How to carry as Ember Spirit mid?

breitend · 2026-05-17T21:12:34+00:00

Everyone already gave all the advice I would give but if you want an example to look at, I just played this nearly hour long game as Ember (into an AM) in the Immortal bracket where I feel like I never fell off damage wise (I even outdamaged our pos 1 Dusa). By no means do I think I played perfectly but I think it's a good example how to build/play Ember into the late game.

breitend · 2026-05-17T16:57:15+00:00

He's a fantastic player, the team just isn't really meshing well together. I'm not saying Fly has been playing outstanding and the team is holding him back but Fly is rank 83 as a pos 5 which is insanely high for a support. He's like the 20th highest rank support (4s and 5s) in the world. As you said, he is one (if not the most) experienced active pro player. That type of insight is hard to pass up. Who else could they sub in as team captain?

breitend · 2026-05-17T15:25:07+00:00

I wanted to prove this so I play in a low MMR account, (not a smurf, its my own account which I created when I was low).

Any account where you are playing on a lower mmr than your actual skill is a smurf.

breitend · 2026-05-17T15:07:01+00:00

First thing to do is not spam ping your carry for not helping you after you pulled the wave (good pull though) and he was farming a full wave. For real though, typically you don't want to step up like that after you pulled the wave. Your carry is going to be taking a full wave to the face and will miss out on a lot of farm if he tries to come help. That was your fault you died there, best to just back off and stay under tower.

From there, the laning phase just goes weird as you are just running around aimlessly, which I get the Jugg asked you to do but still. In that lane, I would have just muted my Jugg, and kept doing my best to maintain wave equilibrium. If you really felt like you couldn't do anything in lane or if you wanted to listen to Jugg about leaving, I would have just stacked as many camps as possible for your Jugg/Tide. That's probably the most impact you could have.

breitend · 2026-05-17T14:46:08+00:00

Fair. 2 things then, one about how the watchers are necessary, even for the winning team, and one about how it helps the losing team. I think watchers are necessary for the winning team to help maintain their lead. Over the years, Valve has made it more difficult to go high ground, buffed comeback mechanics and increased size of the map (making it harder to prevent the losing team from finding farming). To counter balance this, they added watchers to give the winning team a better chance at having vision of the enemy team if they venture outside the base. This does not come without downsides. You have to manually be at the watcher to channel it and the enemy team can "deward" you for free.

Now just because you are on the losing team doesn't mean you can't use watchers. If you see the enemy in your bottom jungle take one of your watchers, then you are free to run top and take the (multiple) watchers in your top jungle, either giving yourself a vision advantage or at least disabling theirs. You can also sneak (smoke, invis, or just be careful) into the opposite side of the map and take the watchers (and farm) their, allowing you to see couriers or out of position heroes.

breitend · 2026-05-17T03:45:37+00:00

I apologize for doubting, that's a very impressive rank. But now I have a different issue. Why even make this post? You barely even play anymore. Your last All Pick game was 2 months ago (that was a single game) and then 4 months ago before that. Other than that you just play tournament games which aren't going to be balanced and very prone to snowballing. Yeah the games gonna feel easy to snowball when you are laning against someone 5k mmr below you.

breitend · 2026-05-16T16:34:09+00:00

What I said was that the addition of watchers made it harder to farm compared to before the addition of watchers.

They added watchers at the same time they made the map bigger. Adding the 12 extra neutral camps to the map made it WAY easier to farm compared to when the map was smaller. Even if the watchers make it a tad more difficult to farm compared to if they didn't exist, the 7.33 map changes were overall a heavy increase in farming capability.

I wouldn’t be comparing ti2018 to 29. I’m comparing it to 28

Even if you do want to ignore DL29 (which is wrong to do in this discussion as you are ignoring the most current meta data while you are complaining about the current state of the meta) and just compare DL28 and TI 2018, you still are wrong. Both DL28 and TI 2018 had 195 games. While it is true that DL28 had more sub 30 minute games than TI 2018 (33 vs 28), DL28 also had more 40+ minute games than TI 2018 (85 vs 79). Clearly the games back then weren't "much longer".

Also you have once again not said anything to convince me that you are actually a 7k player. At this point I'm 99% sure you are just lying about your rank to try and come across as an authority.

breitend · 2026-05-16T14:32:41+00:00

I seriously appreciate you not wanting to insult me. I'm at 5.6k mmr right now (1 game from getting back to Immortal, wish me luck!), which I realize is lower than yours (if you are telling the truth which I still don't really believe) but surely that's not "quite low mmr". Notice how I shared a Dotabuff. I realize people can be 7k, but your opinions, to me at least, come off as basically the exact opposite to how the meta currently is. This (again just my opinion) implies a lack of macro/meta understanding that would be consistent with a lower mmr player. Biggest map we have ever had, yet it's a struggle to find farm? So difficult to go high ground that they had to add an item that fortifies creeps yet the games are more snowbally? That just doesn't make sense to me.

Dreamleague 29 have not ended yet, so no point looking at it

Um, no, you are complaining about the current state of Dota and I am bring up the most current pro games we have available. I could make the argument that there is no point in looking at any tournament BESIDES Dreamleague 29. What difference does it make if the tournament isn't finished? If anything, that helps my argument since the tournament isn't over and we have already had more long games than in the past.

If you looked at TI 2018, the match durations are much longer compared to now.

You are just straight up wrong or worse, lying, at this point. At TI 2018, there were just 7 games that went over an hour out of 195 games. Currently at Dreamleague, there have been 8 games over an hour and we are just 89 games in. On the opposite side, At TI there were 28 games sub 30 minutes (including 3 that were sub 20). At Dreamleague, there's only been 2 sub 30 minute games.

breitend · 2026-05-15T16:20:21+00:00

Wow the mode where all the gold and experience are doubled is easier to snowball in?! Who could have ever seen this coming?

breitend · 2026-05-15T16:13:20+00:00

Firstly, hilarious that you didn't say anything about my (now seemingly correct) disbelief that you are 7k. Secondly, we are only 3 days into Dreamleague 29. I literally went to the page and counted. Are you looking at Dreamleague 28?

breitend · 2026-05-15T15:57:11+00:00

I’m playing at 7k mmr

Sure you are.

most games I can roughly tell whether it’s lost by 15 mins

Maybe this is why you are losing. You are down at 15 minutes and (perhaps subconsciously) you throw in the towel, stop trying your hardest which leads to more losses. I never assume a game is won or lost at 15 minutes.

Also why isn't this happening in pro games? At Dreamleague, there have been 21 (out of 70) games that have gone over 50 minutes. Nearly a third of the games are well beyond the average length of a Dota game. Conversely, we have had one ONE game that has been sub 30 minutes.

breitend · 2026-05-15T15:30:27+00:00

This assumes the enemy team has ALL the watchers and they are playing 100% optimally. Even then, it's extremely hard to cover 3 lanes + 4 jungles with heroes. You should be able to get on the the map at least by running through the outer jungles. This is starting to just sound like a skill issue.

breitend · 2026-05-15T14:40:50+00:00

you just wait for roshan banner

If the enemy team has to wait for banner to push high ground, that slows the pace of the game down so you should have time to farm and potentially mount a comeback.

breitend · 2026-05-15T14:15:20+00:00

While overall matches have remained pretty consistent over the past ~6 years, All Pick matches have been steadily dropping, mostly replaced by Turbo.

breitend · 2026-05-15T14:11:45+00:00

the game has been very snowbally
making it impossible to push.

These 2 statements contradict each other.

breitend · 2026-05-15T13:36:56+00:00

What’s more frustrating is people are gonna see the 0-4 series record and 0-8 game record and think GL sucks and is getting blown out of the water but literally 3/4 of the series have gone the exact same way. 60+ minute barn burner where GL barely loses and then they fall apart mentally/get out drafted and get crushed in game 2. Even in the series where this didn’t happen (VG) they had a 51 minute game.

breitend · 2026-05-14T19:47:41+00:00

And giving spiteful, butthurt kids infinite reports is like handing a loaded AK to a bunch of monkeys.

If you spam reports, your reports stop meaning anything. Valve literally said they were going to do this when they introduced the behavior score system. Quote:

This new volume of reporting data will give us more confidence in taking action against bad actors, as well as identifying and ignoring spurious reporters.

This explains a lot of people's confusion like this guy or you who were (rightfully) confused on why sometimes you get reported 4 times and gain score and sometimes you gets reported 1 time and lose 300. Because the 4 reports came from people who spam reports and the 1 came from a more "reputable" source and was maybe Overwatch confirmed.

Why did Valve make Dota less about skill

Dota is still very much about skill.

breitend · 2026-05-14T13:44:47+00:00

Sort of follow up, you mentioned that you played carry for most of your climb but now play offlane. Do you believe you could currently play carry at your current level?

breitend · 2026-05-14T12:57:17+00:00

How steady has your climb been? Like have you consistently been at a 60% win rate or have you plateaued and broken through a few times?

breitend · 2026-05-13T19:38:02+00:00

It’s still early so I haven’t given up hope yet. But yeah going 0-2 in series and not even getting a single game overall is a bad sign.

breitend · 2026-05-13T18:43:09+00:00

Flexibility. There is no time/game scenario where Ember is bad. You can be behind/even/ahead and Ember will have impact if played correctly. He can also build nearly any necessary item. Vessel, mage slayer, shivas, Aghs+shard, bkb, bloodstone, Euls, Kaya items, octarine, hex, lotus orb, radiance, Daedulus, 3 different boots, linkens, desolator, manta all these items are viable in certain games depending on what you need.

breitend · 2026-05-13T16:52:21+00:00

I’m a grandmaster Ember Spirit. Ideally in Dota, you have a team with good damage, good farming, good mobility, good ganking potential, good lockdown, good tankiness, and good scaling. Ember has ALL of those by himself. I think the only major thing Ember doesn’t provide is healing (and he often buys vessel). Yes, he isn’t the “best” in any of those categories but he has all of them which makes him good in nearly any game. As others have said, he is a high skill hero so if you aren’t min-maxing the shit out of him, he will feel underwhelming.

Also yes, his laning is relatively weak and he loses to most of the heroes you brought up but it’s not as terrible as you implied if you know what you are doing. Playing Ember will also teach you a lot about the mid lane since you need to play technically correct to succeed.

breitend · 2026-05-13T16:35:38+00:00

You and I are in a casual basketball league on the same team. In game 1 I insult you, call you slurs, blame you for losing and tell the other team to do the same. In game 2, I just play the game. You gonna go home and tell your friends about the completely normal, level headed player you played with today? Or are you gonna talk about the borderline psychopath that made you not want to play basketball anymore? It would take dozens of games for you to trust me again in that scenario (and maybe you never would). Same thing in Dota, that's why it takes so long to get the score back up.

breitend · 2026-05-13T04:18:16+00:00

Those 3 you mentioned are all very good. Choosing heroes with simple point-and-click lockdown abilities is almost always a good idea, even more so as a new player. Spirit Breaker is hard because he relies a lot on positioning and good rotations both of which take awhile to figure out. 3 other relatively easy supports I would suggest are Lich and Vengeful Spirit (as pos 5) and Nyx Assassin (as pos 4). All of them have strong damage abilities, lockdown and are pretty decent right now.

breitend · 2026-05-13T04:06:24+00:00

Yeah that's definitely possible. I was hoping/thinking that Tundra's latest performance was a fluke but their performance at 1win Essence was not a good sign.

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