Week 6: What am I for in this team?

Cores, supports and the numbered positions — a distribution rule for experience, and an argument the course has taken a side in

29 March 2027

Open the slides

This week’s decision#

Attributes tell you what a hero converts gold into. Roles tell you how much gold a hero is expected to get, and between them they are most of what a draft is arguing about.

The mistake this week fixes is five players who all want position one — or, more quietly, picking a support and then playing it like a core, competing with your own team for the same gold.

We think you should start on position five. Not because it is easier, because it is not. A support’s decisions surface soonest and cost the team least while you are still learning to make them: where to ward, when to rotate, whose life to spend yours on. Every one of those is a decision you can name afterwards, and naming decisions afterwards is the only skill this course is actually teaching. You still learn to last-hit in week 2, because every position needs it.

The disagreement here is real and worth knowing about. Most beginner guides say support, for roughly our reasons. A serious minority say mid — a self-contained game, no dependence on four other people, and the most direct feedback available. Both cases hold up. Ours is the one this course is arranged around, and week 6’s Lobby Lab is where you get to argue with it.

Mechanics#

Positions one to five are an order of resource priority, not a job description. Position one takes the most gold, position five the least, and everything else follows from that.

Core against support. A core converts the team’s resources into late-game power. A support spends their own time protecting that conversion. Neither is the senior partner.

Power spikes. Every hero has a window where they are at their strongest, and a team’s plan is built around whose window is open right now.

Why positions are agreed before picking, rather than sorted out once the game has started.

The resource lens#

How experience is distributed. Unlike gold, experience is shared inside a radius — so who stands in the wave, which looks like an incidental detail, is really the team allocating a resource. Week 4’s “leaving the lane” now has a team-level explanation rather than only a personal one.

Before the lecture#

Valve’s in-game tutorial, section 3 introduction — heroes versus creeps.

This week’s hero#

Crystal Maiden — Brilliance Aura, because it is the cleanest example of a support whose value does not sit on their own hero. The beneficiaries are other people, and the aura does its work whether or not Crystal Maiden is doing anything interesting.

Juggernaut — Blade Fury, because it lets a position one farm safely very early: a core spending resources on its own safety, made concrete.

This week’s item#

Arcane Boots. The first item bought for the team rather than for yourself. It forces a question the rest of the course keeps returning to — who does this item’s benefit belong to?

After this week you can…#

• say which position you are playing and what that means you are giving up
• say who your team should be playing around right now
• explain why a position five not last-hitting is not laziness