[youtube link=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQhCBoVyGk4″ width=”590″ height=”590″]

The Good, The Bad, The Plays:

In this weeks match we play as a shaper who will almost always be ran as a support, Desecrator. While the match is short and sweet it shows some good zoning that should be a top priority for a beefy tank running into the middle of fights. Remember, as a tank/support, your goal is to keep your carries alive, not to get kills. Yes this means even if you have to throw your life away to get your carry that all important omni kill or even help them escape, it is your job as the support to do so. And now, without further ado, let’s dive into the match.

First time stamp to note, 5:30. Here our Voluc was heading over towards their armor buff to get a steal. Instead he has a run in with Salous in the bottom part of the jungle. As any person who has played MOBA genre games for a while knows, map awareness is key to winning. So we see the fight breaking out and we start rotating down, all the while trying to zone the enemy bot lane from joining the fight and flanking us for an easy clean up. As a result, Viyana dives in too far and we get the easy kill.

In the next kind of elongated fight that breaks out around the 8:05 marker, we make a small mistake that may not be noticed right away. We first get a bit overconfident that the Fenmore has left the lane and jump on the Viyana which proves to be a bit dangerous. As the fight continues though, we throw our stagger on the Fenmore. This proves to be costly in ensuring a kill as Viyana later escapes just barely due to us not being able to get close enough for another attack.

At about the 10:50 marker, Voluc comes in for a gank that proves to be very successful at first, then appears to take a horrible turn, and then continues again to be a favorable trade. So what does that mean exactly? Well we manage to lock down and get an assist on the kill on Viyana and then even pick up a kill on Fenmore. We then transitioned to the well which was a good idea, except once again map awareness got the best of us. The enemy top lane rotated down and ended up killing us, not something we ever want in a match. Fortunately, our top lane had the wit to follow and clean up the rest of the enemy team to then capture the well.

Now we mentioned earlier about how Desecrator, and all other tanks, should make sure they zone. When the Fenmore makes a mistake at 12:30 and walked away from the tower to the bottom half the of the jungle where our Voluc was, we immediate closed in on the escape route back to lane since we knew his blink was down and cornered him. Map awareness again leads to three more kills in our teams favor.

So there are a number of different fights that we can talk about but the key one we want to focus on is the fight that starts around 17:35. The enemy team is attempting to sneak a Parasite kill and Viyana gets spotted so we all collapse. Granted at this point our team is pretty far ahead, but note how we go after specific shapers. Salous, the enemy’s jungle, and Fenmore, one of the enemy’s mages, are near the back lines where we approach. We hit them with some spells and proceed to zone them with our Kindra. We drop the Salous quick and we keep the Fenmore busy trading with us until he is forced to blink and our team finishes him off.

Let’s wrap things up a bit in a nice bow here. Even though the match was a bit one-sided and it was short, there are some key things we should take away. First item, map awareness. Rotating at the right time, noticing that your jungler is fighting the other jungle, all these things and more will lead to being a successful support. Also, remember to zone. If we can take one carry out of the fight to make it 4 vs 4 with our four having two carries the other four only having one, odds are we will manage to win that fight, even if as the support we fall.

You can watch Dawngate live every Thursday night starting at 10pm EST over at NoobistTV.