Why do people play hook champions as support champions?

KingHeidrek·Aug 4, 2017·1 votes·3,014 views

They can actually do a lot of damage you put AP on them. I'm familiar with pudge from dota 2 and he's considered to be a great laner

32 Comments

KoKobotoAug 4, 20171 votes

Blitzcrank is hard to get working in a solo lane. Nautilus can work but he's really weak and you got a 90% chance of losing lane phase. Thresh seems 50/50 to me. I've seen Thresh do a lot and sometimes not enough, guess it depends on the match up.

Also doesn't Pudge hook have like 1500 range and does true damage. Not to mention he has that smelly flesh and a supression ultimate that heals him.

KingHeidrekAug 4, 20171 votes

yeah it's not that important though. blitz has got some knock up and damage and shield. also pudge's w damages himself so eh. In dota all abilities have a larger range, but that map is bigger. the only way to counter pudge is to have a roamer setting up wards. tbh dota's tree system is different from lol's bush system. the extra range really doesn't matter because the pillars for wards can light up half the jungle.

KoKobotoAug 4, 20171 votes

It is important because the enemy will come out of lane with an advantage and screw you and your team over. With the early game meta all it takes is 1 or 2 kills to completely screw over a lane and win the game. Dota 2 on the other hand allows for a lot more kills to be had early that doesn't drastically change the outcome of the game.

oSEXYPLATYPUSoAug 4, 20171 votes

blitz is easily played around in a solo lane... he has one damage pattern ..

naut is bad early slow ms, high cds and mana cost but can be a good tank ( originally a jungler )

thresh would ideally have the best damage out put due to his E passive and souls collected but he is fragile , lack of really tank stats so if you get to him you can blow him up cuz if he is focusing on damage he wont get defense and he has the lowest armor in the game base being 16 and no scaling per lvl only way to get armor is via runes/masteries souls passive or items

back in the day he use to be busted as full CRIT adc in bot lane

KingHeidrekAug 4, 20172 votes

well so does pudge. once the enemy makes a mistake you can roam all you want. high mana costs? in lol mana costs aren't too bad. in dota 2-3 abilities and you can have no mana. I feel mana managment is something that isn't bad. thresh, doesn't he gain bonus armor from his souls? I thought he would be the least likely due to his lantern ability. It's a full on support ability lol.

oSEXYPLATYPUSoAug 4, 20172 votes

well league and dota two different games

as thresh is concerned i said he gets armor via souls but at lvl 1 if u were to go top lane vs a darius (typically top lane pick) if you take 9 armor runes and start cloth armor as thresh you have a total of 16+ 9+ 15 armor for a total of 40 armor but you have no damage cuz you are having to get defensive vs a champ who has more out right damage and tankyness

naut top lane is bad currently due to changes of sunfire and how slow he farms. he really has shit for wave clear. and him going damage isnt ideal he just wont out damage the enemy top laner

blitz is a burst combo and does well but once again miss your Q you are shit out of luck in terms of doing any burst

GamerThinkAug 4, 20171 votes

naut top lane is bad currently due to changes of sunfire and how slow he farms. he really has shit for wave clear. and him going damage isnt ideal he just wont out damage the enemy top laner

???

Riptide's waveclear is insane [55 / 85 / 115 / 145 / 175 (+ 30% AP) magic damage], he is not META just because other tanks are at the moment more busted. And actually, he's as well not even META as a support.

oSEXYPLATYPUSoAug 4, 20171 votes

they just had to buff him and he still is a b tier pick at best Nautilus Top has a win rate 45.81% for Platinum+ players whilst the very best Nautilus's are earning a win rate of 53.05% with the average rank of these top players being in Diamond IV.

LoLalytics ranks Nautilus at 70 amongst Top champions earning a tier grade of Bronze.

This ranking takes into account the win rate of Platinum+ players, the pick/ban influence of Nautilus, the win rate and average rank of the best Nautilus players.

plz tell me a match up top lane where he wins the lane at all

SanKakUAug 4, 20171 votes

It's not like his lantern can't shield himself and he can also use it to collect far away souls in case he's getting zoned out by a jungle champion's stalking or something of the sort. I actually think Nautilus would probably make a good middle lane champion in addition to Thresh, although I haven't tried Nautilus out yet for that position since I've only purchased him recently.

Linna ExcelAug 4, 20171 votes

My biggest problem with thresh outside of bot is his lantern would be of lesser value in a solo lane. Not being able to save or reposition your ADC during laning is a big trade off.

oSEXYPLATYPUSoAug 4, 20171 votes

yes but it could help you asst the jungler ganking such as you would in bot lane ...

GlîtchyAug 4, 20171 votes

Thresh Blitzcrank Nautilus are all better to set up teamfights than to be 1v1'ing someone

KingHeidrekAug 4, 20171 votes

it sets up team fight? I thought it was a better pick potential. I see mostly people leave but support the person who got hooked. I don't think anyone wants to get into a fight if someone got hooked, except if the person hooked is kennen.

GlîtchyAug 4, 20171 votes

{quoted}

it sets up team fight? I thought it was a better pick potential. I see mostly people leave but support the person who got hooked. I don't think anyone wants to get into a fight if someone got hooked, except if the person hooked is kennen.

Naut ult can stun more than 1 target, Blitz silences in a fairly large radius and Thresh can hook someone then pull HIMSELF into the opposing team then ult.

GamerThinkAug 4, 20171 votes

Having a lot of utility in your kit means you rely less on gold. This means that the most effective strategy is that the support is chosen from such champions. Of course, some of those champions may have also good scaling from items ( Nautilus , Alistar , Taric , ...) and are viable as solo laners/junglers.

Being the rift filled with "meta-sheeps", though, you will hardly find them played in other roles than support.

KingHeidrekAug 4, 20171 votes

taric I can see support because of his bastion link skill, but yeah it's kinda sad lol.

Sp33d Zer0Aug 4, 20171 votes

Thresh and nautilus specifically have a lot of peel tools and thresh also has his lantern for utility.

For blitz it's mostly a kill lane thing. He struggles to accomplish much on his own in a solo lane, but when paired with another person his set up and damage gets matched for a basically free kill.

KingHeidrekAug 4, 20171 votes

oh yeah I see that happening, pudge in dota 2 roam a lot. I was thinking why not naut or thresh.

Sp33d Zer0Aug 4, 20171 votes

They do roam a lot. I know in my blitz games I roam after every single back. In fact, mobi boots are a staple item on all three of them BECAUSE they are such good roamers.

I can't say much about the dota meta, but because of how roaming works in league in regards to the opportunity cost of gold from ancient coin and experience, you need to get something out of the roam for it to be really worth it.

EcchiOtakuTMAug 4, 20171 votes

Nautilus is a laner....

Blitz has had meta success in top lane and partallity in jungle

Thresh is played wherever the hell someone disciplined feels to play him.

BeatzBoyFTWAug 4, 20172 votes

Nautilus is a laner....

Nautilus support still works, in terms of locking down/engaging immobile squishy carries like Kogmaw.

Blitz has had meta success in top lane and partallity in jungle

Where the actual fuck did you even get these facts from....

Thresh is played wherever the hell someone disciplined feels to play him.

Just support, yes.

EcchiOtakuTMAug 4, 20171 votes

I know naut is a support and jng, I just meant it was redundant to ask why isn't nautilus is a laner.

Blitz was played in kr as a top laner which kinda seeped over like karthus top and has viability, which is why it was meta success. His jungle is decent if not for not being able to function without blue period early.

Thresh players do whatever they want with him tbh, his scaling of armor and ap with having strong game knowledge can make it work, he has enough power to adc in certain matchups, power to off-meta burst mage mid, top lane has quite good success, while jng is the only thing I havn't seen.

Linna ExcelAug 4, 20171 votes

Because their utility to their team is in their kits and not related to gold, putting them as a support makes sense most of the time.

LadyRenlyAug 4, 20171 votes

i miss ol full ap naut, played it like a season ago. was able to dump on ahris

I Am RaviAug 4, 20171 votes

I play:

Ad Blitz top and mid Ap Blitz Mid and support Tank Blitz Top and support

ADC Thresh Ap Thresh mid Tank Thresh top, jungle and support

Ap Naut top, mid Ad Naut top, jung Tank Naut top, jung, support

So yeah...

HeresyHorusAug 4, 20171 votes

They like being "hookers".

AhristocatsAug 4, 20171 votes

find a single pro game of pudge after 2017 where he was picked in solo lane instead of sup

zxinferxzAug 4, 20171 votes

I used to be a 5.9k mmr filthy Pudge spammer, right now I'm just 5.5k and I hate to shit on your parade but you're completely wrong about Pudge. He's more often played as a support and a roamer at any "high elo", as in, all the people above high plat play him as a support or roamer role. Roles in dota aren't static, they are just divided by farm priority, that's it; it's positions 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Mids tend to be position 2, but that doesn't mean you can't run your mid as a position 3, and give more farm priority to other players in your team. Pudge is almost always ran as a position 5 or 4, 5 being the wardbitch and the poorest possibly you can be, because Dota doesn't have "free gold" items because it doesn't revolve around being a walking stat stick, and a utility Pudge can stay lvl 7 while the enemy team is, on average, lvl 10, and he can still remain highly useful under such conditions. Position 4 is generally the roamer, it's also another support role, but tends to help the pos5 with wards, unless the pos5 decided to be even poorer and let the pos4 build some items for himself so they can "act" like they have 4 core players and 1 support (uncommon) instead of 3 core players and 2 supports (often the case)

Trinkets don't exist in Dota, you don't get free wards, you have to buy wards, you can place as many as you wish, but the shop has a cooldown for them, being like 4 minutes or whatever, I don't recall right now. Wards are invisible and last like 3-6 minutes (I also forgot), and supports start the game by buying both of the 2 wards available in the shop, to put them on cooldown so they can keep buying more. Pudge can roam around the map because the map is filled with fog of war, and there's no bushes to force the fog of war, but instead, every single tree in the map is its own source of fog of war, and you can dance around them, because they block the line of sight of the people on the opposide side of said tree, so Pudge is quite lethal, and even more so, when you consider that his hook is quite damn long compared to Blitz, and when you also add the lack of Flash (Blink dagger has around 3 seconds cooldown, forced every single time you take an instance of damage, so you can't blink out of damage), and the fact that it's Defence of the Ancients, not Breakdance Mobility Fiesta of the Ancients, unlike League of Mobility's massive dash powercreep, and then you get to understand why Pudge is such a huge threat compared to the hookers in LoL

Let's not forget: Turn rate. League of Legends doesn't have any turn rate, while all the units (creeps, neutral creeps, and heroes) in Dota, have their own turn rates, which means they can't instantly click behind them and do a 180° to change their walking direction and dodge a Pudge hook, if they have a blink, or dash, or whatever target-direction skill, they also must face that direction before using it (obviously ignoring the skills that trigger instantly when casted, and simply dash forward to wherever your hero is facing, like Mirana's and Slark's, which actually makes them quite slippery because they don't have to cast these nor turn around for them if they were already pre-facing a decent enough place to leap into), I should also mention a completely abstract concept to LoL players: Skill cancelling, you have animation cancels with Riven and Renekton, but these just cut short some animations, however, what if I told you, you can cancel your Thresh hook before it gets thrown, by pressing S, and then what if I told you, you can do this, forever, ever and ever, with no end to it, with zero mana cost to it, and zero cd incurred, as long as you don't fizzle it and throw your skill by failing to cancel it on time. Now imagine you no longer turn around instantly to avoid that Blitz hook, imagine it's fucking twice as long, and imagine he's cancelling the animation OVER AND OVER AND OVER again while you're trying to juke it

Now also remember that even if you have an escape mechanism: Dota has no CDR, and while the heroes with escape mechanisms don't really have that long cooldowns on them, they do until these are maxed. Kind of like Zed's shadow with its massive early game cd, but on top of that, CC, on average, lasts like more than twice as much on Dota than it does on LoL, so Pudge's entire combo pulls you, then he channels Dismember on you for 3 full seconds, while dealing damage per second with it, and dealing damage per second with his Rot, and then you're still slowed as long as you're in Rot's range, and Rot has zero cd, and zero mana cost, all it does is hurt Pudge for exactly as much damage as it deals to others, just as an example. This means that Pudge has even easier setup to throw his hook on people, than Blitz does, and the reward is so much bigger than for Blitz as well

Dota has Smoke of Deceit. This is an extremely cheap (50 fucking gold) item that has a 10 minutes restock cooldown in the shop, and starts with like 2 or 3 smokes you can buy I believe, when used, you and all champs around you, will become "stealthed" until they come within some "generous" range of a tower or an enemy champion, you're completely immune to wards (they don't see invis), and the sentries (old pink wards), the ones that reveal all sorts of invisibility around them, do reveal you, but they don't let the enemy team know about your presence because Smoke will remove your hero's icon from the minimap, so if you're standing under a sentry's range while smoked, the enemy will only know if they manually happened to CHECK that place in the minimap by moving their camera towards it, just because they were expecting or being cautious about a possible smoke gank. Smoke break range is exactly 1025, and Pudge's hook at level 1 has 1000 range, and then has 1100, 1200, 1300, on the following levels. Pudge can smokegank your midlaner at lvl 1, even from under their noses, while being invisible

So to resume: Pudge is a massively lethal threat in Dota, he can be so much more sneakier than Blitz thanks to a combination of factors (non-mirrored map, fog of war everywhere, fog of war even on uphill terrain as well, lower availability of wards, Smoke of Deceit, twice as long hook range, everyone is so much more immobile than in League which affects them when avoiding the hook and also when escaping after getting hooked, Pudge's skill ceiling is added to his hook skill rather than it being a crapshoot of whether or not the enemy player decides to sidestep it for a little bit), and his entire combo is much more potent than Blitz as well, so he would make quite a damn good core; but you know what? Even then, even though he has all these advantages over Blitz, he's never played as a real core (Pos 1, or 2) in any rank above high gold ELO's equivalent in Dota. Pudge is played as an offlaner (often called the suicide lane, the hero in here can be a pos3 or 4, generally thrown there just to keep the lane warm, or to run an aggro lane as 2v2 against the enemy pos1 carry and his support) from time to time, but that's it, he's more often a pos5 or pos4. I haven't played in a few months so something could have changed since then, but, historically, Pudge's role has never changed, no matter the meta, no matter the context, no matter the buffs

TL; DR: If even Pudge is such a lethal thing to face, and is such a monster to deal with, and he's never played as a core at any rank above high gold, then why the actual fuck would you play a hook champ as a laner in any rank above high gold in LoL?

KingHeidrekAug 8, 20171 votes

I kinda don't. I'm a casual so in public games I see pudge in postion 3 very often. I guess my postion 4 and 5 heroes pool is kinda tiny. lol I'm kinda casual, sorry if I accidentally pissed you off, but I was wondering what happened. The rest I get. I know dota is totally different in terms of mechanisms (i remember the turn thing, couldn't last hit anything when I tried lol).

KingHeidrekAug 8, 20171 votes

ahh the feels of position 5, lots of blue and yellow wards and smokes the memories.

zxinferxzAug 8, 20171 votes

Naw you didn't piss me off, I just like pointing out the differences between both games, the more people that play both, the better

KingHeidrekAug 8, 20171 votes

I feel that's a terrible idea if anyone was position 1-3 lol. last hitting abilities go to shit. stupid turn rate differences.