough lategame potential, enough early game survivability etc.). But when deciding where to lane which hero, the approach of “most carry-type hero goes safelane, typical mid goes mid, tank goes offlane” is a safe, tried and tested approach, but sometimes it can be sub-optimal. It always depends on the enemy lineup where your heroes lane. For example, let’s say your team has 3 cores: a Juggernaut, an Invoker and a Bristleback. And your enemy team has 4 standard heroes, and then a surprise last pick Brood. You know it’s likely that Brood is going mid. And you know Brood is going to destroy Invoker (or anyone else that gets sent mid). And you know that based on the other 4 heroes of the enemy, Invoker may actually be a very valuable asset in this game. So, what you do is send your Invoker in the offlane. And Bristleback lanes middle against Brood. In this example, did Invoker get downgraded to Space Creator and Bristleback upgrade to Secondary WinCon? Nope. Bristleback is still the space creator and Invoker is the Secondary WinCon – with just swapped lanes. Farm Priority is not always linked to lanes, you see. Sometimes the safelane carry goes offlane and offlaner comes to safelane because of an unfavorable matchup (imagine your Juggernaut going against an Axe and Sand King lane – no thanks).

Dota is a beautiful game and team composition is one of the most fascinating things about it. We often don’t think about it as much for a few reasons. The biggest reason is that it’s not that relevant to whether we win or lose at lower ranks, since even the best draft of counterpicks will not win the game if you are crushed at the game of last hitting and denying. Another reason is that there is a lot of conventional wisdom about Team Composition that we all “know” and adhere to which kind of keeps our teams in check (5 heroes: 1 typical mid, agi carry in safelane, tanky strength hero in offlane, two supports, one of them can be greedy). But sometimes, the difference between winning and losing can be your 4th and 5th pick. You look at all the heroes of your team and enemy team selected so far and think “what does my team need now?” The answer will not be “Offlaner.” The answer will not be “Stuns”. The answer will not be Position 3 (Space creator). The answer will be “a hero that can offlane against those two xyz heroes that enemy is likely to put on safelane and disrupt their farm a bit while not dying too much, and this hero should have some decent disables since the rest of my team lacks any, and also the hero must not be too greedy as it needs to be a Space creator (Position 3)”. With this kind of thinking, you can great improve your picking. Also, after all 10 heroes are picked, team composition STILL can influence decision making a lot. Where are you laning your heroes? Do you want your safelane carry to dodge a dangerous lane? Do you want to help your carry trilane? Do you want to have a support as a roamer to address their annoying Mid that you don’t have any real counter for other than lane harass and warding his camps?

These are very interesting and amusing thoughts, and the more games you watch (both pro games and random pub games of your level), the better you will understand these things and the more fun you will have while thinking about stuff like this. But in your game, your actual game, during playing – you don’t have the luxury to think about all of these unless you are an afk Pos 5 support. Because youa are ranked lower than Legend and you should just focus on last hitting, denying, creep aggro, proper itemization according to timings and enemy heroes, taking objectives, and map control. Work on the basics first – then you can maybe think about Team Composition in your free time. But the more you think about Team Composition, watch videos of commentary during draft, or draft analysis, the better you will be about understanding the game at a macro level.