19 December 2009

[Strategy] Ponderings on countering defensive carry strats

Seens to be a sudden rush into asian style 3 defensive carries play - i.e. carries like razor and medusa buying early defensive items to bulk them up for teamfight survival later on - vanguard, hood, blademail, manta, linkins, etc. Makes me wonder a bit about what else we might be likely to see because of this, so heres my thoughts:

Strength Carries

With the focus going on buying survivability for carries, why not start off with carries who have natural in-built survivability already? Makes sense to me... I reckon we'll see more of these guys in the future, Davion can be a complete nightmare to take down when he's farmed up.


N'aix

Whilst granted he's also a "strength carry", he also works perfectly as a sort of anti-tank hero, performing well against heroes with increased hp. He used to be a very important pick, when strength carries were all the rage a few versions ago... might we see him reclaim a place as one of the top picks? Open wounds no longer having a mini-stun sucks a bit for him though


"Map-hack" heroes

With the trend towards defending carries and allowing them to farm up, extra map vision via hawk/revenants/rocket/eyes surely has to be a big advantage. Granted clockwerks rockets don't really give a huge amount of abusable vision, so maybe I'm just going with wishful thinking on that one (was one of my fav heroes to play a couple of versions ago), but the others are definetly worth looking at.


Armour loss strat

Finally, I think this might be a good way to counter heroes who've bulked up on survivability - take away their armour. This sort of strat has proved to be valuble time and time again this version, and I think it could really be utilised to take on the defensive heroes. Not necessarily advocating a lineup of *all* those heroes, but utilising some of them together in a lineup works wonders.