THE SECOND FUNDAMENTAL: PUSH (and an introduction to Support)

Typically, what are referred to as "" are ones which are focused on destroying towers. This is valuable for multiple reasons: when you bring a tower down, your whole team gains gold and the enemy loses a lot of map control as towers are important for controlling key points of the map. Many things help push strategies: some examples would be adding bonus armor, damage or attack speed to heroes and creeps (), the ability to quickly kill creepwaves (), skills that do a lot of damage to towers (), and the ability to summon units to aid in a push (). It's also very important to properly choose items when executing a pushing strategy. Those chosen generally share some properties: they benefit multiple allies rather than just the wielder, and they are immediately cost-effective. A simple Ring of Basillus gives extra armor in an aura to allied creeps and makes them tougher to bring down. Items like Mekanism and Arcane Boots give sustainability to the team, allowing them to stay pushing instead of wasting time healing on the fountain. Items like Vladimir’s Offering and Drums of Endurance give allies valuable auras for a small price. Offensively, Desolator and Assault Cuirass reduce the armor of enemy towers and thus can also assist with pushing.A push strategy will focus on getting the key items on their heroes and will try to build a gold advantage by destroying enemy towers- while protecting theirs. Usually, what triggers the start of the push is the timing on their key items, but many things can trigger pushes such as a successful gank, a potential tower trade, or a key level up on a core hero. Having a tower advantage will often mean you're ahead on gold and have more map control, allowing you to continue forcing action. Such a strategy usually banks on this advantage to build towards a victory. There are also strategies where teams relentlessly push while giving up on any late-game potential: this kind of strategy is built around a window of opportunity, and thus has an innate countdown. If the enemy can prevent you from achieving key objectives sufficiently, they can translate this into a crushing victory with their late game heroes. This tends to play out similarly to all-ins we see on Starcraft 2. With push strategies, quickly destroying any 2nd tier tower leaves the enemy team in a very disadvantageous position, because their base is now susceptible to being attacked.Making sure you're destroying towers is really important for a certain kind of heroes in the game. There are heroes that aren't that dependant on having much farm, which can be a lower farm-priority hero and not have many problems because of it. We call this hero, and his mission in the game is self-explanatory: he's there to support. They are the heroes that fall from a single mistake, sometimes not even their own, while they help the team to work more coherently together. They must be as efficient as possible with whatever scraps of resources are available while keeping aware of the state of the game as a whole and making important calls. In professional play, captains and key decision makers are typically support players.At the beginning of the game, a Support hero has more initial power than others, but loses strength as the game flows and all heroes become stronger. Support heroes are frequently placed into a delicate position, because while they're not high farm-priority heroes, if they don't get enough experience and farm they risk becoming a liability to the team. Once again, we can see the importance of good farm distribution.There are many ways to deal with an opposing team that seems intent to push. I'll mention two: heroes that are good at destroying creepwaves are usually good at defending towers - which means that some heroes that are good at pushing are also good at anti-pushing. But what's really good to deal with pushes is the next fundamental category we'll discuss: